The Wenatchee 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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73° on Nov. 15, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 69° in 1989.
Wenatchee’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 610 ft to 2,090 ft, a difference of 1,480 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mission Peak, about 6,810 ft, 11 miles south-southwest.
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 5 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 11 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
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 Wenatchee reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Columbia: about 460 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
210 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wenatchee; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wenatchee has a dry-summer hot-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 9 inches of water.
On November 14 Wenatchee normally reaches 47° and falls to 33°. The record high is 66°, in 2015; the record low 6°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.86 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 at Wenatchee, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
