The Yakima 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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72° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1946. Next is 72° in 2021.
Yakima’s center stands about 1,070 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 990 ft to 1,970 ft, a difference of 980 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Baldy, about 3,210 ft, 14 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 6 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, sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Eocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 56 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 28 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, volcanic. Age: Middle Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 16 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 Yakima reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Wide Hollow Creek, the Yakima 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 Yakima; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Yakima has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in December. A normal year brings about 20 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 8 inches of water.
On November 14 Yakima normally reaches 50° and falls to 27°. The record high is 72°, in 2021; the record low 0°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.66 in, fell in 2020.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1946 from the Yakima Area threaded record (Yakima Airport, 3 miles south-southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
