The Kamiah 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.
Mostly sunny
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Showers likely; cooler
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9° on Nov. 16, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1913. Next is 15° in 2000.
Kamiah’s center stands about 1,240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,170 ft to 2,920 ft, a difference of 1,750 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Woodrat Mountain, about 4,980 ft, 13 miles east-southeast.
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 6×. 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, basaltic-andesite. Age: Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 6 to 18 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand, clay. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss, amphibolite. Age: Permian to Cretaceous, 66 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand, silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million 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 Kamiah reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Clearwater, the Snake and the Columbia: about 520 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 Kamiah; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Kamiah has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in August; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 11 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 24 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1913 at Kamiah, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
