The Pateros 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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66° on Nov. 12, 1990, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1891. Next is 65° in 1989.
Pateros’s center stands about 790 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 780 ft to 2,390 ft, a difference of 1,610 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cooper Mountain, about 5,860 ft, 9 miles west-southwest.
The section below crosses 5 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.
Granite. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 2 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Triassic to Early Cretaceous, 100 to 252 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.
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 Pateros reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Methow and the Columbia: about 520 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
240 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Pateros; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pateros has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 20 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 12 inches of water.
On November 14 Pateros normally reaches 46° and falls to 30°. The record high is 63°, in 1896; the record low 5°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.51 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1891 at Chelan, 16 miles south-southwest, 400 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
