The White Salmon 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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74° on Nov. 14, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 72° in 1999.
White Salmon’s center stands about 640 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 70 ft to 2,200 ft, a difference of 2,130 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Defiance, about 4,950 ft, 13 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pleistocene-Recent volcanic rocks (basalt), from the Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 5.3 million years old.
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 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Conglomerate. Age: Late Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 38 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Middle Miocene, 12 to 16 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 23 million years old. About 2 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 White Salmon reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Columbia: about 170 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of White Salmon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
White Salmon has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 14 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 White Salmon normally reaches 51° and falls to 35°. The record high is 74°, in 2021; the record low 5°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.56 in, fell in 2020.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Dallesport Airport, 17 miles east-southeast, 410 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
