The Startup 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.
72° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1924. Next is 69° in 1990.
Startup’s center stands about 150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 120 ft to 1,600 ft, a difference of 1,480 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Vesper Peak, about 6,110 ft, 14 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (silt, sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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 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.
Andesite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Eocene, 34 to 48 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 4 mi of the line.
Graywacke, argillite, siltstone. Age: Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Argillite, graywacke. Age: Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous, 100 to 164 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 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 Startup reaches Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean by way of the Wallace, the Skykomish and the Snohomish: about 35 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Startup; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Startup 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 Startup 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, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.