The Colfax 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
73° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1912. Next is 69° in 1981.
Colfax’s center stands about 960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 940 ft to 990 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Belle Fourche-Skull Creek, Undivided (shale, sandstone), from the Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Age: Precambrian. About 7 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion 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.
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 Colfax reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Wild Rice, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,150 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
470 miles of the trip are on the Red River of the North.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Colfax; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Colfax has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about −1° in January. About 24 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Colfax normally reaches 40° and falls to 21°. The record high is 67°, in 2016; the record low −12°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.57 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1912 at Mc Leod 3 E, 18 miles west-southwest, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
