I cancelled any plans for a ride this week due to what looked like rainy weather all week. It so happens that its clear and sunny today even though it rained a lot the last day or so. I felt OK about cancelling anyway since next week I am heading out for a ride into Death Valley for a few days. I’ve been to Death Valley a number of times, but its been a while and it just seemed like a nice short trip to take that went beyond our regular day trips and yet wasn’t so involved as to require a lot of planning. I’m already remembering that no motorcycle trip, no matter how simple it may seem is ever without some dilemmas, and sure enough, even this little jaunt has had its issues. One of the great things about California is the diversity of topography. There are hills and valleys and mountains and deserts everywhere. The human population of the state tends to cluster around certain places, where the cities have grown, but lots of the rest of the state is wide open, probably because of that diversity of topography. The most notable of these dispersion anomalies is the LA Basin, and it is a bitch to ride around.
Los Angeles sits in a remarkably complex and varied landscape for such a large urban area. Far from being the flat, featureless sprawl it’s often imagined as, the city is shaped by a dramatic interplay of mountains, valleys, coastal plains, and river systems.
The Basin and surrounding ranges constitute the core of the metro area that occupies the Los Angeles Basin. It’s a broad coastal plain that slopes gently from the mountains toward the Pacific. This basin is bounded on the north and east by the Santa Monica Mountains, which form a prominent east-west spine running through the city itself — an unusual feature, since most North American mountain ranges run north-south. These mountains effectively divide the city between the coastal communities (Malibu, Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica) and the San Fernando Valley to the north. Further north and east, the San Gabriel Mountains rise dramatically. These are genuinely rugged mountains, with peaks exceeding 10,000 feet (Mt. San Antonio / “Mt. Baldy” reaches 10,064 ft). They form a stark wall behind the eastern San Gabriel Valley communities. The Santa Susana Mountains and Simi Hills bound the western edge of the San Fernando Valley. The San Fernando Valley lies north of the Santa Monicas and is a broad, flat alluvial valley. It was once an agricultural region, but is now heavily suburbanized. It sits at roughly 700–1,000 feet elevation and has its own distinct climate as a result (hotter summers, cooler winters than the basin).
The region east of Los Angeles (the area that interest me mostly at the moment since I have to fashion a ride through it) is one of the more geographically fascinating transitions in the American West. It moves from the densely urbanized basin into increasingly dramatic and eventually extreme landscapes. You are in nasty city freeway traffic or you are in the rugged hills with few road options (even fewer when mountain roads get closed…which happens often). The Inland Empire (San Bernardino and Riverside Counties) are immediately east of LA County. The urban sprawl of LA Basin continues through the San Gabriel Valley and transitions into the Inland Empire. The terrain here is still relatively basin-like with broad alluvial fans spreading out from the mountain fronts, but the scale changes. The San Bernardino Valley is wider and more open than the LA Basin, sitting at slightly higher elevations (around 1,000–1,200 feet near San Bernardino and Riverside). The San Gabriel Mountains continue eastward and connect with the San Bernardino Mountains, which are actually a distinct and higher range. San Gorgonio Mountain (near Big Bear Lake) at 11,503 feet is the highest peak in Southern California, and the San Bernardino range as a whole is more massive and sustained in its elevation than the San Gabriels. These ranges together form a formidable east-west barrier and are a challenge to navigate around.
The San Gorgonio Pass is one of the most significant geographic features in the region. The pass drops to around 1,600 feet between the San Bernardino Mountains to the north and the San Jacinto Mountains to the south, and the San Jacintos (the gateway to Palm Springs) are extraordinary. San Jacinto Peak rises to 10,834 feet, but what makes it remarkable is the escarpment. From the desert floor near Palm Springs, the west face of San Jacinto rises nearly 10,000 feet in roughly 5 miles — one of the steepest mountain faces in the contiguous United States. The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway exploits this directly. The pass itself acts as a massive natural wind tunnel, which is why the area around Palm Springs is blanketed with wind turbines. This is where you get the transition to desert.
East of the pass, the landscape changes abruptly and dramatically. You drop into the Coachella Valley, which is below sea level in places near the Salton Sea (surface elevation around -230 feet). This is the northern extension of the Sonoran Desert, and the transition from the mountain wall to the desert floor happens with striking speed. Palm Springs sits at the edge of this. You can be in alpine forest on the tram and back in 100-degree desert heat within minutes. This is where you start the Mojave Desert.
North and northeast of the San Bernardino Mountains, the terrain opens into the Mojave Desert, a high desert, with most of it sitting between 2,000 and 4,000 feet elevation, notably higher than the Sonoran Desert to the south. The Mojave is characterized by broad flat valleys separated by isolated mountain ranges, dry lake beds (playas), and lava fields. Victorville and Barstow sit in the main corridor through it (known to Angelenos as the road to Vegas). The geology here shifts as well. You’re moving onto the Basin and Range province, where the crust has been stretched and faulted into a series of parallel grabens and horsts (down-dropped valleys and uplifted ranges), a fundamentally different tectonic regime than the compressed, thrust-faulted terrain of the LA area.
Continuing northeast, this Basin and Range structure produces its most extreme expression in Death Valley, where Badwater Basin sits at -282 feet, the lowest point in North America. The adjacent Panamint Range rises to over 11,000 feet — so within roughly 15 miles you have one of the most extreme elevation differentials on the continent. What’s striking about this eastward transect is how compressed the transitions are. Within roughly 150 miles from downtown LA you go from ocean-influenced coastal basin to urbanized alluvial plain to alpine peaks over 11,000 feet to below-sea-level desert. Few places on earth pack that much topographic and climatic variation into such a short horizontal distance, and it’s a direct product of the intense tectonic activity that built and continues to reshape the entire region.
How that translates into an interesting motorcycle ride is the challenge. Our first destination will be Furnace Creek, at the heart of Death Valley. That means we will ride up and into the San Jacinto Mountains and skirt the San Bernardino Range to the east through the Yucca Valley towards Barstow. From there we will cross the Mojave as best the roads allow to Furnace Creek. Our second day will allow us to work through Death Valley in 70 degree comfort heading towards the base of the High Sierras to the west. That will leave us at the base of the Sierras on historic Rt. 395, which we will take south through Ridgecrest, Boron and the western fringe of the Mojave to Victorville and Hesperia. I had planned to stay at Lake Arrowhead, but weather looks iffy at best, so we will stay in Hesperia and venture up the hill if the weather allows before we wiggle our way back down to Yucaipa and head back up the San Jacinto incline to Idyllwild before heading home. This three-day jaunt will take us through the largest portion of the Mojave, saving the most remote parts to the northeast for our ride later in the spring as we head up towards Utah. There is something special about the Mojave to me…maybe its the proximity to all the urban sprawl here in Socal and maybe its just that like all deserts…its just so clean as Lawrence of Arabia famously said.