The Blanchard 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; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Chance of showers
70° on Nov. 12, 2005, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 68° in 1953.
Blanchard’s center stands about 950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 920 ft to 980 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Belle Fourche Formation (shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 62×. 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, 66 to 100 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 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 Blanchard reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Elm, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,060 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
400 miles of the trip are on the Nelson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Blanchard; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Blanchard has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. About 24 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Blanchard normally reaches 37° and falls to 18°. The record high is 65°, in 1953; the record low −15°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 0.90 in, fell in 1922.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Mayville, 12 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
