The Bullhead City 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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90° on Nov. 11, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1977. Next is 89° in 2016.
Bullhead City’s center stands about 550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 500 ft to 1,210 ft, a difference of 710 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Spirit Mountain, about 5,580 ft, 12 miles northwest.
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 6 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.
Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, 0.8 to 3 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 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.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Late Oligocene to Middle Miocene, 14 to 26 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.
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 Bullhead City reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Colorado: about 370 river miles.
Lake on the way: 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 Bullhead City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bullhead City has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 111° in July; winter nights fall to about 44° in December. About 5 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bullhead City normally reaches 75° and falls to 51°. The record high is 88°, in 1999; the record low 35°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.25 in, fell in 1978.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1977 at Bullhead City, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
