The Spiritwood Lake 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.
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−11° on Nov. 14, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is −8° in 2019.
Spiritwood Lake’s center stands about 1,440 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,440 ft to 1,560 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Formation (shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
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 24 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 Spiritwood Lake reaches the Gulf of America by way of the James, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,560 river miles.
Lake on the way: Columbia Road Reservoir.
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 Spiritwood Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Spiritwood Lake has a dry-winter warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 1° in January. About 20 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Spiritwood Lake normally reaches 38° and falls to 20°. The record high is 70°, in 2025; the record low −11°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.08 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Jamestown Municipal Airport, 11 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
