The Steepest Wall in the West

Let me tell you why this climb is so steep and so sudden — because it's one of the most dramatic pieces of geology in the country, and you're driving right up the face of it. This whole range, the San Jacinto Mountains, is a gigantic block of granite that the earth has shoved straight up along a fault, tilted like a trapdoor. And the numbers are staggering: the top of it, San Jacinto Peak, stands ten thousand eight hundred feet above the sea — and the desert floor you just left is barely two hundred feet up. So in just a few horizontal miles, the land leaps up more than ten thousand feet, almost straight into the sky.

That makes the north face of San Jacinto one of the steepest, tallest mountain escarpments in the entire lower forty-eight states — a sheer rise nearly two miles high. It's the reason the desert down there is so hot and dry, too: these mountains stand like a great wall, wringing the rain out of the ocean air before it can ever reach the far side. Green and wet up here where you're headed; parched desert down there where you began — and the difference is this one enormous tilted block of rock you're driving up and over. The San Andreas and San Jacinto faults, some of the most active on Earth, run right along the foot of these mountains. You're driving up the edge of a living, rising thing.