The Rock House 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.
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Chance of showers
27° on Nov. 15, 2022, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1905. Next is 28° in 1938.
Rock House’s center stands about 2,180 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,130 ft to 3,580 ft, a difference of 1,450 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Aztec Peak, about 7,730 ft, 13 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Holocene surficial deposits (silt, clay), from the Holocene, less than 10,000 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 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, sandstone, quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Neoproterozoic, 700 to 1,300 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Hypabyssal-basalt, gabbro. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.1 to 1.1 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 38 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 0.6 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 Rock House reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Salt River, the Gila and the Colorado: about 430 river miles.
200 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 60% 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 Rock House; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rock House has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 104° in July; winter nights fall to about 40° in January. About 16 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Rock House normally reaches 72° and falls to 48°. The record high is 85°, in 1953; the record low 28°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 1.63 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1905 at Roosevelt 1 S, 10 miles west, 420 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
