The Boulder City 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.
85° on Nov. 11, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1937. Next is 82° in 1981.
Boulder City’s center stands about 1,920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,710 ft to 2,510 ft, a difference of 800 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Black Mountain, about 5,040 ft, 10 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium, undifferentiated (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Andesite, dacite. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Gneiss, schist. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 0.5 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.
Boulder City has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 105° in July; winter nights fall to about 40° in December. About 4 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Boulder City normally reaches 68° and falls to 48°. The record high is 81°, in 1995; the record low 22°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 0.23 in, fell in 1965.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1937 from the Las Vegas Area threaded record (Harry Reid International Airport, 21 miles northwest, 260 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.