The Caballo 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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86° on Nov. 14, 2017, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1936. Next is 84° in 1973.
Caballo’s center stands about 4,270 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,170 ft to 4,760 ft, a difference of 590 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Timber Mountain, about 7,510 ft, 5 miles east-southeast.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Conglomerate-sandstone, coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Late Miocene to Pleistocene, 0.1 to 7.2 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone, mixed-clastic. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Permian, 284 to 299 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, carbonate, evaporite. Age: Permian, 273 to 290 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Metavolcanic, metaclastic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion 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. 4 smaller units 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 Caballo reaches the Gulf of America by way of Caballo Reservoir and the Rio Grande: about 1,370 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Paz Ramirez Lake, Amistad Reservoir and Caballo Reservoir.
760 miles of the trip are on the Rio Grande.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Caballo; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Caballo has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in June; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 11 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Caballo normally reaches 69° and falls to 37°. The record high is 86°, in 2017; the record low 22°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.61 in, fell in 2003.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1936 at Caballo Dam, 6 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
