The Moyie Springs 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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61° on Nov. 11, 1990, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1907. Next is 61° in 2021.
Moyie Springs’s center stands about 2,240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,760 ft to 4,280 ft, a difference of 2,520 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Burton Peak, about 6,880 ft, 14 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Glacial deposits (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. 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: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite, quartz-diorite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 70 to 100 million 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. 4 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Moyie Springs reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Moyie, the Kootenai and the Columbia: about 790 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
460 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Moyie Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Moyie Springs has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 54 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 21 inches of water.
On November 14 Moyie Springs normally reaches 42° and falls to 30°. The record high is 55°, in 1949; the record low 3°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 1.31 in, fell in 1966.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1907 at Bonners Ferry, 6 miles west-southwest, 240 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
