The Dragoon 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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85° on Nov. 11, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1913. Next is 84° in 2017.
Dragoon’s center stands about 4,620 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,510 ft to 5,460 ft, a difference of 950 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Glenn, about 7,480 ft, 6 miles south-southeast.
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 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 8×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, metavolcanic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Late Cretaceous to Early Eocene, 50 to 82 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone, quartzite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Triassic, 248 to 544 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Arenite, conglomerate. Age: Late Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 80 to 160 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Late Oligocene to Middle Miocene, 14 to 26 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. 4 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 Dragoon reaches the Gulf of California by way of Dragoon Wash, the San Pedro, the Gila and the Colorado: about 570 river miles.
330 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 60% 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 Dragoon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dragoon has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in June; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Dragoon normally reaches 70° and falls to 36°. The record high is 84°, in 2017; the record low 22°, in 1915. The most rain on this date, 0.26 in, fell in 1959.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1913 at Pearce - Sunsites, 13 miles east-southeast, 280 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
