The Quartz Hill 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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87° on Nov. 15, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is 84° in 2007.
Quartz Hill’s center stands about 2,470 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,340 ft to 3,450 ft, a difference of 1,110 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount McDill, about 5,160 ft, 7 miles south-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 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. 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 15 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Late Cretaceous to Eocene, 34 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene, 19 to 23 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. 1 smaller unit 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.
Rain that falls on Quartz Hill runs straight into the desert basins of Owens Valley and Death Valley. The desert basins of Owens Valley and Death Valley 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 Quartz Hill; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Quartz Hill has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in December. About 7 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Quartz Hill normally reaches 68° and falls to 35°. The record high is 83°, in 2021; the record low 22°, in 2012. The most rain on this date, 0.41 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 from the Lancaster Area threaded record (Lancaster, 6 miles north, 130 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
