The Spokane 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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67° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1881. Next is 65° in 1899.
Spokane’s center stands about 1,890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,700 ft to 2,360 ft, a difference of 660 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Krell Hill, about 3,670 ft, 8 miles southeast.
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 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.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Argillite, siltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,600 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.3 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 Spokane reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Spokane and the Columbia: about 700 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
360 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Spokane; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Spokane has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in December. A normal year brings about 45 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 16 inches of water.
On November 14 Spokane normally reaches 43° and falls to 31°. The record high is 65°, in 1899; the record low −7°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.74 in, fell in 1966.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1881 from the Spokane Area threaded record (Spokane International Airport, 5 miles west-southwest, 460 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
