The Desert Edge 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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23° on Nov. 17, 1964, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1922. Next is 31° in 1950.
Desert Edge’s center stands about 990 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 720 ft to 2,400 ft, a difference of 1,680 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cornell Peak, about 9,590 ft, 15 miles west-southwest.
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 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. 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.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Tonalite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 175 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Plutonic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 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. 2 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Desert Edge reaches Salton Sea by way of the Whitewater: about 50 river miles. Salton Sea has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Desert Edge; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Desert Edge has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 109° in July; winter nights fall to about 46° in December. About 5 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Desert Edge normally reaches 79° and falls to 54°. The record high is 93°, in 2021; the record low 31°, in 1964. The most rain on this date, 0.50 in, fell in 1946.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1922 from the Palm Springs Area threaded record (Palm Springs, 8 miles south-southwest, 560 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
