The Fessenden 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
Sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
69° on Nov. 13, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1942. Next is 68° in 1979.
Fessenden’s center stands about 1,610 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,590 ft to 1,620 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Formation (shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 22 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. 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 Fessenden reaches the Gulf of America by way of the James, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,670 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Columbia Road Reservoir and Depuy Dam Lake.
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 Fessenden; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fessenden has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about −2° in January. About 19 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Fessenden normally reaches 36° and falls to 17°. The record high is 68°, in 2001; the record low −7°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.45 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1942 at Harvey 4 NE, 16 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
