The Chelan 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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66° on Nov. 12, 1990, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1891. Next is 65° in 1989.
Chelan’s center stands about 1,180 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 710 ft to 3,330 ft, a difference of 2,620 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Baldy Mountain, about 6,360 ft, 15 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mesozoic granitic rocks, undivided (granite), from the Precambrian to Eocene.
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.
Granite. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 14 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 0.7 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 Chelan reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Lake Chelan, the Chelan and the Columbia: about 500 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Chelan and Lake Umatilla.
220 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chelan; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Chelan has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 20 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 12 inches of water.
On November 14 Chelan normally reaches 46° and falls to 30°. The record high is 63°, in 1896; the record low 5°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.51 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1891 at Chelan, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
