The Mesquite 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. 14, 1988, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1979. Next is 84° in 1989.
Mesquite’s center stands about 1,610 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,540 ft to 2,000 ft, a difference of 460 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Virgin Peak, about 7,980 ft, 14 miles south.
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 3 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.
Sedimentary, volcanic. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Gneiss, schist. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion 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 Mesquite reaches the Gulf of California by way of Pulsipher Wash, the Virgin and the Colorado: about 520 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 Mesquite; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mesquite has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 106° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in December. About 6 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1979 at Bunkerville, 4 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
