The Four Corners 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. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 68° in 1930.
Four Corners’s center stands about 220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 160 ft to 330 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Waldo Hills, about 1,200 ft, 13 miles east.
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 20×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Miocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 16 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Late Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 38 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 0.6 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 Four Corners reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the West Fork Little Pudding, the Little Pudding, the Pudding, the Willamette and the Columbia: about 180 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 Four Corners; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Four Corners has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 35° in December. About 40 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Four Corners normally reaches 54° and falls to 39°. The record high is 68°, in 2001; the record low 12°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 3.00 in, fell in 1896.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 from the Salem Area threaded record (Salem Airport (Mcnary Field), here). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
