The Killdeer 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
Partly cloudy
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Chance of showers; cooler
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75° on Nov. 11, 1961, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1918. Next is 73° in 2016.
Killdeer’s center stands about 2,240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,200 ft to 2,380 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is North Killdeer Mountain, about 3,150 ft, 12 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sentinel Butte Formation (siltstone, claystone, sandstone), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 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 20×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone, claystone, sandstone. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Sandstone, claystone, siltstone. Age: Paleocene to Eocene, 34 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Siltstone, claystone, sandstone. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 0.7 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 Killdeer reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spring Creek, the Knife, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,680 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Oahe, Lake Sharpe, Lake Francis Case and Lewis and Clark 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 Killdeer; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Killdeer has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in August; winter nights fall to about 0° in January. About 17 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Killdeer normally reaches 41° and falls to 16°. The record high is 67°, in 2025; the record low −21°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.37 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1918 at Dunn Center 1 E, 8 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
