The West Clarkston-Highland 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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77° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1881. Next is 69° in 2021.
West Clarkston-Highland’s center stands about 950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 730 ft to 1,970 ft, a difference of 1,240 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Potter Hill, about 3,410 ft, 15 miles west-southwest.
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 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 9×. 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 9 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 33,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 6 to 18 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand, clay. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 West Clarkston-Highland reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Snake and the Columbia: about 450 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 West Clarkston-Highland; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
West Clarkston-Highland has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. A normal year brings about 13 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 13 inches of water.
On November 14 West Clarkston-Highland normally reaches 49° and falls to 35°. The record high is 69°, in 2021; the record low −3°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.84 in, fell in 1988.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1881 from the Lewiston Area threaded record (Lewiston Airport, 3 miles southeast, 480 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
