The Sunset 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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70° on Nov. 15, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 70° in 2024.
Sunset’s center stands about 4,540 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,270 ft to 4,780 ft, a difference of 510 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Thurston Peak, about 9,650 ft, 10 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 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.
Clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Metamorphic. Age: Neoarchean to Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Peat. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mudstone, conglomerate. Age: Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 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 Sunset reaches Great Salt Lake by way of the Weber: about 17 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 Sunset; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sunset has a dry-summer hot-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. About 16 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Sunset normally reaches 49° and falls to 31°. The record high is 69°, in 2025; the record low 19°, in 2009. The most rain on this date, 0.77 in, fell in 1950.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Ogden Hinkley Airport, 4 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
