Leaving the Basin: Interstate Ten Eastbound

You are leaving one of the largest continuous metropolitan areas on earth. Los Angeles does not have a clear edge, it has a gradient, a slow thinning of signal lights and strip malls and density that goes on for thirty miles before you are actually out of it. Interstate Ten is the old road east.

Before the freeway, this corridor carried US Route Ninety-Nine, with US Route Sixty-Six running a few miles to the north, the last urban corridor before the desert. The basin you are driving out of was formed by the intersection of three fault systems, which is why it sits ringed by mountains on three sides: the San Gabriels to the north, the San Bernardinos to the east, the Santa Anas closing the gap to the south. The Tongva people, also known as the Gabrielino, lived in this basin for thousands of years before Spanish missionaries arrived in seventeen seventy-one and fundamentally reorganized the landscape and the population.

Their descendants are still here. The Gabrieleno-Tongva Tribe holds state recognition but not federal recognition, a legal distinction that affects land rights, sovereignty, and resources in very concrete ways. You will see the San Bernardino Mountains rising to your left, snow-capped in winter, brown and enormous in summer.

The elevation change from the valley floor to the summit of San Gorgonio, the highest peak in Southern California, is over ten thousand feet. You will not go over that mountain. The road bends south through the San Gorgonio Pass, the lowest gap through the Transverse Ranges.

Wind turbines begin about thirty miles out. They are not decorative. The pass is one of the most powerful wind corridors in California, a pressure valve between the hot interior and the coast.

You will feel it if your windows are down. The basin you are leaving took a century to fill. It may take another century to leave behind.