The Sula 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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Sula’s center stands about 4,430 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,380 ft to 6,880 ft, a difference of 2,500 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Piquett Mountain, about 8,790 ft, 12 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic rock, from the Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Granitic. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 24 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 0.3 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 Sula reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the East Fork Bitterroot, the Bitterroot, the Clark Fork, the Pend Oreille and the Columbia: about 1,160 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 Sula; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
