The Inchelium 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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Inchelium’s center stands about 2,950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,280 ft to 3,250 ft, a difference of 1,970 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is White Mountain, about 6,910 ft, 14 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Upper Paleozoic rocks, undivided (graywacke, quartzite), from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old.
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 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.
Graywacke, quartzite. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 2 mi of the line.
Phyllite, quartzite. Age: Early Cambrian to Middle Cambrian, 497 to 542 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 Inchelium reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Hall Creek and the Columbia: about 680 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
390 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Inchelium; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
