The Mount Vernon 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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3° on Nov. 14, 1955, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1896. Next is 8° in 1911.
Mount Vernon’s center stands about 100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 10 ft to 600 ft, a difference of 590 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lyman Hill, about 4,280 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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 14×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Arkose. Age: Late Cretaceous to Eocene, 34 to 100 million years old. About 6 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 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Graywacke, argillite, phyllite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Eocene, 34 to 175 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary. Age: Devonian to Permian, 273 to 422 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 Mount Vernon reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the South Fork Skagit and Freshwater Slough: about 3 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mount Vernon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mount Vernon has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 75° in August; winter nights fall to about 34° in December. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Mount Vernon normally reaches 51° and falls to 39°. The record high is 66°, in 1923; the record low 3°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 2.45 in, fell in 1998.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Sedro-Woolley, 7 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
