The Twentynine Palms 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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22° on Nov. 17, 1958, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1935. Next is 25° in 1938.
Twentynine Palms’s center stands about 1,990 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,780 ft to 3,820 ft, a difference of 2,040 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Quail Mountain, about 5,790 ft, 14 miles 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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 0.3 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 Twentynine Palms reaches the desert basins of the Mojave by way of Dog Wash: about 20 river miles. The desert basins of the Mojave has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Often dry. About 90% 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 Twentynine Palms; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Twentynine Palms has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 104° in July; winter nights fall to about 40° in December. About 4 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Twentynine Palms normally reaches 72° and falls to 48°. The record high is 93°, in 1942; the record low 27°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.16 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1935 at Twentynine Palms, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
