The San Gorgonio Pass – corridor of life

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If you live in Southern California, chances are you’ve driven right through it. Even if you live elsewhere in the U.S. there is still a very good chance that you’ve glimpsed it in the movies.  It is a quintessential slice of our American landscape, yet it is rarely named and quite often overlooked.  I am speaking of the San Gorgonio Pass –  gateway to Southern California.

Although its actual summit is at Beaumont, 2,600 feet above sea level, the heart of the pass scoops through Cabazon, where the valley gap is narrowest and both the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains soar nearly 9,000 feet upward to the north and south respectively.  This makes the San Gorgonio Pass one of the deepest mountain passes in the 48 contiguous states and an absolutely critical route for human transportation.   There is simply no getting around it.  

Old Time Locomotive Traversing San Gorgonio Pass

But it is also a critical wildlife habitat and corridor.  The ongoing exchange of plants and animals through this passage is a crucial and vastly unappreciated process, one which ensures diversity among both desert and coastal species.  This is the reason why it is so important to maintain wildlife culverts under freeway and railway lines.  Roads and rails have impacted the ecosystem in the pass for well over a century, as evidenced by our postcard of interest.  This image comes to us courtesy of Agua Caliente Cultural Museum.

Here we have an old-time locomotive steaming through a typical pass vista.  See the snow-dusted peaks, those grassy foothills, the parched desert floor?  This progression is part of our continental consciousness.  It is a storybook journey in our minds.  Whether you’ve been there or not, you just know it goes to a special place.  The locomotive is chugging through a magical land!  

What makes the San Gorgonio Pass so unique, enigmatic and improbable?  Well, like the geologically surreal Cajon Pass to the northwest, San Gorgonio was created by the San Andreas fault.  The pass is in fact a long slip running parallel to the fault.  Remember, we are talking about the edge of the North American plate here.  If SoCal were to slide off into the Pacific Ocean, this is where it would happen.

I ask you to stop there sometime.  I know you are on the way to someplace else, still take a moment, pull off at Whitewater Canyon and soak in the unusual energy.  Of course, there’s a slew of giant spinning windmills (as seen in a thousand car commercials), but look closely at the sifting landscape, sloping eastward to the Coachella Valley.  Feel the wind whipping past you, the power of life itself flowing down this timeless track.  Know that the crust below you is being subducted into the molten mantle.  You and all the life around you stand on a vital seam of our living planet.

If you cannot get there personally, please enjoy the postcard or do a little more research on your own. And by all means, read my new novel Desert Gold, which features the landscapes mentioned in this blog.  Thank you for joining me in rediscovering a wonderful Hidden Treasure of Southern California: the San Gorgonio Pass.

Kyle Samper