The Pinedale 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.
73° on Nov. 11, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1984. Next is 73° in 2016.
Pinedale’s center stands about 6,460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,280 ft to 7,010 ft, a difference of 730 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hub Point, about 7,160 ft, 3 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cretaceous sedimentary rocks (sandstone, shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 88 to 97 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 14×. 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 8 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Paleocene to Early Oligocene, 30 to 65 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 230 to 245 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 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, shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Permian, 280 to 310 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. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Pinedale reaches the Gulf of California by way of Dodson Wash, Cottonwood Wash, Silver Creek, the Little Colorado and the Colorado: about 1,000 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 Pinedale; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pinedale has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in December. A normal year brings about 19 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 16 inches of water.
On November 14 Pinedale normally reaches 57° and falls to 32°. The record high is 70°, in 2025; the record low 11°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.29 in, fell in 2009.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1984 at Show Low Airport, 14 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.