The Desert View Highlands 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. 16, 1992, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 85° in 1995.
Desert View Highlands’s center stands about 2,720 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,580 ft to 3,380 ft, a difference of 800 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Gleason, about 6,520 ft, 15 miles south.
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 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 14 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Late Cretaceous to Eocene, 34 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Anorthosite, gabbro. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.2 to 1.2 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene, 19 to 23 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Middle Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 48 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.
Desert View Highlands has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in August; winter nights fall to about 32° in December. About 6 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Desert View Highlands normally reaches 68° and falls to 38°. The record high is 84°, in 1932; the record low 24°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 0.81 in, fell in 1946.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 from the Palmdale Area threaded record (Palmdale Airport, 5 miles northeast, 210 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
