The Sleeping Buffalo 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.
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Showers likely; cooler
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
−23° on Nov. 11, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1966. Next is −18° in 2014.
Sleeping Buffalo’s center stands about 2,240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,190 ft to 2,330 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Claggett Formation (shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 72 to 84 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 30×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 84 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 84 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 5 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 Sleeping Buffalo reaches the Gulf of America by way of Beaver Creek, the Milk River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 3,100 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Oahe, Lake Sakakawea, Lake Sharpe and Lake Francis Case.
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 Sleeping Buffalo; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sleeping Buffalo has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 1° in January. About 13 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Sleeping Buffalo normally reaches 41° and falls to 17°. The record high is 68°, in 2025; the record low −18°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.48 in, fell in 1996.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1966 at Saco 1 NNW, 8 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
