The Gold Bar 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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72° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1924. Next is 69° in 1990.
Gold Bar’s center stands about 200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 140 ft to 2,810 ft, a difference of 2,670 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Del Campo Peak, about 6,410 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 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.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Early Paleocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 66 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Late Cretaceous to Eocene, 34 to 100 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Graywacke, argillite, siltstone. Age: Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 0.5 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 Gold Bar reaches Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean by way of May Creek, the Wallace, the Skykomish and the Snohomish: about 40 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gold Bar; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gold Bar has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 68 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Gold Bar normally reaches 52° and falls to 37°. The record high is 65°, in 1967; the record low 6°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 2.30 in, fell in 1948.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1924 at Startup 1 E, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
