The Joseph City 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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Mostly sunny; cooler
78° on Nov. 13, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1915. Next is 78° in 1973.
Joseph City’s center stands about 5,010 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,960 ft to 5,210 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Flying Butte, about 5,900 ft, 14 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Holocene surficial deposits (silt, clay), from the Holocene, less than 10,000 years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 28×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Mudstone. Age: Late Triassic, 210 to 230 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 230 to 245 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone. Age: Permian, 270 to 280 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 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 Joseph City reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Little Colorado and the Colorado: about 930 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 Joseph City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Joseph City has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. About 6 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Joseph City normally reaches 61° and falls to 29°. The record high is 77°, in 2017; the record low 7°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.46 in, fell in 1988.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1915 from the Winslow Area threaded record (Winslow Airport, 23 miles west-northwest, 120 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
