The Prairie City 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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79° on Nov. 15, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1903. Next is 73° in 2016.
Prairie City’s center stands about 3,540 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,430 ft to 4,290 ft, a difference of 860 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Strawberry Mountain, about 8,990 ft, 10 miles south.
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 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Mixed-clastic, volcanic. Age: Paleozoic, 252 to 542 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Paleocene to Early Oligocene, 28 to 66 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.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite, andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 1.6 to 24 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granite, quartz-diorite. Age: Triassic to Jurassic, 145 to 252 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. 2 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 Prairie City reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the John Day and the Columbia: about 470 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
260 miles of the trip are on the John Day.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Prairie City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Prairie City has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 10 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 12 inches of water.
On November 14 Prairie City normally reaches 48° and falls to 26°. The record high is 75°, in 1999; the record low −7°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.55 in, fell in 2006.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1903 at John Day, 13 miles west-southwest, 480 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
