The Kettle Falls 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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−5° on Nov. 17, 1903, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1899. Next is 2° in 1916.
Kettle Falls’s center stands about 1,630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,280 ft to 3,000 ft, a difference of 1,720 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mack Mountain, about 6,220 ft, 15 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Glacial drift, undivided (sand, gravel), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 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.
Phyllite, quartzite. Age: Early Cambrian to Middle Cambrian, 497 to 542 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary. Age: Devonian to Permian, 273 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 3 mi of the line.
Slate, argillite. Age: Early Ordovician to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 487 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 3 smaller units 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 Kettle Falls reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Colville and the Columbia: about 690 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 Kettle Falls; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kettle Falls has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in August; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 43 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Kettle Falls normally reaches 44° and falls to 29°. The record high is 58°, in 2015; the record low 6°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.59 in, fell in 1921.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1899 at Colville 5 NE, 12 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
