The Cactus Flats 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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88° on Nov. 14, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 87° in 1999.
Cactus Flats’s center stands about 3,130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,000 ft to 3,560 ft, a difference of 560 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Graham, about 10,700 ft, 10 miles west-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 6 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.
Gravel, sand. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, 0.8 to 3 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, metavolcanic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 billion years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 0.6 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 Cactus Flats reaches the Gulf of California by way of Marijilda Wash, Stockton Wash, the Gila and the Colorado: about 570 river miles.
430 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 Cactus Flats; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cactus Flats has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 100° in June; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 9 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cactus Flats normally reaches 72° and falls to 38°. The record high is 88°, in 2025; the record low 28°, in 2010. The most rain on this date, 0.65 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Safford Agricultural Center, 4 miles north-northeast, 180 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
