The Alpine 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; cooler
3.36 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1904. The next wettest, 2.85 inches, fell in 1994.
Alpine’s center stands about 7,970 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 7,900 ft to 9,820 ft, a difference of 1,920 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Escudilla Mountain, about 10,920 ft, 8 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Oligocene to Paleocene[?] sedimentary rocks (conglomerate, sandstone), from the Early Paleocene to Early Oligocene, 30 to 65 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. 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 Paleocene to Early Oligocene, 30 to 65 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 38 million years old. About 4 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 Alpine reaches the Gulf of California by way of the San Francisco, the Gila and the Colorado: about 740 river miles.
460 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 40% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
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 Alpine; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Alpine has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 45 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Alpine normally reaches 54° and falls to 22°. The record high is 71°, in 1999; the record low 2°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.67 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1904 at Alpine, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
