The Alamo Lake 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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29° on Nov. 15, 2022, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1975. Next is 30° in 2015.
Alamo Lake’s center stands about 1,350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,190 ft to 1,560 ft, a difference of 370 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Arrastra Mountain, about 4,750 ft, 13 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pliocene to middle Miocene deposits (conglomerate, sandstone), from the Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 8×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Middle Miocene, 15 to 1,800 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, tonalite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 38 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Oligocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 32 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. 4 smaller units 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 Alamo Lake reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Bill Williams and the Colorado: about 330 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Havasu.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Alamo Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Alamo Lake has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 108° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in December. About 8 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Alamo Lake normally reaches 77° and falls to 40°. The record high is 93°, in 1999; the record low 32°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 0.11 in, fell in 1978.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1975 at Alamo Dam, 5 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
