The Gates 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.
Chance of showers
Showers likely
Chance of showers
Chance of showers
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
74° on Nov. 15, 1995, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1954. Next is 70° in 1974.
Gates’s center stands about 940 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 850 ft to 2,820 ft, a difference of 1,970 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Battle Ax, about 5,500 ft, 15 miles east-northeast.
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 5 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.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, felsic-volcanic, clastic. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Miocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 16 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 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 Gates reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the North Santiam, the Santiam, 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 Gates; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gates has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in August; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. A normal year brings about 10 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 94 inches of water.
On November 14 Gates normally reaches 50° and falls to 41°. The record high is 62°, in 1974; the record low 21°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 3.00 in, fell in 1966.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1954 at Detroit Dam, 8 miles east-southeast, 280 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
