The Dripping 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.
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; cooler
90° on Nov. 12, 1934, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1900. Next is 89° in 1906.
Dripping Springs’s center stands about 2,240 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,100 ft to 4,160 ft, a difference of 2,060 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pinal Peak, about 7,820 ft, 13 miles north-northwest.
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 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.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Rhyolite, dacite, andesite. Age: Late Cretaceous to Early Eocene, 50 to 82 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Permian, 280 to 310 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Neoproterozoic, 700 to 1,300 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 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. 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 Dripping Springs reaches the Gulf of California by way of Dripping Spring Wash, the Gila and the Colorado: about 470 river miles.
340 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 Dripping Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dripping Springs has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 99° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 13 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Dripping Springs normally reaches 69° and falls to 39°. The record high is 89°, in 1906; the record low 22°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 1.07 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1900 at San Carlos Reservoir, 14 miles east-northeast, 290 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
