The Mount Vista 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.
69° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1856. Next is 68° in 1899.
Mount Vista’s center stands about 240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 50 ft to 340 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bells Mountain, about 2,250 ft, 13 miles east-northeast.
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 10×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, clay, volcanic. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel, silt. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Conglomerate. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Late Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 38 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 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 Mount Vista reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Mill Creek, Salmon Creek and the Columbia: about 100 river miles.
85 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mount Vista; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mount Vista has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in August; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Mount Vista normally reaches 52° and falls to 36°. The record high is 68°, in 1899; the record low 15°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 2.33 in, fell in 1966.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1856 at Vancouver 4 NNE, 4 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.