The Three Lakes 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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5° on Nov. 15, 1955, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1929. Next is 18° in 1978.
Three Lakes’s center stands about 470 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 60 ft to 670 ft, a difference of 610 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Pilchuck, about 5,260 ft, 13 miles northeast.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. 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 11 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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.
Arkose. Age: Late Cretaceous to Eocene, 34 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 56 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. 2 smaller units 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 Three Lakes reaches Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean by way of West Fork Woods Creek, Woods 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 Three Lakes; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Three Lakes has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 75° in August; winter nights fall to about 31° in December. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Three Lakes normally reaches 49° and falls to 36°. The record high is 67°, in 1995; the record low 9°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 1.92 in, fell in 2001.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1929 at Monroe, 7 miles south, 340 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
