San Gorgonio: The Highest and the Least Known

The highest point in Southern California is not the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles, though you can see those from the freeway and they are impressive. It is not in the Santa Monica Mountains or the Santa Ana range. It is here, in the San Bernardino Mountains: Mount San Gorgonio, at eleven thousand five hundred and three feet above sea level.

For comparison: eleven thousand five hundred and three feet is higher than the tallest peak in the entire Appalachian mountain chain, from Maine to Georgia. It is higher than any peak in the Sierra Nevada south of the High Sierra. It is the highest summit in a seven-hundred-mile stretch between the High Sierra and the southern end of the range.

Most Southern Californians cannot name it.

The San Gorgonio Wilderness surrounds the summit, a federally designated wilderness area that requires a permit to enter during peak season. It is one of the least crowded major wilderness areas in Southern California, partly because it is genuinely difficult, with vertical gains of more than five thousand feet from most trailheads, and partly because it lacks the marketing of more famous California wilderness destinations. There are no Instagram-famous lakes here, no famous rock formations with celebrity names. It is just a very large, very cold mountain above a logistics corridor.

The Serrano people, whose mountain homeland this was before an eighteen sixty-seven massacre at Chimney Rock drove the survivors down out of the mountains, called the range Yuhaaviatam, People of the Pines. The pines are still there, at treeline. The summit above them is wind and talus and silence. Most of what is crowded in Southern California reaches its limit well below here.