The Hansen 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.
Sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
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Showers likely; cooler
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75° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1915. Next is 73° in 1934.
Hansen’s center stands about 4,030 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,690 ft to 4,260 ft, a difference of 570 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sugarloaf, about 5,750 ft, 12 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Basalt (Pleistocene and Pliocene), from the Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3 million years old.
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 11×. 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: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Rhyolite. Age: Middle Miocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 14 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 33,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 Hansen reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Snake and the Columbia: about 940 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Umatilla, Brownlee Reservoir, Cove Arm Lake 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 Hansen; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hansen has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. About 10 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Hansen normally reaches 48° and falls to 29°. The record high is 73°, in 1999; the record low 5°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.83 in, fell in 2006.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1915 at Jerome, 18 miles northwest, 290 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
