The Red Rock 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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92° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1987. Next is 91° in 2013.
Red Rock’s center stands about 1,870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,800 ft to 2,000 ft, a difference of 200 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Newman Peak, about 4,480 ft, 11 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary surficial deposits, undivided (sand, silt, clay), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 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.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Late Oligocene to Middle Miocene, 14 to 26 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Late Cretaceous to Early Eocene, 50 to 80 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Middle Miocene, 15 to 1,800 million years old. About 0.3 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.
Red Rock has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 104° in June; winter nights fall to about 40° in December. About 10 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Red Rock normally reaches 77° and falls to 49°. The record high is 90°, in 1999; the record low 35°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 0.30 in, fell in 1991.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1987 at Picacho 8 SE, 7 miles northwest, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
