The Rufus 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.
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Rufus’s center stands about 210 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 160 ft to 2,120 ft, a difference of 1,960 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Haystack Butte, about 2,940 ft, 8 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Grande Ronde Basalt, from the Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Middle Miocene, 12 to 16 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, volcanic. Age: Middle Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 16 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 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 Rufus reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Columbia: about 210 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Rufus; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
