The La Bolt 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
La Bolt’s center stands about 1,370 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,210 ft to 1,620 ft, a difference of 410 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Punished Womans Mound, about 2,060 ft, 13 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carlile Shale, from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 21×. 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 20 mi of the line.
Shale, bentonite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Chalk, marlstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 0.3 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 La Bolt reaches the Gulf of America by way of the South Fork Yellow Bank, the Yellow Bank, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,190 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
1,750 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of La Bolt; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
