The Chewelah 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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Chewelah’s center stands about 1,690 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,630 ft to 3,230 ft, a difference of 1,600 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Calispell Peak, about 6,830 ft, 15 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (silt, sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
The section below crosses 7 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.
Argillite, siltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,600 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 1 mi of the line.
Greenstone. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 0.3 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Chewelah reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Chewelah Creek, the Colville and the Columbia: about 730 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
410 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chewelah; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
