The Kicking Horse 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Showers likely
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy
71° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 66° in 1990.
Kicking Horse’s center stands about 3,050 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,930 ft to 3,360 ft, a difference of 430 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is McDonald Peak, about 9,710 ft, 9 miles southeast.
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 3×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt, sand, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Quartzite, 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 2 mi of the line.
Mafic-hypabyssal. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,600 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 0.7 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.
A raindrop that lands in Kicking Horse reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Mission Creek, the Flathead, the Clark Fork, the Pend Oreille and the Columbia: about 1,010 river miles.
Lakes on the way: 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 Kicking Horse; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kicking Horse has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 34 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 16 inches of water.
On November 14 Kicking Horse normally reaches 40° and falls to 26°. The record high is 62°, in 1990; the record low −4°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.38 in, fell in 2021.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Skq Dam, 17 miles north-northwest, 320 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
