The Cow Creek 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
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
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Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
78° on Nov. 14, 1990, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1960. Next is 78° in 2016.
Cow Creek’s center stands about 1,650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,600 ft to 1,750 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Willow Creek Butte, about 2,080 ft, 13 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Shale (shale, bentonite), 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 43×. 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 16 mi of the line.
Clay, sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 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 Cow Creek reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lake Oahe, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,250 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 Cow Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cow Creek has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 8° in January. About 19 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cow Creek normally reaches 48° and falls to 24°. The record high is 78°, in 2016; the record low 5°, in 2011. The most rain on this date, 0.09 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1960 at Oahe Dam, 8 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
