The Rancho Mirage 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.
Rancho Mirage’s center stands about 270 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 170 ft to 2,140 ft, a difference of 1,970 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Red Tahquitz, about 8,710 ft, 14 miles west.
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 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 7 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Tonalite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 175 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 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. 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.
A raindrop that lands in Rancho Mirage reaches Salton Sea by way of the Whitewater: about 35 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 Rancho Mirage; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rancho Mirage 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 Rancho Mirage 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 northwest, 160 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
