NDNorth Dakota Geography

Two towns argue about the middle of a continent

Rugby has claimed the geographic centre of North America since 1931, when a rough federal calculation pointed that way and a local booster club put up a fifteen foot fieldstone obelisk at the junction of US 2 and State Highway 3. In 2015 Peter Rogerson, a geographer at the University at Buffalo, redid the sum with a method that properly accounts for the curvature of the earth and landed about 145 miles southwest, roughly six miles from a town called Center. Center is the seat of Oliver County and was named in 1902 for sitting in the middle of the county, not the continent. While the argument was running, the trademark on Rugby's claim lapsed and the owner of a bar in Robinson, a third North Dakota town, registered it for himself.

Three flat steps from the Red River to White Butte

North Dakota rises westward in terraces rather than slopes, with escarpments between them. The lowest step is the Red River Valley in the east, 750 to about 1,000 feet. The Pembina Escarpment climbs to the Drift Prairie, a rolling till plain full of pothole sloughs at 1,300 to 1,600 feet. The Missouri Escarpment then lifts onto the Missouri Plateau in the west, mostly above 2,000 feet and geologically part of the Great Plains proper.

White Butte in Slope County is the high point at 3,506 feet, a knob of shale and sandstone standing on private ranch land where the owners have long kept a sign-in box and asked hikers for a small fee. The low point, 750 feet, is where the Red River crosses into Manitoba near Pembina. The 2,756 foot difference between them is less than the drop from rim to river in the Grand Canyon.

A lakebed pretending to be a valley, and a river running north

The Red River Valley was never cut by a river. It is the floor of Glacial Lake Agassiz, a meltwater lake that at its largest held more water than all the modern Great Lakes put together and covered parts of Manitoba, Ontario, Minnesota and the northeast corner of this state. When it drained it left a bed of fine lake clay so level that the land falls roughly one foot per mile. Grand Forks and Fargo sit on it, and so do most of the sugar beet and potato fields.

Across that lakebed the Red River of the North flows north, into Lake Winnipeg and out through the Nelson River to Hudson Bay, which puts eastern North Dakota in the Arctic drainage. Everything west of the Laurentian Divide, which crosses the state diagonally, goes instead to the Missouri and the Gulf of Mexico.

Flowing north into colder country is exactly what makes the Red dangerous. Its southern headwaters thaw first and send meltwater downstream into channels still frozen shut, where it backs up across a landscape with no valley walls to hold it. In April 1997 the river crested at 54.35 feet at Grand Forks, overtopped the dikes, and forced the evacuation of a city of about 50,000 people. A fire broke out downtown while the streets were under water.

Where the ice stopped, the badlands began

Southwest of the Missouri River the Laurentide ice sheet never arrived. The Little Missouri Badlands are a maze of buttes, gullies and cliffs eroded into soft Paleocene clay, sandstone and lignite coal, streaked with bands of red scoria where lignite seams caught fire underground and baked the clay above them into something like brick.

The badlands owe their existence to the ice even so. The Little Missouri once flowed north toward Hudson Bay. An advancing ice lobe blocked that route and forced the river east into the Missouri, cutting hundreds of miles off its journey to the sea and steepening its gradient. A steeper river cuts down faster, and it has been cutting ever since. Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the only national park named for a single person, protects three separate units of the result.

Two lakes that will not sit still

Devils Lake has no natural outlet. Water leaves only by evaporation, so its level tracks decades of wet and dry weather rather than seasons. Between 1993 and 2011 it rose about 32 feet and roughly quadrupled in surface area, swallowing roads, farmsteads and much of the town of Churchs Ferry, whose residents largely relocated. By 2011 it stood within a few feet of the natural saddle where it would have spilled into the Sheyenne River, and the state built pumped outlets to stop it reaching that point.

Lake Sakakawea is the opposite kind of lake, entirely manufactured. Garrison Dam closed in 1953 and backed the Missouri up into a reservoir with roughly 1,320 miles of shoreline, more than the coast of California. Filling it drowned the Missouri bottomlands of the Fort Berthold Reservation, the best and most sheltered land the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation held, and put the town of Elbowoods and several others permanently under water.

Two time zones, and 181 degrees inside one year

North Dakota is one of the states split by the boundary between Central and Mountain time. Roughly the southwestern dozen counties, running from Bowman and Slope up through Billings and Dunn, keep Mountain Time, while Bismarck about an hour's drive east keeps Central. The northern boundary, by contrast, needed no thought at all: it is the 49th parallel, fixed by the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, and the International Peace Garden was planted straddling it at Dunseith in 1932.

The state also holds one of the widest single-year temperature ranges recorded anywhere in the country. On 15 February 1936 the thermometer at Parshall read,60 °F. On 6 July of the same year, Steele reached 121 °F. That is 181 degrees inside a span of under five months, and both readings still stand as the state records.

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