The De Beque 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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6° on Nov. 16, 1955, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1911. Next is 7° in 1916.
De Beque’s center stands about 4,950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,880 ft to 5,710 ft, a difference of 830 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Horse Mountain, about 9,230 ft, 10 miles east.
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 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.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Paleocene to Eocene, 34 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, oil-shale. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, marlstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 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 De Beque reaches the Gulf of California by way of Little Horsethief Creek and the Colorado: about 1,190 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, Lake Powell, Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of De Beque; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
De Beque has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 13 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 10 inches of water.
On November 14 De Beque normally reaches 54° and falls to 32°. The record high is 74°, in 1934; the record low 7°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.51 in, fell in 2004.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1911 at Palisade, 17 miles south-southwest, 200 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
