The Paradise Valley 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 cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Showers likely; cooler
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Chance of showers
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76° on Nov. 12, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1911. Next is 74° in 1934.
Paradise Valley’s center stands about 4,530 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,460 ft to 5,120 ft, a difference of 660 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Granite Peak, about 9,660 ft, 12 miles north-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 8 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: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clastic. Age: Late Triassic to Middle Jurassic, 164 to 227 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Andesite, dacite. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Rhyolite, hypabyssal-quartz-latite, dacite. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million 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. 2 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 Paradise Valley reaches the Great Basin by way of Big Cottonwood Creek, the Little Humboldt, Pioneer Slough and the Humboldt: about 190 river miles. The Great Basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
150 miles of the trip are on the Humboldt.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Paradise Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Paradise Valley has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in December. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 10 inches of water.
On November 14 Paradise Valley normally reaches 53° and falls to 24°. The record high is 73°, in 1999; the record low 4°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.90 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1911 at Orovada 3 W, 17 miles west-northwest, 330 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
