The Wallowa 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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74° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1903. Next is 68° in 2021.
Wallowa’s center stands about 2,940 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,820 ft to 4,540 ft, a difference of 1,720 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Goat Mountain, about 8,020 ft, 14 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 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. 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 22 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Middle Miocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 16 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
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 Wallowa reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Wallowa, the Grande Ronde, the Snake and the Columbia: about 590 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 Wallowa; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wallowa has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in December. A normal year brings about 48 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 18 inches of water.
On November 14 Wallowa normally reaches 46° and falls to 26°. The record high is 68°, in 2021; the record low −3°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.91 in, fell in 1903.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1903 at Wallowa, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
