The Happy Valley 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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71° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1872. Next is 68° in 1976.
Happy Valley’s center stands about 500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 100 ft to 930 ft, a difference of 830 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Council Crest, about 1,110 ft, 9 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Basalt and basaltic andesite (basaltic-andesite, basalt), from the Early Pliocene to Pleistocene, 1.2 to 3.9 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 18×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Basaltic-andesite, basalt. Age: Early Pliocene to Pleistocene, 1.2 to 3.9 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Miocene, 5.3 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.
Sandstone, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Silt, sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million 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. 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 Happy Valley reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Rock Creek, the Clackamas, the Willamette and the Columbia: about 130 river miles.
100 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Happy Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Happy Valley has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in August; winter nights fall to about 37° in January. About 44 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 4 inches of snow.
On November 14 Happy Valley normally reaches 53° and falls to 42°. The record high is 66°, in 2001; the record low 18°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 2.18 in, fell in 1876.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1872 from the Portland Downtown Area threaded record (Portland Kgw-Tv, 9 miles west-northwest, 340 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
