The Stites 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. 16, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1913. Next is 15° in 2000.
Stites’s center stands about 1,320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,270 ft to 2,820 ft, a difference of 1,550 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is China Point, about 6,170 ft, 14 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Columbia River Basalt Group (basalt, basaltic-andesite), from the Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 6 to 18 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 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.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 6 to 18 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 67 to 107 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Basalt, rhyolite. Age: Permian to Triassic, 202 to 299 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, tonalite, quartz-diorite. Age: Late Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 87 to 160 million years old. About 0.3 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 Stites reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the South Fork Clearwater, the Clearwater, the Snake and the Columbia: about 530 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 Stites; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Stites 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, 10 miles north-northwest, 110 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
