The Sultan 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. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1924. Next is 69° in 1990.
Sultan’s center stands about 110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 80 ft to 960 ft, a difference of 880 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Index, about 5,920 ft, 13 miles east-southeast.
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 4 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.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Early Paleocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Eocene, 34 to 48 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.
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 Sultan reaches Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean by way of Wagleys Creek, the Skykomish and the Snohomish: about 35 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sultan; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sultan 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 Sultan 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, 5 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
