The Beaver Dam 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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85° on Nov. 14, 1988, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1979. Next is 84° in 1989.
Beaver Dam’s center stands about 1,840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,740 ft to 2,370 ft, a difference of 630 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Bangs, about 7,910 ft, 9 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Middle Miocene to Oligocene sedimentary rocks (conglomerate, sandstone), from the Early Oligocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 32 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 3×. 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 Oligocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 32 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, metavolcanic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, 0.8 to 3 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Permian, 280 to 310 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 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 Beaver Dam reaches the Gulf of California by way of Beaver Dam Wash, the Virgin and the Colorado: about 540 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.
290 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
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 Beaver Dam; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Beaver Dam has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 106° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in December. About 6 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1979 at Bunkerville, 14 miles southwest, 310 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
