The Saltese 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
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5° on Nov. 14, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1975. Next is 7° in 2011.
Saltese’s center stands about 3,400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,370 ft to 5,450 ft, a difference of 2,080 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Eagle Peak, about 7,290 ft, 11 miles southeast.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. 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, quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Quartzite, metasiltstone, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sedimentary. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.4 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 Saltese reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Saint Regis, 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 Saltese; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Saltese has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in February. About 37 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Saltese normally reaches 41° and falls to 28°. The record high is 57°, in 2021; the record low 5°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1990.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1975 at Mullan, 15 miles west-northwest, 200 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
