The Windmills of San Gorgonio Pass
Near Palm Springs, California
Driving into the Coachella Valley from the west, you pass through a forest of a different kind, thousands of white wind turbines marching across the San Gorgonio Pass. There is a reason they cluster here. The pass is a narrow gap between two of the tallest mountains in Southern California, and hot desert air rushing to fill the cooler coastal side turns it into one of the windiest places in the United States, almost every single day.
The wind farm rose in the early nineteen eighties, one of the first large scale wind projects in America, spurred by federal tax incentives and California energy policy. Developers rushed in, and by nineteen eighty-seven fourteen different operators had installed more than four thousand two hundred turbines in the pass. Many of the early machines were small and imported from Denmark, then the world leader in wind technology.
Since then the field has been thinned and modernized. Old turbines are torn down and replaced with far fewer, far larger ones, so that today there are only a fraction of that peak number, generating much more power than the crowded early forest ever did. Locals once grumbled that the machines cluttered their views.
Over time many came to see them as a landmark in their own right, the mechanical gateway that tells you the desert resorts are near.
