The Mead Ranch 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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−4° on Nov. 14, 1985, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1965. Next is 5° in 1982.
Mead Ranch’s center stands about 6,030 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,500 ft to 7,890 ft, a difference of 2,390 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hart Point, about 7,110 ft, 14 miles north.
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 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, limestone. Age: Permian, 270 to 280 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Metavolcanic. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Permian, 280 to 310 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Early Cambrian to Late Mississippian, 330 to 540 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, tonalite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion 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 Mead Ranch reaches the Gulf of California by way of Tonto Creek, the Salt River, the Gila and the Colorado: about 490 river miles.
200 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 50% 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 Mead Ranch; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mead Ranch has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 22 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Mead Ranch normally reaches 56° and falls to 25°. The record high is 73°, in 1967; the record low −4°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.82 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1965 at Blue Ridge Ranger Station, 18 miles north, 850 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
