The Wellton Hills 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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Sunny
93° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1969. Next is 93° in 2025.
Wellton Hills’s center stands about 360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 260 ft to 680 ft, a difference of 420 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sheep Mountain, about 3,030 ft, 8 miles southwest.
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 6 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 12 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Holocene, less than 10,000 years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Volcanic, clastic. Age: Early Oligocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 32 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Late Cretaceous to Early Eocene, 50 to 82 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary, metavolcanic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Oligocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 32 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.
Wellton Hills has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 109° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in December. About 4 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Wellton Hills normally reaches 80° and falls to 44°. The record high is 92°, in 2025; the record low 28°, in 1975. The most rain on this date, 0.07 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1969 at Tacna 3 NE, 15 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
