The Carey 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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67° on Nov. 13, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1958. Next is 66° in 1999.
Carey’s center stands about 4,780 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,740 ft to 5,430 ft, a difference of 690 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bell Mountain, about 7,960 ft, 12 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvial deposits (gravel, sand, silt), from the Quaternary, 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 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.
Basalt. Age: Pleistocene to Quaternary, less than 15,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dacite, andesite, rhyolite. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand, silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 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 Carey reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Little Wood, the Malad, the Snake and the Columbia: about 980 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Umatilla, Brownlee Reservoir, Cove Arm Lake and Hells Canyon Reservoir.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Carey; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Carey has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 46 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 13 inches of water.
On November 14 Carey normally reaches 45° and falls to 19°. The record high is 65°, in 1999; the record low −4°, in 1964. The most rain on this date, 1.00 in, fell in 2020.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1958 at Picabo, 6 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
