The Ephrata 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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69° on Nov. 14, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 66° in 1999.
Ephrata’s center stands about 1,280 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,230 ft to 2,200 ft, a difference of 970 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Monument Hill, about 2,860 ft, 12 miles west.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 11×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.5 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 Ephrata reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Moses Lake, Potholes Reservoir, Lower Crab Creek and the Columbia: about 470 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Umatilla, Potholes Reservoir and Moses Lake.
210 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Ephrata; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ephrata has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 8 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Ephrata normally reaches 46° and falls to 30°. The record high is 69°, in 2021; the record low 1°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.38 in, fell in 1963.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Ephrata Airport, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
