Beaumont police Chief Pat Smith and his wife, Glo, exhausted the real estate listings in Beaumont, Oak Glen, and Cherry Valley when they decided to check out “that other mountain”: The Highway 243 side of the San Gorgonio Pass, rarely traveled except by those en route to Idyllwild.
The San Gorgonio Pass provides a natural corridor for plants, animals, and a forceful current of air and water
If you have been thinking you’re in an urban nexus with some fetching mountains on the fringes, what we’re about to tell you may be unsettling. Here in the greater Palm Springs area, you’re actually on an island — a puddle of urbanity surrounded by wildlands.
For decades, artists have come to the Salton Sea to put their stamp on its waters. In April, the Salton Sea History Museum in the restored North Shore Yacht Club opened its inaugural exhibition, Valley of the Ancient Lake: Works Inspired by the Salton Sea.
Every year around Easter, Tracy Albrecht looks out her window to see lights flickering on the mountainside behind her Snow Creek home. She alerts her husband: “The hikers are coming.”
Suicide and Tahquitz rocks — lies just outside the boundary of the Santa Rosa & San Jacinto Mountains National Monument.
When you pull up to the Indian Canyons tollgate, there’s plenty of time to study the posted rules (no pets, no loud radios) and watch the resident chipmunks play.
Brewster and monument volunteer Keith Bartleson set off full of optimism. It was a glorious, still morning in this primal desert wilderness so hidden and yet close to major highways.
Palm Desert and La Quinta claim an unusual concentration of urban fringe trails, a cluster seen in only a few places around the country, such as Boulder, Colo.
For many artists in the early 1900s, a trip to the Palm Springs area became an essential spiritual pilgrimage.