The Milnor 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.
73° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1912. Next is 69° in 1981.
Milnor’s center stands about 1,100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,070 ft to 1,160 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carlile 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 48×. 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 19 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 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 Milnor reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Wild Rice, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,290 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 Milnor; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Milnor 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 Milnor 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, 14 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.