The Creswell 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.
76° on Nov. 11, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 74° in 1981.
Creswell’s center stands about 550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 510 ft to 1,360 ft, a difference of 850 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bear Mountain, about 3,660 ft, 8 miles 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. Age: Late Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 38 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Late Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 38 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Late Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 38 million years old. About 1.0 mi of the line.
Volcanic. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.5 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 Creswell reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Coast Fork Willamette, the Willamette and the Columbia: about 300 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 Creswell; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Creswell has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in August; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Creswell normally reaches 53° and falls to 38°. The record high is 71°, in 2001; the record low 13°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 1.88 in, fell in 1966.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Dorena, 10 miles south-southeast, 270 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.