The Starbuck 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.
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy
77° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 73° in 2001.
Starbuck’s center stands about 640 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 530 ft to 1,590 ft, a difference of 1,060 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Fryxell Overlook, about 1,010 ft, 11 miles north-northwest.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 12×. 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 17 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.4 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 Starbuck reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Tucannon, the Snake and the Columbia: about 390 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 Starbuck; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Starbuck has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 19 inches of water.
On November 14 Starbuck normally reaches 50° and falls to 31°. The record high is 74°, in 1999; the record low −9°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 1.06 in, fell in 1941.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Dayton 1 WSW, 15 miles south-southeast, 920 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
