The Wide Ruins 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
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Sunny; cooler
Partly cloudy; warmer
Chance of showers; cooler
78° on Nov. 12, 2009, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 76° in 1967.
Wide Ruins’s center stands about 6,260 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,070 ft to 6,620 ft, a difference of 550 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Padres Mesa, about 6,690 ft, 7 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pliocene to middle Miocene deposits (conglomerate, sandstone), from the Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 12×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone. Age: Permian, 270 to 280 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Late Triassic, 210 to 230 million years old. About 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 Wide Ruins reaches the Gulf of California by way of Wide Ruin Wash, Leroux Wash, the Little Colorado and the Colorado: about 1,010 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.
290 miles of the trip are on the 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 Wide Ruins; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wide Ruins has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 8 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 4 inches of snow.
On November 14 Wide Ruins normally reaches 59° and falls to 26°. The record high is 78°, in 2009; the record low 12°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Sanders, 17 miles southeast, 410 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
