The Gila Hot Springs 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
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Showers likely
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10° on Nov. 13, 2018, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1957. Next is 11° in 1970.
Gila Hot Springs’s center stands about 5,630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,560 ft to 6,860 ft, a difference of 1,300 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Black Mountain, about 9,270 ft, 13 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Gila Group, Formation, or Conglomerate (conglomerate-sandstone, volcanic), from the Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 0.1 to 28 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 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, volcanic. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 0.1 to 28 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Basaltic-andesite, andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Early Miocene, 22 to 26 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Rhyolite. Age: Early Oligocene to Late Oligocene, 24 to 29 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Rhyolite. Age: Early Oligocene to Late Oligocene, 24 to 30 million years old. About 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 Gila Hot Springs reaches the Gulf of California by way of the West Fork Gila, the Gila and the Colorado: about 730 river miles.
610 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 40% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
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 Gila Hot Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gila Hot Springs has a oceanic climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in June; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 6 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 15 inches of water.
On November 14 Gila Hot Springs normally reaches 65° and falls to 24°. The record high is 81°, in 1967; the record low 12°, in 2024. The most rain on this date, 0.38 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1957 at Gila Hot Springs, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
