The Machias 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. 14, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 67° in 1939.
Machias’s center stands about 110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 80 ft to 610 ft, a difference of 530 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Pilchuck, about 5,260 ft, 13 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (silt, sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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 10×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 Machias reaches Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean by way of the Pilchuck and the Snohomish: about 19 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Machias; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Machias has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 76° in August; winter nights fall to about 34° in February. About 40 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Machias normally reaches 53° and falls to 38°. The record high is 69°, in 2016; the record low 11°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 1.30 in, fell in 1966.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Everett, 7 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
