The Cashmere 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.
73° on Nov. 15, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 69° in 1989.
Cashmere’s center stands about 840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 720 ft to 2,920 ft, a difference of 2,200 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is The Temple, about 8,170 ft, 14 miles west.
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 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.
Arkose. Age: Late Cretaceous to Eocene, 34 to 100 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 7 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Triassic to Early Cretaceous, 100 to 252 million years old. About 2 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 Cashmere reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Wenatchee and the Columbia: about 470 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
210 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cashmere; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cashmere has a dry-summer hot-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 9 inches of water.
On November 14 Cashmere normally reaches 47° and falls to 33°. The record high is 66°, in 2015; the record low 6°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.86 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 at Wenatchee, 10 miles southeast, 210 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.