The Crawfordsville 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.
74° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1969. Next is 73° in 2021.
Crawfordsville’s center stands about 460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 400 ft to 1,790 ft, a difference of 1,390 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Farmers Butte, about 3,590 ft, 14 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvial deposits (sand, gravel, silt), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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 8×. 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: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Gravel, boulders, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, felsic-volcanic, clastic. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 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 Crawfordsville reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Calapooia, the Willamette and the Columbia: about 260 river miles.
Lake on the way: Willamette Falls Hydroelectric Power Reservoir.
100 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Crawfordsville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Crawfordsville has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in August; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 54 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Crawfordsville normally reaches 53° and falls to 38°. The record high is 74°, in 1999; the record low 17°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 1.95 in, fell in 2014.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1969 at Foster Dam, 10 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.