The Clay Springs 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.
Chance of showers
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Mostly sunny
Showers likely
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Chance of showers; cooler
−10° on Nov. 17, 1964, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 2° in 1958.
Clay Springs’s center stands about 6,300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,210 ft to 6,700 ft, a difference of 490 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hub Point, about 7,160 ft, 6 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pliocene to middle Miocene deposits (conglomerate, sandstone), from the Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 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 13×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, limestone. Age: Permian, 270 to 280 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 88 to 97 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Paleocene to Early Oligocene, 30 to 65 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 230 to 245 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 4 million 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 Clay Springs reaches the Gulf of California by way of Cottonwood Wash, Silver Creek, the Little Colorado and the Colorado: about 1,000 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 Clay Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clay Springs has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. About 18 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Clay Springs normally reaches 56° and falls to 27°. The record high is 77°, in 1967; the record low 2°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.58 in, fell in 1955.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Heber (Black Mesa) Ranger Station, 15 miles west, 290 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
