The Skykomish 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.
Showers likely
Showers likely
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
72° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1924. Next is 69° in 1990.
Skykomish’s center stands about 940 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 910 ft to 4,590 ft, a difference of 3,680 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Daniel, about 7,800 ft, 13 miles southeast.
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 3×. 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 9 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Early Paleocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 66 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Chert, metavolcanic. Age: Paleozoic to Paleocene, 56 to 542 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 56 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.5 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 Skykomish reaches Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean by way of the South Fork Skykomish, the Skykomish and the Snohomish: about 65 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Skykomish; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Skykomish has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 68 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Skykomish normally reaches 52° and falls to 37°. The record high is 65°, in 1967; the record low 6°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 2.30 in, fell in 1948.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1924 at Startup 1 E, 20 miles west-northwest, 770 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
