The North Powder 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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72° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1928. Next is 66° in 2016.
North Powder’s center stands about 3,270 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,200 ft to 3,570 ft, a difference of 370 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Twin Mountain, about 8,850 ft, 14 miles west-southwest.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gravel, boulders, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Middle Miocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 16 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metaandesite, metabasalt, spilite. Age: Permian to Triassic, 202 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Quartz-diorite, granitic, granodiorite. Age: Late Triassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 208 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand, boulders. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million 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. 3 smaller units 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 North Powder reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the North Powder, the Powder River, the Snake and the Columbia: about 690 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Umatilla, Brownlee Reservoir and Hells Canyon Reservoir.
240 miles of the trip are on the Snake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of North Powder; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
North Powder has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. About 9 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 North Powder normally reaches 48° and falls to 25°. The record high is 65°, in 1999; the record low −15°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.44 in, fell in 1941.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1928 from the Baker City Area threaded record (Baker City Airport, 14 miles south-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
