The Priest River 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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−14° on Nov. 16, 1955, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is −10° in 1959.
Priest River’s center stands about 2,170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,040 ft to 3,360 ft, a difference of 1,320 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Mountain, about 6,170 ft, 14 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 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 8×. 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 7 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, quartzite, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Argillite, siltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,600 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 67 to 107 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, quartz-monzodiorite, granite. Age: Early Eocene to Middle Eocene, 43 to 49 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Priest River reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Priest, the Pend Oreille and the Columbia: about 810 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 Priest River; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Priest River has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in February. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Priest River normally reaches 40° and falls to 29°. The record high is 55°, in 2001; the record low 1°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.18 in, fell in 1927.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 at Newport, 7 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
