The Spring Lake Colony 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
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
75° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1961. Next is 72° in 2001.
Spring Lake Colony’s center stands about 1,770 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,740 ft to 1,810 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country.
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 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, 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 Spring Lake Colony reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lake Whitewood, Lake Thompson, the East Fork Vermillion, the Vermillion, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,140 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Thompson and Lake Whitewood.
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 Spring Lake Colony; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Spring Lake Colony has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 37 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Spring Lake Colony normally reaches 43° and falls to 23°. The record high is 75°, in 1999; the record low −6°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.12 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 at Madison 2 SE, 17 miles south-southeast, 130 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
