Pinyon Flats — the high desert bench where the road levels into open pinyon-juniper woodland, the middle rung of the great ecological ladder this drive climbs from desert to alpine forest.
The road's leveled off a bit and the country's opened up around you — welcome to Pinyon Flats. Look at the trees: those low, rounded, dark-green ones scattered across the slopes are pinyon pines and junipers, and this open, high-desert woodland is a whole different world from the bare rock and creosote you left down below.
This is a good place to notice what this drive really is — it's a ladder through life zones. Botanists figured out over a century ago that as you climb a mountain, the plant communities change in bands, almost like you're driving north toward Canada, because it gets cooler and wetter as you go up. You started this morning in Sonoran desert — creosote, cactus, fan palms. You've climbed up through a belt of chaparral and scrub. Now you're in the pinyon-juniper zone, right here at Pinyon Flats. And keep climbing and you'll pass into tall yellow-pine forest up around Idyllwild, cool and green and smelling of vanilla bark. Five different worlds, stacked one on top of the other up the side of one mountain — and you're driving straight up through all of them. Those pinyon pines, by the way, gave the Cahuilla one of their most precious foods: the fat, rich pine nut, gathered up here every fall. Roll on — the pines are getting taller.
Photo: San Bernardino Nat'l Forest · Public domain
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