The Valdez 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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78° on Nov. 16, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1989. Next is 77° in 1989.
Valdez’s center stands about 6,500 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,360 ft to 7,290 ft, a difference of 930 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Fishers Peak, about 9,620 ft, 13 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Raton Fm (arkose, siltstone, shale), from the Late Cretaceous to Paleocene, 56 to 100 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 10×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Arkose, siltstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous to Paleocene, 56 to 100 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, shale. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 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 Valdez reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Purgatoire, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,910 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
850 miles of the trip are on the Arkansas.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Valdez; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Valdez has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 48 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 17 inches of water.
On November 14 Valdez normally reaches 56° and falls to 24°. The record high is 77°, in 2007; the record low 0°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.56 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1989 at Trinidad Lake, 8 miles east-northeast, 190 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
