The Villard plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
69° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1911. Next is 64° in 1913.
Villard’s center stands about 1,250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,230 ft to 1,310 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mafic metavolcanic rocks (metabasalt, greenstone), from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Schist, paragneiss. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dioritic, granodiorite. Age: Archean to Paleoproterozoic. About 0.4 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Villard reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Crow Wing and the Mississippi: about 2,000 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Villard; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Villard has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about −1° in January. About 27 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Villard normally reaches 38° and falls to 23°. The record high is 65°, in 1953; the record low −5°, in 1911. The most rain on this date, 0.54 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1911 at Gull Lake Dam, 19 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
