The Elgin 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.
Elgin’s center stands about 2,680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,630 ft to 3,900 ft, a difference of 1,270 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Emily, about 6,120 ft, 12 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lacustrine and fluvial sedimentary rocks (clay, silt, sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 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: Middle Miocene, 12 to 16 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Middle Miocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 16 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 23 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mixed-clastic. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Elgin reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Grande Ronde, the Snake and the Columbia: about 580 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 Elgin; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Elgin 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 Elgin 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, 19 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
