The Sun 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.
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny; cooler
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; cooler
78° on Nov. 11, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 77° in 2017.
Sun Valley’s center stands about 5,270 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,150 ft to 5,490 ft, a difference of 340 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Flying Butte, about 5,900 ft, 15 miles 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 30×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Late Triassic, 210 to 230 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 230 to 245 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone. Age: Permian, 270 to 280 million years old. About 1 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 Sun Valley reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Puerco, the Little Colorado and the Colorado: about 950 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, 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 Sun Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sun Valley has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. About 10 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 4 inches of snow.
On November 14 Sun Valley normally reaches 62° and falls to 29°. The record high is 76°, in 2017; the record low 13°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 0.52 in, fell in 1946.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 at Petrified Forest National Park, 16 miles southeast, 180 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
