The Cougar 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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69° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1927. Next is 66° in 1999.
Cougar’s center stands about 600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 480 ft to 3,010 ft, a difference of 2,530 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Saint Helens, about 8,250 ft, 11 miles north-northeast.
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 3×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 56 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Late Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 38 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, clay, volcanic. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.8 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 Cougar reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Yale Lake, the Lewis and the Columbia: about 120 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Merwin and Yale Lake.
85 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cougar; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cougar has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in August; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 115 inches of water.
On November 14 Cougar normally reaches 51° and falls to 39°. The record high is 63°, in 1999; the record low 24°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 5.47 in, fell in 2001.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1927 at Cougar 6 E, 5 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
