The Molalla 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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8° on Nov. 15, 1955, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 19° in 1916.
Molalla’s center stands about 360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 200 ft to 590 ft, a difference of 390 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Goat Mountain, about 4,250 ft, 14 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Tuffaceous sedimentary rocks and tuff (sandstone, siltstone, mudstone), from the Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 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 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.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite, basaltic-andesite. Age: Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 10 to 17 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Volcanic, conglomerate, andesite. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, felsic-volcanic, clastic. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 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. 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 Molalla reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Bear Creek, the Pudding, the Willamette and the Columbia: about 160 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 Molalla; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Molalla has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in August; winter nights fall to about 35° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Molalla normally reaches 55° and falls to 39°. The record high is 67°, in 2019; the record low 12°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 1.65 in, fell in 1918.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 at Estacada 2 SE, 15 miles east-northeast, 150 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
