The Barstow 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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63° on Nov. 15, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1899. Next is 59° in 2007.
Barstow’s center stands about 1,370 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,290 ft to 2,950 ft, a difference of 1,660 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is King Mountain, about 6,610 ft, 14 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Glacial drift, undivided (sand, gravel), 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.
Granite. Age: Precambrian to Eocene. About 6 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, gravel. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Slate, argillite. Age: Early Ordovician to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Early Cambrian to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Early Paleocene to Middle Miocene, 12 to 66 million years old. About 0.5 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 Barstow reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the Columbia: about 700 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
420 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Barstow; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Barstow has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in August; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 47 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Barstow normally reaches 41° and falls to 28°. The record high is 58°, in 2016; the record low 8°, in 1955. The most rain on this date, 0.85 in, fell in 1966.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1899 at Northport, 16 miles east-northeast, 130 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
