The Thompson Falls 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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74° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1956. Next is 62° in 1976.
Thompson Falls’s center stands about 2,620 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,340 ft to 5,220 ft, a difference of 2,880 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Headley, about 7,380 ft, 10 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Gravel, from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million 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.
Metasiltstone, argillite. 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 8 mi of the line.
Quartzite, argillite, metasiltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, argillite, quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.3 mi of the line.
Sedimentary. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.1 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 Thompson Falls reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Clark Fork, the Pend Oreille and the Columbia: about 920 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 Thompson Falls; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Thompson Falls has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 15 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 22 inches of water.
On November 14 Thompson Falls normally reaches 42° and falls to 30°. The record high is 60°, in 1999; the record low 5°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.49 in, fell in 2021.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1956 at Thompson Falls Ph, here, 240 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
