The Cayuse 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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78° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1932. Next is 75° in 1990.
Cayuse’s center stands about 1,420 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,350 ft to 2,710 ft, a difference of 1,360 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Black Canyon Butte, about 4,530 ft, 15 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wanapum Basalt, from the Middle Miocene, 12 to 16 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. 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. Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 23 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Middle Miocene, 12 to 16 million years old. About 5 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 Cayuse reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Umatilla and the Columbia: about 350 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 Cayuse; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cayuse has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in December. A normal year brings about 15 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 17 inches of water.
On November 14 Cayuse normally reaches 51° and falls to 30°. The record high is 75°, in 1999; the record low 1°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.57 in, fell in 1988.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1932 at Pendleton Branch Experiment Sta, 5 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
