The Smelterville 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
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69° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1905. Next is 64° in 2021.
Smelterville’s center stands about 2,230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,200 ft to 4,860 ft, a difference of 2,660 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Latour Peak, about 6,340 ft, 11 miles southwest.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, quartzite, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand, silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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.
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 Smelterville reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the South Fork Coeur d'Alene, the Coeur d'Alene, the Spokane and the Columbia: about 800 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Harrison Slough and Lake Umatilla.
360 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Smelterville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Smelterville has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 52 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Smelterville normally reaches 44° and falls to 28°. The record high is 61°, in 1912; the record low 6°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.98 in, fell in 1941.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 at Kellogg, 2 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
