The Bowie 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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14° on Nov. 16, 2018, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1898. Next is 17° in 2020.
Bowie’s center stands about 3,760 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,660 ft to 3,920 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Dos Cabezas Peaks, about 8,170 ft, 10 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary surficial deposits, undivided (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Rhyolite, dacite, andesite. Age: Late Cretaceous to Early Eocene, 50 to 82 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, metavolcanic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 0.7 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 Bowie reaches the Gulf of California by way of the San Simon, the Gila and the Colorado: about 620 river miles.
440 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 50% 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 Bowie; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bowie has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 99° in June; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 10 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Bowie normally reaches 71° and falls to 35°. The record high is 87°, in 2017; the record low 18°, in 1915. The most rain on this date, 0.20 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1898 at San Simon, 15 miles east, 180 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
