Here's a way to think about the drive you're making that I love. More than a hundred years ago, a naturalist named C. Hart Merriam came out to these very mountains of Southern California to work out one of the big ideas of American nature study: that climbing a mountain is like traveling north toward the pole. Every thousand feet you go up, it gets cooler, much like going hundreds of miles north — and the plants and animals change to match, in distinct bands he called life zones.
And this road is about the finest place in the country to see that idea in action, because you drive through nearly all of them, bottom to top, in a single hour. Down at the palms, that's the Lower Sonoran zone — the hot desert. Climbing up through the scrub, you passed into the Upper Sonoran, the chaparral and pinyon. Up around Idyllwild you're in the Transition zone, the tall yellow pines. And the very top of San Jacinto Peak, high above you, reaches up into cold subalpine forest, the kind of country you'd otherwise have to drive to Oregon or Canada to find. So when you climb from Palm Desert to these peaks, in terms of the plants and the climate, you really are making a journey the rough equivalent of driving from Mexico to Canada — except you're doing it straight up, in an afternoon, on one mountain road. Not a bad day's travel.
Photo: Z3lvs · CC0
