The Bella Vista 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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88° on Nov. 13, 1995, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 87° in 1933.
Bella Vista’s center stands about 570 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 490 ft to 790 ft, a difference of 300 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Town Mountain, about 4,300 ft, 13 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Plio-Pleistocene and Pliocene loosely consolidated deposits (sandstone, conglomerate), from the Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 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.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, mudstone. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 202 to 247 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, felsic-volcanic. Age: Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 260 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.
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 Bella Vista reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Dry Creek, Little Cow Creek, Cow Creek and the Sacramento: about 290 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bella Vista; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bella Vista has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 100° in July; winter nights fall to about 37° in December. About 34 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Bella Vista normally reaches 65° and falls to 42°. The record high is 87°, in 1933; the record low 23°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 2.32 in, fell in 1934.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Redding Area threaded record (Redding Airport, 9 miles south-southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
