The Burns 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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69° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1939. Next is 67° in 1999.
Burns’s center stands about 4,190 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,140 ft to 4,770 ft, a difference of 630 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Burns Butte, about 5,260 ft, 5 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Silicic ash-flow tuff (rhyolite, dacite), from the Early Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 16×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Rhyolite, dacite. Age: Early Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Rhyolite, dacite. Age: Eocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 56 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 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. 2 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Burns reaches the desert basins of southern Oregon by way of the West Fork Silvies: about 30 river miles. The desert basins of southern Oregon has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Burns; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Burns has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in December. About 10 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Burns normally reaches 48° and falls to 23°. The record high is 66°, in 1999; the record low −5°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.34 in, fell in 1952.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1939 from the Burns Area threaded record (Burns Municipal Airport, 5 miles east). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
