The Ko Vaya 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
Sunny
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Ko Vaya’s center stands about 2,710 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,460 ft to 3,190 ft, a difference of 730 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Devine, about 4,760 ft, 6 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Middle Miocene to Oligocene sedimentary rocks (conglomerate, sandstone), from the Early Oligocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 32 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 9×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Diorite, alkali-granite, granodiorite. Age: Early Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 150 to 180 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Oligocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 32 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, conglomerate. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 150 to 170 million years old. About 4 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 Ko Vaya reaches the Gulf of California by way of Ko Vaya Wash, Quijotoa Wash, Santa Rosa Wash, the Gila and the Colorado: about 440 river miles.
220 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 70% 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 Ko Vaya; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
