The Bigfork 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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67° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 64° in 1990.
Bigfork’s center stands about 2,980 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,890 ft to 3,900 ft, a difference of 1,010 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Aeneas, about 7,460 ft, 9 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ravalli Group: St. Regis, Revett, and Burke Formations; or Empire and Grinnell Formations; or Empire and Spokane Formations (quartzite, argillite, metasiltstone), from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
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 4×. 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 to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Quartzite, argillite, metasiltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Quartzite, metasiltstone, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, argillite, quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion 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.
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 Bigfork reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Flathead, the Clark Fork, the Pend Oreille and the Columbia: about 1,070 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Flathead Lake, Lake Pend Oreille, Lake Umatilla and Noxon Rapids Reservoir.
460 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bigfork; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bigfork has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 51 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 19 inches of water.
On November 14 Bigfork normally reaches 42° and falls to 26°. The record high is 59°, in 1999; the record low −5°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.46 in, fell in 2021.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Creston, 9 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
