The Bull 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
64° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1912. Next is 59° in 2021.
Bull Lake’s center stands about 2,380 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,320 ft to 6,220 ft, a difference of 3,900 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Snowshoe Peak, about 8,550 ft, 7 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Glacial deposit (unconsolidated), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 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.
Quartzite, argillite, metasiltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, argillite, quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion 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.
Granitic. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 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 Bull Lake reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Bull Lake, Lake Creek, the Kootenai and the Columbia: about 830 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 Bull Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bull Lake 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 84 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Bull Lake normally reaches 41° and falls to 30°. The record high is 58°, in 2021; the record low 3°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.98 in, fell in 1966.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1912 at Heron 2 NW, 14 miles south-southwest, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
