The Cove 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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70° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1965. Next is 69° in 1999.
Cove’s center stands about 2,920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,690 ft to 4,780 ft, a difference of 2,090 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Mountain, about 7,860 ft, 14 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Fanglomerate (mixed-clastic), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 23 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Mixed-clastic. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Quartz-diorite, granitic, granodiorite. Age: Late Triassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 208 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Rhyolite, dacite. Age: Late Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 38 million years old. About 0.8 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 Cove reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Grande Ronde, the Snake and the Columbia: about 630 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 Cove; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cove has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in August; winter nights fall to about 24° in December. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 17 inches of water.
On November 14 Cove normally reaches 48° and falls to 30°. The record high is 70°, in 2016; the record low 2°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.63 in, fell in 1988.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1965 at La Grande, 13 miles west, 160 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
