The McNary 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
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; cooler
76° on Nov. 12, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1920. Next is 73° in 1967.
McNary’s center stands about 7,320 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,450 ft to 7,680 ft, a difference of 1,230 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Tiger Butte, about 10,180 ft, 15 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Holocene to middle Pliocene basaltic rocks, from the Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 4 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 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Basalt. Age: Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 4 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Paleocene to Early Oligocene, 30 to 65 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 88 to 97 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone. Age: Permian, 270 to 280 million years old. About 1 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 McNary reaches the Gulf of California by way of the North Fork White, the White River, the Salt River, the Gila and the Colorado: about 570 river miles.
200 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 40% 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 McNary; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
McNary has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in June; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 66 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 24 inches of water.
On November 14 McNary normally reaches 55° and falls to 28°. The record high is 73°, in 1967; the record low 6°, in 1944. The most rain on this date, 1.15 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1920 at Mcnary 2 N, 3 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
