The Camp Verde 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.
11° on Nov. 17, 1958, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1938. Next is 14° in 1950.
Camp Verde’s center stands about 3,100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,050 ft to 3,680 ft, a difference of 630 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Tule Mesa, about 6,670 ft, 14 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Holocene river alluvium (sand, gravel), from the Holocene, less than 10,000 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 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.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 16 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, metavolcanic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Permian, 280 to 310 million years old. About 0.8 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 Camp Verde reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Verde, the Salt River, the Gila and the Colorado: about 490 river miles.
200 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 Camp Verde; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Camp Verde has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 101° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in December. About 13 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Camp Verde normally reaches 70° and falls to 32°. The record high is 83°, in 1990; the record low 20°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 1.45 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1938 at Montezuma Castle National Monument, 3 miles north-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.