The Metaline 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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57° on Nov. 12, 1990, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1965. Next is 57° in 1999.
Metaline Falls’s center stands about 2,100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,980 ft to 5,340 ft, a difference of 3,360 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Abercrombie Mountain, about 7,280 ft, 6 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Glaciolacustrine deposits (silt, sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 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.
Quartzite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Phyllite, quartzite. Age: Early Cambrian to Middle Cambrian, 497 to 542 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 5 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Phyllite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Early Cambrian to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 542 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Metaline Falls reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Pend Oreille and the Columbia: about 740 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 Metaline Falls; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Metaline Falls has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in August; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 55 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 28 inches of water.
On November 14 Metaline Falls normally reaches 41° and falls to 29°. The record high is 57°, in 2016; the record low 9°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.83 in, fell in 1966.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1965 at Boundary Dam, 9 miles north, 260 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
