The Las Vegas 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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85° on Nov. 11, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1937. Next is 82° in 1981.
Las Vegas’s center stands about 2,350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,230 ft to 2,710 ft, a difference of 480 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is La Madre Mountain, about 8,070 ft, 11 miles west.
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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. 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.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Cambrian to Middle Devonian, 384 to 497 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 273 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Devonian to Late Devonian, 359 to 394 million years old. About 0.3 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 Las Vegas reaches the Gulf of California by way of Las Vegas Wash and the Colorado: about 480 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.
290 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
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 Las Vegas; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Las Vegas 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 Las Vegas 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, 12 miles south-southeast, 180 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
