The Queen Valley 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
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Sunny
Mostly sunny
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32° on Nov. 15, 2000, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1987. Next is 32° in 2015.
Queen Valley’s center stands about 2,030 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,930 ft to 2,680 ft, a difference of 750 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mound Mountain, about 6,210 ft, 15 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pliocene to middle Miocene deposits (conglomerate, sandstone), from the Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 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 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.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, schist. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 38 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Neoproterozoic, 700 to 1,300 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 billion years old. About 2 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.
Queen Valley has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 105° in July; winter nights fall to about 42° in December. About 13 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Queen Valley normally reaches 76° and falls to 50°. The record high is 91°, in 1999; the record low 34°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 0.62 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1987 at Apache Junction 5 NE, 16 miles northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
