The Sunland Estates 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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70° on Nov. 14, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1941. Next is 66° in 1976.
Sunland Estates’s center stands about 610 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 560 ft to 1,910 ft, a difference of 1,350 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Whiskey Dick Mountain, about 3,880 ft, 10 miles west-southwest.
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 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, clay, volcanic. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Miocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 16 million years old. About 0.3 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 Sunland Estates reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Columbia: about 420 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 Sunland Estates; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sunland Estates has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 8 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Sunland Estates normally reaches 47° and falls to 30°. The record high is 70°, in 2021; the record low 0°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.46 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1941 at Quincy, 13 miles northeast, 680 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
