The Schurz 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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78° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1972. Next is 74° in 1995.
Schurz’s center stands about 4,140 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,120 ft to 5,530 ft, a difference of 1,410 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Mountain, about 9,180 ft, 13 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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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.
Diorite, hypabyssal-andesite, granodiorite. Age: Jurassic to Miocene, 5.3 to 202 million years old. About 0.6 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 Schurz reaches Walker Lake by way of the Walker: about 19 river miles. Walker Lake has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Schurz; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Schurz has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in December. About 5 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Schurz normally reaches 58° and falls to 20°. The record high is 73°, in 1995; the record low 5°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.02 in, fell in 1987.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1972 at Wabuska 6 SE, 17 miles west-northwest, 160 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
