The Hayden Lake 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.
68° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 61° in 1995.
Hayden Lake’s center stands about 2,300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,230 ft to 3,750 ft, a difference of 1,520 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is South Chilco Mountain, about 5,670 ft, 12 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Missoula Flood deposits (gravel, sand, silt), from the Pleistocene, less than 20,000 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 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gravel, sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 20,000 years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite, quartz-diorite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 70 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 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.
Hayden Lake has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. About 25 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Hayden Lake normally reaches 45° and falls to 32°. The record high is 63°, in 1999; the record low 0°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 1.08 in, fell in 1937.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 at Coeur D'Alene, 6 miles south-southwest, 170 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.