The Thorp 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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69° on Nov. 14, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 65° in 2019.
Thorp’s center stands about 1,630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,580 ft to 2,340 ft, a difference of 760 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Table Mountain, about 6,350 ft, 13 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (silt, sand), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 years old.
The section below crosses 3 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 16 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, volcanic. Age: Middle Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 16 million 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 Thorp reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Yakima and the Columbia: about 490 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 Thorp; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Thorp has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in August; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. About 9 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Thorp normally reaches 47° and falls to 29°. The record high is 69°, in 2021; the record low −1°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.34 in, fell in 2020.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Ellensburg Bowers Field, 7 miles east-southeast, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
