The Spray 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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Spray’s center stands about 1,780 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,740 ft to 3,100 ft, a difference of 1,360 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Baldy, about 5,890 ft, 15 miles southwest.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. 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: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 23 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Paleocene to Early Oligocene, 28 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 38 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 23 million years old. About 0.4 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 Spray reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the John Day and the Columbia: about 390 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
210 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Spray; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
