The Cusick 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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−14° on Nov. 16, 1955, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is −10° in 1959.
Cusick’s center stands about 2,050 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,030 ft to 3,020 ft, a difference of 990 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Calispell Peak, about 6,830 ft, 12 miles northwest.
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 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.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Argillite, siltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,600 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 4 mi of the line.
Conglomerate. Age: Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 56 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 Cusick reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Pend Oreille and the Columbia: about 790 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
460 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cusick; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cusick has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in February. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cusick normally reaches 40° and falls to 29°. The record high is 55°, in 2001; the record low 1°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.18 in, fell in 1927.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 at Newport, 16 miles southeast, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
