12 min
Overview
In just about every account of hiking at Mt. San Jacinto, there is always a mention of John Muir’s quote that the view from San Jacinto is “the most sublime spectacle to be found anywhere on this Earth.” While it’s hard to deny that Muir was engaging in hyperbole with this statement, it is true that Mt. San Jacinto features some striking superlatives that other peaks in the lower half of the state cannot match. Mt. San Jacinto is unrivaled in terms of prominence, which characterizes the distance between a mountain’s summit and the lowest contour line surrounding it. Mt. San Jacinto has a prominence of 8,839’, which places it among the most severe in the world. As anybody who has taken the tram up to Mountain Station can attest, the mountain’s northern slope is spectacularly steep. From its base in San Gorgonio Pass to its summit, San Jacinto rises over 10,000’ in a little under 7 horizontal miles. Summit sign Mt. San Jacinto, and its sister peak, Mt. San Gorgonio, stare at each other across a startlingly deep valley formed by the San Andreas Fault. These two mountain ranges were created when the Pacific Plate, grinding northwest, rammed into a west-east bend in the North American plate. This tectonic collision contributed to the creation of the Transverse Ranges (a rare west-east oriented set of mountains) of Southern California, including the San Bernadino, San Gabriel, Santa Susana, Santa Monica, San Emigdo, and San Rafael Mountain Ranges. The same collision caused the San Jacinto Mountains to “pile up” to a remarkable height relative to the nearby coastal and desert areas. If one calculates the distance from the summit of Mt. San Jacinto to the Salton Sea’s regional-low elevation of 226’ below sea level, you have a difference of 11,060’. Mt. San Antonio (Baldy) as an island in a sea of clouds If that’s not enough to support John Muir’s hyperbole, one can also consider that San Jacinto features a subalpine wilderness in view of the Pacific Ocean. Or, there’s the fact that the views can reach southern Utah on
Trail Stats
30.1 km
1706 m
3267 m
1667 m
—
Photos
Trail photo
No caption provided.
Trail photo
No caption provided.
Trail photo
No caption provided.
Trail photo
No caption provided.
Trail photo
No caption provided.
Trail photo
No caption provided.
Trail photo
No caption provided.
Trail photo
No caption provided.
Trail photo
No caption provided.
Trail photo
No caption provided.
Trail photo
No caption provided.
the summit of mount san jacinto
the summit of mount san jacinto
Trail photo
No caption provided.
Trail photo
No caption provided.