The Mountain View Ranches 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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74° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1910. Next is 71° in 2021.
Mountain View Ranches’s center stands about 6,420 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,260 ft to 7,000 ft, a difference of 740 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is San Francisco Mountain, about 12,570 ft, 13 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Permian sedimentary rocks (sandstone, limestone), from the Permian, 270 to 280 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 6×. 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 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone. Age: Permian, 270 to 280 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Rhyolite, dacite, andesite. Age: Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 4 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 3 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 Mountain View Ranches reaches the Gulf of California by way of San Francisco Wash, Canyon Diablo Wash, the Little Colorado and the Colorado: about 890 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 Mountain View Ranches; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mountain View Ranches has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 52 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 18 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1910 at Walnut Canyon National Monument, 5 miles south-southwest, 280 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
