The Desert Hills 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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89° on Nov. 11, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1967. Next is 89° in 1999.
Desert Hills’s center stands about 550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 450 ft to 1,220 ft, a difference of 770 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Crossman Peak, about 5,040 ft, 10 miles east.
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 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Metasedimentary, metavolcanic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Early Miocene, 18 to 1,680 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Volcanic, clastic. Age: Early Oligocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 32 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 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 Desert Hills reaches the Gulf of California by way of Lake Havasu and the Colorado: about 310 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Havasu.
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 Desert Hills; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Desert Hills has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 109° in July; winter nights fall to about 42° in December. About 4 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Desert Hills normally reaches 76° and falls to 51°. The record high is 88°, in 1995; the record low 43°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 0.41 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1967 from the Lake Havasu City Area threaded record (Lake Havasu, 7 miles south). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
