The Wallowa Lake 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.
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Chance of showers
Chance of showers
Wallowa Lake’s center stands about 4,460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,300 ft to 9,180 ft, a difference of 4,880 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Matterhorn, about 9,780 ft, 6 miles southwest.
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 3×. 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 7 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand, boulders. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Spilite, volcanic. Age: Late Triassic, 227 to 237 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Quartz-diorite, granitic, granodiorite. Age: Late Triassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 208 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Miocene, 5.3 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 Wallowa Lake reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Wallowa, the Grande Ronde, the Snake and the Columbia: about 620 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 Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
