The Butte Falls 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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74° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1905. Next is 74° in 2016.
Butte Falls’s center stands about 2,550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,200 ft to 4,090 ft, a difference of 1,890 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount McLoughlin, about 9,400 ft, 15 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ridge-capping basalt and basaltic andesite (basaltic-andesite, basalt), from the Late Miocene to Early Pliocene, 4 to 9 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Basaltic-andesite, basalt. Age: Late Miocene to Early Pliocene, 4 to 9 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gravel, boulders, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, felsic-volcanic, clastic. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.4 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 Butte Falls reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of South Fork Big Butte Creek, Big Butte Creek and the Rogue: about 170 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Butte Falls; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Butte Falls has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. A normal year brings about 21 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Butte Falls normally reaches 55° and falls to 34°. The record high is 72°, in 2018; the record low 12°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 1.50 in, fell in 1911.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 at Prospect 2 SW, 14 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
