The Essex 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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64° on Nov. 15, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1947. Next is 63° in 1999.
Essex’s center stands about 3,880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,690 ft to 6,800 ft, a difference of 3,110 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Phillips, about 9,410 ft, 14 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lower Missoula Group: Shepard and Snowslip Formations; or Shepard Formation and unresolved Snowslip Formation equivalent (metasiltstone, argillite), 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.
Quartzite, metasiltstone, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, argillite, quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Quartzite, argillite, metasiltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, argillite, quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.9 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 Essex reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Middle Fork Flathead, the Flathead, the Clark Fork, the Pend Oreille and the Columbia: about 1,160 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 Essex; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Essex has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. About 35 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Essex normally reaches 38° and falls to 28°. The record high is 62°, in 1990; the record low −4°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 1.91 in, fell in 1983.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1947 at Hungry Horse Dam, 19 miles west-northwest, 720 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
