The Bell Hill 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. 17, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1980. Next is 62° in 1990.
Bell Hill’s center stands about 1,000 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 20 ft to 2,350 ft, a difference of 2,330 ft: mountain country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gray Wolf, about 7,180 ft, 13 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Oligocene marine rocks (sandstone, siltstone), from the Middle Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 48 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 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.
Basalt. Age: Early Paleocene to Middle Eocene, 40 to 64 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Triassic to Late Eocene, 34 to 252 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Eocene, 34 to 48 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Middle Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 48 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 56 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.
Rain that falls on Bell Hill runs only a short way, about 4 miles, to Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bell Hill; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bell Hill has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 70° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 17 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Bell Hill normally reaches 51° and falls to 35°. The record high is 62°, in 2004; the record low 20°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.94 in, fell in 2015.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1980 at Sequim 2 E, 2 miles north-northeast, 950 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
