The Garden Valley 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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9° on Nov. 13, 2000, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1896. Next is 11° in 1993.
Garden Valley’s center stands about 3,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,020 ft to 5,620 ft, a difference of 2,600 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Scott Mountain, about 8,130 ft, 10 miles northeast.
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 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 67 to 107 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite, quartz-diorite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 70 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand, silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, quartz-monzodiorite, granite. Age: Early Eocene to Middle Eocene, 43 to 49 million years old. About 0.7 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 Garden Valley reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the South Fork Payette, the Payette, the Snake and the Columbia: about 760 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Umatilla, Brownlee Reservoir and Hells Canyon Reservoir.
240 miles of the trip are on the Snake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Garden Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Garden Valley has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. About 22 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Garden Valley normally reaches 49° and falls to 22°. The record high is 69°, in 1999; the record low 11°, in 1993. The most rain on this date, 0.52 in, fell in 1941.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1896 at Ola, 18 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
