The Chain 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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5° on Nov. 15, 1955, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1929. Next is 18° in 1978.
Chain Lake’s center stands about 340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 680 ft, a difference of 680 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Pilchuck, about 5,260 ft, 14 miles 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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 8×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Diorite, gabbro. Age: Middle Jurassic to Early Cretaceous, 100 to 175 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Late Cretaceous to Eocene, 34 to 100 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 Chain Lake reaches Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean by way of French Creek and the Snohomish: about 20 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chain Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Chain Lake has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 75° in August; winter nights fall to about 31° in December. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Chain Lake normally reaches 49° and falls to 36°. The record high is 67°, in 1995; the record low 9°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 1.92 in, fell in 2001.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1929 at Monroe, 4 miles south, 220 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
