The Sodaville 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.
74° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1969. Next is 73° in 2021.
Sodaville’s center stands about 520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 360 ft to 1,390 ft, a difference of 1,030 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Peter, about 4,040 ft, 14 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Basaltic lava flows (basalt, basaltic-andesite), from the Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 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 10×. 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, basaltic-andesite. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, felsic-volcanic, clastic. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, boulders, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.9 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 Sodaville reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Oak Creek, the Calapooia, the Willamette and the Columbia: about 240 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 Sodaville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sodaville has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in August; winter nights fall to about 34° in January. About 54 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Sodaville normally reaches 53° and falls to 38°. The record high is 74°, in 1999; the record low 17°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 1.95 in, fell in 2014.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1969 at Foster Dam, 11 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.