The Blunt 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.
74° on Nov. 12, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1913. Next is 73° in 2005.
Blunt’s center stands about 1,620 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,600 ft to 1,790 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Medicine Knoll, about 2,030 ft, 4 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Shale (shale, bentonite), 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 50×. 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, bentonite. 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 Blunt reaches the Gulf of America by way of Medicine Knoll Creek, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,230 river miles.
Lakes on the way: 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 Blunt; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Blunt has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 49 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 21 inches of water.
On November 14 Blunt normally reaches 44° and falls to 23°. The record high is 69°, in 1975; the record low −21°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1928.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1913 at Onida 4 NW, 17 miles north-northwest, 230 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.