The Borrego Springs 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.
Sunny
Sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
95° on Nov. 17, 1990, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1942. Next is 94° in 1989.
Borrego Springs’s center stands about 590 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 500 ft to 1,710 ft, a difference of 1,210 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rabbit Peak, about 6,640 ft, 15 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 3×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Tonalite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 175 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Plutonic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 2 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 Borrego Springs reaches Salton Sea by way of San Felipe Creek: about 40 river miles. Salton Sea has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Often dry. About 50% 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 Borrego Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Borrego Springs has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 108° in July; winter nights fall to about 45° in December. About 5 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Borrego Springs normally reaches 79° and falls to 52°. The record high is 91°, in 1999; the record low 36°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.66 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1942 at Borrego Desert Park, here, 220 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
