The Klickitat 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.
Klickitat’s center stands about 740 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 420 ft to 2,220 ft, a difference of 1,800 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Grayback Mountain, about 3,770 ft, 13 miles north-northeast.
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 22 mi of the line.
Basalt. 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 Klickitat reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Klickitat and the Columbia: about 190 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Klickitat; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Klickitat 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 Klickitat 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, 14 miles south, 510 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.