The Springerville 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
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75° on Nov. 11, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1911. Next is 74° in 1934.
Springerville’s center stands about 6,980 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,690 ft to 7,280 ft, a difference of 590 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pole Knoll, about 9,780 ft, 15 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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Paleocene to Early Oligocene, 30 to 65 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 4 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 88 to 97 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Late Triassic, 210 to 230 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.
A raindrop that lands in Springerville reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Little Colorado and the Colorado: about 1,070 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.
340 miles of the trip are on the Little Colorado.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Springerville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Springerville has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in June; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. About 11 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Springerville normally reaches 60° and falls to 22°. The record high is 74°, in 2017; the record low 0°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.91 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1911 at Springerville, 3 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
