Three meters of sediment from Blue Lake, Idaho, have provided a 3500-year paleomagnetic record with low scatter and good serial correlation. Comparison of the Blue Lake record with the record from Fish Lake, Oregon, reveals differences of up to 963 years for secular variations extrema based on the separate radiocarbon chronologies for Blue Lake and Fish Lake. To achieve a common time scale, the Blue Lake record was redated using the Fish Lake ages for five major inclination extrema. With this adjusted time scale, the excellent correspondence between the declination records confirm the extremal correlations and demonstrates that paleomagnetic correlations may provide more accuracy for relative stratigraphy than radiocarbon dating. The morphological agreement between the smooothed records documents secular variation features with wavelengths of 1000--2000 years and amplitudes of 10¿--20¿ in inclination and 20¿--30¿ in declination. Examination of the unsmoothed records indicates that features with wavelengths of less than a few hundred years and amplitudes less than 5¿ are probably noise. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1988