The Oldtown 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.
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
−14° on Nov. 16, 1955, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is −10° in 1959.
Oldtown’s center stands about 2,130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,030 ft to 2,870 ft, a difference of 840 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hoodoo Mountain, about 5,080 ft, 8 miles south-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 8×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 20,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Andesite, dacite. Age: Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 56 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Argillite, siltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,600 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 Oldtown reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Pend Oreille and the Columbia: about 800 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
460 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Oldtown; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Oldtown has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in February. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Oldtown normally reaches 40° and falls to 29°. The record high is 55°, in 2001; the record low 1°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.18 in, fell in 1927.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 at Newport, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
