The Parks 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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73° on Nov. 13, 1967, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 72° in 1999.
Parks’s center stands about 7,100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,840 ft to 7,540 ft, a difference of 700 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Kendrick Peak, about 10,370 ft, 12 miles north-northeast.
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 8×. 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 18 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Miocene to Early Pliocene, 4 to 8 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Rhyolite, dacite, andesite. Age: Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 4 million years old. About 2 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 Parks reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Verde, the Salt River, the Gila and the Colorado: about 570 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 Parks; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Parks has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in December. About 21 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Parks normally reaches 56° and falls to 23°. The record high is 72°, in 1967; the record low 0°, in 1972. The most rain on this date, 0.53 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 at Fort Valley, 12 miles east, 250 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
