The Bingen 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.
74° on Nov. 14, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 72° in 1999.
Bingen’s center stands about 90 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 70 ft to 2,200 ft, a difference of 2,130 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Defiance, about 4,950 ft, 13 miles west-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 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: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Basaltic-andesite, basalt. Age: Early Pliocene to Pleistocene, 1.2 to 3.9 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basaltic-andesite, basalt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, volcanic. Age: Middle Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 16 million years old. About 0.6 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 Bingen reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Jewett Creek and the Columbia: about 170 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bingen; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bingen has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 14 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bingen normally reaches 51° and falls to 35°. The record high is 74°, in 2021; the record low 5°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.56 in, fell in 2020.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Dallesport Airport, 16 miles east-southeast, 140 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.