THE GARFIELD COUNTY LAND BRIEF
Land in the
Dissected Loess Uplands setting.
Garfield County has 710.8 square miles of land in Washington. 5 mapped landscape regions meet across Garfield County: Dissected Loess Uplands, Canyons and Dissected Highlands, Lower Snake and Clearwater Canyons, among others.
Basalt underlies this dry plateau of grassland and sagebrush. Windblown soils cover some uplands, while ancient flood paths exposed rock across the region's scabland terrain.
Regional context: Columbia Plateau ↗ · Regional mapping across the county footprint
Where the landscape changes
Garfield County intersects 5 mapped regional units. The largest mapped shares are:
- Dissected Loess Uplands65.1%
- Canyons and Dissected Highlands14.2%
- Lower Snake and Clearwater Canyons11.3%
- Mesic Forest Zone8.6%
- Canyons and Dissected Uplands0.8%
Blue Mountains in Garfield County
The Blue Mountains combine open mountain ranges and dissected volcanic uplands. The Wallowa and Elkhorn high country includes older granitic and metamorphic rocks above the surrounding lava landscape.
Read the regional source ↗Finding your parcel within Garfield County
The atlas lists 2 cities, towns, townships, and Census communities associated with Garfield County, including Pomeroy, Pataha. The list includes overlapping geography types and does not divide the county into exclusive service areas.
Garfield County by land and water
The Census records 7.45 square miles of water within Garfield County, or 1% of its total area. That share is close to Garfield County’s 1%. This is geographic context; waterfront status and usable land must be checked at the parcel.
For scale, Garfield County has 2,013.7 times the land area of nearby Pataha CDP (0.35 square miles). These areas describe boundaries, not comparable property prices.
The Census boundary meets Asotin County, Columbia County, Whitman County within Washington. A tract near one of these lines should be matched to the county identifier on its own records.

