The Ponderay 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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−7° on Nov. 15, 1955, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1910. Next is −4° in 1959.
Ponderay’s center stands about 2,130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,060 ft to 4,020 ft, a difference of 1,960 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Casey, about 6,640 ft, 11 miles northwest.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 67 to 107 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, quartzite, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 1.0 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 Ponderay reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Lake Pend Oreille, the Pend Oreille and the Columbia: about 840 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Pend Oreille and 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 Ponderay; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ponderay has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 62 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Ponderay normally reaches 42° and falls to 29°. The record high is 58°, in 1999; the record low 4°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.99 in, fell in 1937.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1910 at Sandpoint Experiment Station, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
