The Laurier 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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63° on Nov. 15, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1899. Next is 59° in 2007.
Laurier’s center stands about 1,650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,450 ft to 4,380 ft, a difference of 2,930 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Togo Mountain, about 6,120 ft, 8 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Glacial drift, undivided (sand, gravel), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 9 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 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 Laurier reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Columbia: about 730 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
420 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Laurier; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Laurier has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in August; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 47 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Laurier normally reaches 41° and falls to 28°. The record high is 58°, in 2016; the record low 8°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.85 in, fell in 1966.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1899 at Northport, 19 miles east-southeast, 150 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
