The Cottonwood Heights 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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76° on Nov. 15, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1917. Next is 75° in 1941.
Cottonwood Heights’s center stands about 4,840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,390 ft to 7,620 ft, a difference of 3,230 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Twin Peaks, about 11,430 ft, 9 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lake Bonneville deposits (clay), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 3×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Middle Eocene to Early Oligocene, 30 to 42 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metamorphic. Age: Neoarchean to Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Carbonate, shale. Age: Middle Cambrian, 497 to 521 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Cottonwood Heights reaches Great Salt Lake by way of Big Cottonwood Creek and the Jordan: about 25 river miles. Great Salt 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 Cottonwood Heights; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cottonwood Heights has a dry-summer hot-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 82 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 24 inches of water.
On November 14 Cottonwood Heights normally reaches 50° and falls to 32°. The record high is 70°, in 1990; the record low 13°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 1.39 in, fell in 1955.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1917 at Cottonwood Weir, here, 150 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
