The White Mountain Lake 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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73° on Nov. 11, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1984. Next is 73° in 2016.
White Mountain Lake’s center stands about 6,100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,900 ft to 6,400 ft, a difference of 500 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Turkey Mountain, about 7,820 ft, 15 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Holocene to middle Pliocene basaltic rocks, from the Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 4 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 13×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Basalt. Age: Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 4 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 230 to 245 million years old. About 8 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 White Mountain Lake reaches the Gulf of California by way of Silver Creek, the Little Colorado and the Colorado: about 1,000 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 White Mountain Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
White Mountain Lake has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in December. A normal year brings about 19 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 16 inches of water.
On November 14 White Mountain Lake normally reaches 57° and falls to 32°. The record high is 70°, in 2025; the record low 11°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.29 in, fell in 2009.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1984 at Show Low Airport, 6 miles south, 310 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
