The Oakesdale 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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−14° on Nov. 15, 1955, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 0° in 1916.
Oakesdale’s center stands about 2,470 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,430 ft to 2,740 ft, a difference of 310 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mission Mountain, about 4,340 ft, 15 miles east-southeast.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 13×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Argillite, siltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,600 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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 Oakesdale reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Spring Creek, Pine Creek, Rock Creek, the Palouse, the Snake and the Columbia: about 500 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
210 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Oakesdale; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Oakesdale has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in August; winter nights fall to about 24° in December. A normal year brings about 26 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 18 inches of water.
On November 14 Oakesdale normally reaches 46° and falls to 30°. The record high is 65°, in 1999; the record low −3°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.78 in, fell in 1903.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Rosalia, 9 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
