The Cottonwood 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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91° on Nov. 13, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1911. Next is 86° in 1967.
Cottonwood’s center stands about 3,330 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,250 ft to 3,840 ft, a difference of 590 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Woodchute Mountain, about 7,840 ft, 9 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Late and middle Pleistocene surficial deposits (gravel, sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 0.8 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 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.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 16 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Permian, 280 to 310 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.8 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Early Cambrian to Late Mississippian, 330 to 540 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, tonalite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion 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. 3 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Cottonwood reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Verde, the Salt River, the Gila and the Colorado: about 510 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 Cottonwood; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cottonwood has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 101° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in December. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Cottonwood normally reaches 71° and falls to 36°. The record high is 85°, in 1999; the record low 23°, in 1929. The most rain on this date, 0.55 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1911 at Tuzigoot, 2 miles north-northwest, 140 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
