The Drake 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
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Chance of showers; cooler
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
70° on Nov. 14, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1964. Next is 69° in 1981.
Drake’s center stands about 1,650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,550 ft to 1,680 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cannonball Formation (shale, sandstone), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 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: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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.
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 Drake reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Wintering, the Souris, the Assiniboine, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,140 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 Drake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Drake has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about −3° in January. About 18 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Drake normally reaches 36° and falls to 17°. The record high is 70°, in 2025; the record low −6°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 0.55 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1964 at Drake 9 NE, 9 miles north-northeast, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
