The Bickleton 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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66° on Nov. 13, 2002, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1968. Next is 65° in 1990.
Bickleton’s center stands about 3,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,780 ft to 3,470 ft, a difference of 690 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lone Pine Butte, about 4,710 ft, 12 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Miocene volcanic rocks (basalt), from the Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. 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: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 12 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 Bickleton reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Pine Creek and the Columbia: about 270 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 Bickleton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bickleton has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 21 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bickleton normally reaches 44° and falls to 29°. The record high is 65°, in 1999; the record low 5°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 2015.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1968 at Satus Pass 2 SSW, 18 miles west, 440 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
