The Warm Springs 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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81° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1958. Next is 73° in 1995.
Warm Springs’s center stands about 1,540 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,370 ft to 2,410 ft, a difference of 1,040 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Twin Buttes, about 4,020 ft, 15 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows John Day Formation of east-central Oregon (sandstone-mudstone), from the Late Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 38 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.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 38 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 23 million 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 Warm Springs reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Deschutes and the Columbia: about 300 river miles.
200 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Warm Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Warm Springs has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 10 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Warm Springs normally reaches 52° and falls to 31°. The record high is 73°, in 1995; the record low 8°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 0.53 in, fell in 1965.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1958 at Pelton Dam, 3 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
