Keys View

Park in the lot, and if I cut out when you shut the car off, tap play. The paved path from here is a steep quarter-mile loop, about thirty minutes, with a vault toilet near the upper lot. Five thousand one hundred eighty-five feet. This is the highest road in the park, and in front of you the ground falls nearly a mile into the Coachella Valley. Bill Keys opened the way up here himself, with a plow and two horses, back when they called it Salton View. In nineteen forty-one, John C. Merriam of the Carnegie Institute called this panorama one of the outstanding views of the world. Read it left to right. The Salton Sea is on the far left, the Santa Rosa Mountains stand behind Indio, San Jacinto rises behind Palm Springs, and further right is San Gorgonio, more than eleven thousand five hundred feet. Don't look for a crack. The San Andreas Fault runs through that valley, and down there it splits into two branches, the Banning and the Mission Creek. Read it from what it left, the Indio Hills squeezed up between the branches, and a line of palm oases. I'll be honest about the air. Pollution cuts the average view from a hundred sixty miles to a hundred, and to fifty-five on a bad day. On a very clear day you might pick out Signal Mountain in Mexico, ninety miles south, but that has become rare. In summer, mind the bees. They've taken to drinking condensation from car air conditioners up here, and in two thousand eleven one car had to be towed from this overlook after a swarm moved in. Now find those two big peaks again. Storms off the Pacific rise against San Jacinto and San Gorgonio and drop their rain there, and the air arrives here wrung out. You're looking at the wall that keeps the rain away.