The Sandpoint 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.
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Showers likely
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Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
−7° on Nov. 15, 1955, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1910. Next is −4° in 1959.
Sandpoint’s center stands about 2,110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,060 ft to 4,010 ft, a difference of 1,950 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Casey, about 6,640 ft, 12 miles north-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.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, quartzite, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 67 to 107 million years old. About 4 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 Sandpoint 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 Sandpoint; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sandpoint 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 Sandpoint 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.
