The Cottage Grove 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.
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71° on Nov. 14, 1971, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1869. Next is 70° in 1911.
Cottage Grove’s center stands about 890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 850 ft to 1,010 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Liberty Mound, about 1,060 ft, 5 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ancell Group (sandstone), from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 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 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.
Sandstone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 5 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 Cottage Grove reaches the Gulf of America by way of Door Creek, Koshkonong Creek, the Rock River and the Mississippi: about 1,710 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Koshkonong.
1,450 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cottage Grove; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cottage Grove has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. A normal year brings about 52 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 37 inches of water.
On November 14 Cottage Grove normally reaches 46° and falls to 29°. The record high is 71°, in 1971; the record low 2°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.04 in, fell in 1956.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1869 from the Madison Area threaded record (Madison Dane County Regional Airport, 9 miles west-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
