The Palouse 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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72° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 71° in 1904.
Palouse’s center stands about 2,470 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,410 ft to 3,080 ft, a difference of 670 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Moscow Mountain, about 4,970 ft, 12 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Miocene volcanic rocks (basalt), from the Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 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 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.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 67 to 107 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Argillite, siltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,600 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. 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 Palouse reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Palouse, the Snake and the Columbia: about 500 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
210 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Palouse; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Palouse has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in December. About 18 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Palouse normally reaches 45° and falls to 33°. The record high is 65°, in 1999; the record low 2°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 1.20 in, fell in 1906.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Pullman Area threaded record (Pullman Moscow Regional Airport, 12 miles south). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
