The Valle Vista 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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93° on Nov. 15, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 92° in 1989.
Valle Vista’s center stands about 1,820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,630 ft to 2,540 ft, a difference of 910 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is San Jacinto Peak, about 10,740 ft, 13 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Plio-Pleistocene and Pliocene loosely consolidated deposits (sandstone, conglomerate), from the Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 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 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.
Tonalite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 175 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Argillite. Age: Paleozoic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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.
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 Valle Vista reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the San Jacinto, Temescal Wash and the Santa Ana: about 100 river miles.
Often dry. About 70% 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 Valle Vista; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Valle Vista has a hot semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in August; winter nights fall to about 39° in December. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Valle Vista normally reaches 73° and falls to 45°. The record high is 91°, in 2021; the record low 30°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.29 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at San Jacinto, 6 miles northwest, 300 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
