The Big Lake 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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3° on Nov. 14, 1955, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1896. Next is 8° in 1911.
Big Lake’s center stands about 90 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 40 ft to 1,480 ft, a difference of 1,440 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Iron Mountain, about 4,770 ft, 15 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Younger glacial drift (fine-detrital, coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million 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.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Graywacke, argillite, phyllite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Eocene, 34 to 175 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Phyllite. Age: Jurassic to Early Cretaceous, 100 to 202 million years old. About 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 Big Lake reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Nookachamps Creek, the Skagit, the South Fork Skagit and Freshwater Slough: about 25 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Big Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Big Lake has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 75° in August; winter nights fall to about 34° in December. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Big Lake normally reaches 51° and falls to 39°. The record high is 66°, in 1923; the record low 3°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 2.45 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Sedro-Woolley, 7 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
