An Awesome Summit Meeting With Nature on San Jacinto

You might call it a desert island.

San Jacinto Peak, 10,804 feet high, is a cool oasis of alpine forests, meadows and bubbling streams surrounded by the desert. It is, arguably, the best mountain in Southern California. Barren and rugged in some spots, lush and gentle in others, San Jacinto’s extremes are matched by few peaks anywhere.

It is a wild place--more than 40 square miles at the top are designated wilderness--but remarkably accessible. It’s possible to explore parts of the upper mountain in a day trip.

The mountain’s most striking feature is its northeast face. Rising from Interstate 10 just outside of Palm Springs for nearly 10,000 feet, it is one of the biggest and steepest mountainsides anywhere in the United States.

To go from bottom to top is comparable, climatologically, to going from Mexico to northern Canada--from a Sonoran desert of creosote bush and burro brush to an Arctic forest of lodgepole pines and columbines--in the space of five miles. It’s a stunning contrast found nowhere else in the country.

Near the summit, some of the ravines hold snow until June or, after a particularly heavy winter, July--when in the valley below it might be pushing 110.

Ecological Interest

“It’s unique,” says University of California ecologist Michael Hamilton, who has made a career of studying the mountain. Hamilton is the director of UC’s James Reserve, near Idyllwild, one of several dozen natural reserves set up by the university in environmentally important spots around the state.

That sense that the mountain is something special goes back centuries.

The Cahuilla Indians, who lived throughout the San Jacinto region before Europeans arrived, regarded the mountain as an abode of gods and devils. Among its denizens was an evil demon named Tahquitz, whose anger caused thunderstorms and who reputedly had a voracious appetite for human flesh.

The Spaniards, who came next, rarely ventured up the mountain except to retrieve stray cattle. They did, however, indirectly give it a name. Sometime in the 1820s, the Dominican padres from Mission San Luis Rey set up a cattle operation near what is now Hemet and named it Rancho San Jacinto.

St. Hyacinth, as the name is rendered in English, was a 13th-Century Dominican missionary from Silesia (now part of Poland) who spread the faith in China. The name was subsequently applied to the rancho’s valley, its river and, finally, the mountain at the river’s source.

When Anglos began to arrive in large numbers late in the 19th Century, they set about creating their own mythology, and once again San Jacinto took on a mystique. No one contributed more to this effort than Helen Hunt Jackson, who wrote reverently of the mountain in her 1884 romance “Ramona.”

Amid its “lofty pinnacles . . . which seem to pierce the sky,” she wrote, Ramona and her Indian lover, Alessandro, found “that infinite unspeakable sense of nearness to heaven.”

The federal government also recognized the uniqueness of San Jacinto. In 1931, two parcels of land containing more than 40 square miles were among California’s first tracts of public land to be designated as wilderness, and set aside to be maintained in its unspoiled state. A connecting tract, which includes the summit, is owned by the state and similarly protected.

Wilderness designation blocks not only roads and houses, but other human intrusions such as timber harvest and mining. The result is that most of the mountain above the 7,000-foot level has never been logged.

Delightful Sights

It is a mountain of quiet delights. Look for azaleas growing wild in many north-facing, shady, moist spots on the upper mountain. Be in the right spot at the right time of summer and a whole hillside of lupine will be in bloom. On a dirt road up Dark Canyon on the west side of the mountain is the only stand of dogwood in the San Jacinto Range.

Walk a mile or so south from the summit, on a broad plateau more than 10,000 feet high, to a grove of splendidly gnarled lodgepole pines. Some of them are more than 1,000 years old--the oldest known specimens of this widely distributed tree.

Without even leaving your car, explore the Garner Valley southeast of Idyllwild along California 74.

“It reminds you of Colorado,” UC scientist Hamilton says. And if the valley conjures up images of Ben Cartwright and the boys, well, it’s no accident. Many of the outdoor scenes of the “Bonanza” television show were shot in the Garner Valley, as were scenes from more than a few movie Westerns.

In addition to being beautiful, the valley is the only home, Hamilton says, for a half-dozen species of plants. Look, for example, in the meadows for a small sunflower-like plant called Ziegler’s tidytips. It is found nowhere else.

Only Home on Earth

Another plant unique to San Jacinto is a small perennial called Tahquitz rockrose. Its only home on Earth is in the crevices on Lily Rock, a striking crag close to Idyllwild that is popular with rock climbers. And Hidden Lake, a small pool near the top of the Palm Springs tramway that dries up every year by late summer, is the only place to find a small wildflower called the Hidden Lake blue curl.

San Jacinto is a bird watcher’s paradise as well. Golden eagles soar amid the crags year-round. Bald eagles winter around Lake Hemet. Threatened elsewhere by logging, spotted owls thrive in the San Jacinto Range. Whippoorwills, common in the Eastern woods but rare in California, are here as well.

The view from the peak is a dazzler. Even when it’s hazy, you can look down the steep north face to San Gorgonio Pass, and across to the round, gray hump of San Gorgonio Mountain--11,499 feet, and the highest point in the state south of the Sierra Nevada--20 miles away. To the east are Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley.

In the distance to the southeast is the Salton Sea; northeast is the sprawling desert country of Joshua Tree National Monument. A few days a year, it’s clear enough to see the L.A. Basin, the Pacific and even Catalina.