As you come down the last of the mountain toward Banning, look ahead into that deep gap between the ranges — the San Gorgonio Pass — and notice the wind. You'll feel it push the car; you'll see those thousands of white turbines turning on the hills. There's a reason they put them here: this is one of the windiest places in all of California, and one of the great wind-energy fields in the country.
Here's why it blows so hard. On one side of this pass is the cool, moist air of the Los Angeles basin and the coast; on the other side is the hot, dry desert, which heats up and rises, especially on summer afternoons, and pulls that ocean air in behind it. And all that moving air gets funneled through this one narrow gap between two of the tallest mountains in the region — San Gorgonio to the north, San Jacinto to the south, each of them over ten or eleven thousand feet, standing barely a dozen miles apart with only this slot between them. Squeeze all that wind through a gap that tight and it comes howling out the far end. People have harnessed it since the nineteen-eighties; you're looking at one of the first big wind farms ever built in America. So the same geography that gave you this whole dramatic drive — these two giant mountains standing so close together — is exactly what makes the wind blow here. It's all connected. Almost down now.
Photo: Spiglanin · CC BY 4.0
