Geography
The San Bernardino Valley was cut from fast moving water flows from mountain ranges in the north, east and south that collectively drain into the Santa Ana River basin that goes to the sea through Riverside and Orange County. The valley connects several open natural areas and beautiful mountain and valley vistas. The San Bernardino Valley is surrounded by preserves, national forests and open recreational areas. For this reason many residents travel through the area for a variety of outdoor sports, including skiing, hiking, biking and ballooning in the mountain resorts of Crestline, Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear City.
Once part of famed U.S. Route 66, it is now crossed by Interstate 15 on its way through the high desert. Interstate 10 enters the valley from Pomona and exits to the east over the San Gorgonio Pass, which enters into the low desert.
Joan Didion, in her essay "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," describes the San Bernardino Valley as "...in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies of the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and works on the nerves."
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Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Ktaadn, near which we were to pass the next day, is said to mean “Highest Land.” So much geography is there in their names.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The California fever is not likely to take us off.... There is neither romance nor glory in digging for gold after the manner of the pictures in the geography of diamond washing in Brazil.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)