The Red Mesa 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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79° on Nov. 15, 1966, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1962. Next is 73° in 1999.
Red Mesa’s center stands about 5,370 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,190 ft to 5,740 ft, a difference of 550 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chezhindeza Mesa, about 7,550 ft, 11 miles south-southeast.
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 13×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Late Jurassic, 145 to 160 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Jurassic, 145 to 164 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Arenite. Age: Early Jurassic, 175 to 202 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 94 to 125 million years old. About 0.8 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 Red Mesa reaches the Gulf of California by way of Gothic Creek, the San Juan and the Colorado: about 1,020 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, Lake Powell, 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 Red Mesa; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Red Mesa has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. Barely 0.0 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Red Mesa normally reaches 58° and falls to 33°. The record high is 73°, in 2005; the record low 11°, in 1964. The most rain on this date, 0.45 in, fell in 1962.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1962 at Teec Nos Pos, 16 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
