The Spirit Lake 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
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
69° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1947. Next is 62° in 2021.
Spirit Lake’s center stands about 2,570 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,370 ft to 3,720 ft, a difference of 1,350 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Spokane, about 5,870 ft, 12 miles west-southwest.
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 9 mi of the line.
Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Argillite, siltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,600 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite, quartz-diorite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 70 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million 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 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. 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.
Spirit Lake has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in December. A normal year brings about 27 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 25 inches of water.
On November 14 Spirit Lake normally reaches 42° and falls to 28°. The record high is 60°, in 1995; the record low 0°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.63 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1947 at Bayview Model Basin, 14 miles east, 480 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
