The Ponderosa Pines 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.
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74° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1941. Next is 70° in 1990.
Ponderosa Pines’s center stands about 4,390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,980 ft to 5,580 ft, a difference of 1,600 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Blacktail Mountain, about 8,340 ft, 14 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Upper Tertiary sediment or sedimentary rock (conglomerate, sandstone, siltstone), from the Early Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 20 million years old.
The section below crosses 18 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Limestone, sandstone. Age: Middle Cambrian, 497 to 521 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 20 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Age: Late Miocene to Holocene, less than 7.2 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sedimentary-breccia, conglomerate. Age: Early Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 56 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 12 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Ponderosa Pines reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 3,470 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Oahe, Lake Sakakawea, Lake Fort Peck and Lake Sharpe.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ponderosa Pines; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ponderosa Pines has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 10° in January. About 13 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ponderosa Pines normally reaches 42° and falls to 19°. The record high is 66°, in 1963; the record low −15°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.45 in, fell in 1941.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1941 at Bozeman Gallatin Field Airport, 20 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
