The Oroville 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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Oroville’s center stands about 930 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 910 ft to 2,790 ft, a difference of 1,880 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Juniper Point, about 5,640 ft, 15 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 5 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.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 1 mi of the line.
Phyllite. Age: Jurassic to Early Cretaceous, 100 to 202 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Serpentinite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 175 million years old. About 0.7 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 Oroville reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Okanogan and the Columbia: about 600 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
250 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Oroville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
