Not far from Indio’s date farms, the Mecca Hills Wilderness shelters a maze of pastel-hued canyons formed by movement along the San Andreas Fault. The Pacific Plate and the North American Plate collide here—sometimes violently—pushing up layers of eroded rock that have been sculpted…
Olancha artist Jael Hoffmann doesn’t just live in the desert, she makes the desert come to life. Thousands of drivers have slammed on the brakes and pulled off US 395 with their first glimpse at Hoffmann’s thought-provoking art, which populates the western roadside near…
Great art often makes us uncomfortable. It tells us that the status quo is not necessarily okay and that the world is unstable and problematic. In an age of Photoshopped reality and Instagram shams, art sometimes make us look at what we don’t want…
With a swipe of the Presidential pen, a huge swath of California desert was granted national monument status in 2016, protecting 1.8 million acres of land for future generations. President Barack Obama’s three new national monuments—Sand to Snow, Mojave Trails, and Castle Mountains—form a…
A whimsical maze of rounded granitic boulders, golden-hued arches, and badland gullies made Lone Pine’s Alabama Hills an ideal backdrop for Hollywood westerns. Filmmakers from the early 20th century loved the way the smooth, weathered boulder piles struck a contrasting pose against a background…
Bakersfield is smack in the middle of the flat-as-a-pancake San Joaquin Valley. If you’re familiar with the city, you probably don’t think of it as a place for hiking and nature study. But that image will change when you pull into the parking lot…