The Vilas 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
75° on Nov. 15, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 73° in 2001.
Vilas’s center stands about 1,480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,410 ft to 1,550 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Niobrara Formation (chalk, marlstone, 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 47×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Chalk, marlstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 1 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 Vilas reaches the Gulf of America by way of Rock Creek, the James, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,160 river miles.
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 Vilas; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Vilas has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 36 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Vilas normally reaches 48° and falls to 22°. The record high is 71°, in 1953; the record low −18°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.69 in, fell in 1928.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Howard, 3 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
