The Tombstone 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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86° on Nov. 11, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 85° in 2017.
Tombstone’s center stands about 4,540 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,250 ft to 5,110 ft, a difference of 860 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is China Peak, about 7,090 ft, 13 miles north-northeast.
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 7×. 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 Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Rhyolite, dacite, andesite. Age: Late Cretaceous to Early Eocene, 50 to 82 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Arenite, conglomerate. Age: Late Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 80 to 160 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Permian, 280 to 310 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 billion years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Early Cambrian to Late Mississippian, 330 to 540 million years old. About 0.4 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 Tombstone reaches the Gulf of California by way of the San Pedro, the Gila and the Colorado: about 580 river miles.
330 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 Tombstone; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Tombstone has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in June; winter nights fall to about 38° in January. About 13 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Tombstone normally reaches 71° and falls to 46°. The record high is 85°, in 2017; the record low 20°, in 1929. The most rain on this date, 0.50 in, fell in 2011.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Tombstone, here, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
