The Mesa 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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82° on Nov. 17, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1943. Next is 80° in 2021.
Mesa’s center stands about 4,620 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,300 ft to 5,380 ft, a difference of 1,080 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Humphreys, about 13,800 ft, 12 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary pyroclastic and volcanic mudflow deposits, unit 2 (Long Valley Caldera) (rhyolite), from the Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 2×. 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.
Rhyolite. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Diorite, gabbro. Age: Triassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 252 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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.
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 Mesa reaches Owens Lake by way of Horton Creek and the Owens: about 120 river miles. Owens Lake has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
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 Mesa; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mesa has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 100° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in December. About 5 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Mesa normally reaches 65° and falls to 27°. The record high is 79°, in 1967; the record low 16°, in 1994. The most rain on this date, 0.94 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1943 from the Bishop Area threaded record (Bishop Airport, 10 miles east-southeast, 510 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
