Palm Springs, CA

This post is one of a series about our trip to Arizona and California spanning the 2018/2019 New Year’s holiday. For an overview of our trip and links to other posts, please see 2018/2019 Western Trip.

We spent some time in Palm Springs both before and after we visited the Salton Sea area (please see posts Salton Sea & North Shore and Bombay Beach). The downtown areas were vibrant but the residential areas we drove through were quiet. There is an Aerial Tramway which travels more than two miles along the cliffs of Chino Canyon to the Mt. San Jacinto State Park but at the last minute we didn’t ride it because of our limited time and the local stormy weather – there is a photo of a storm in the Additional Images section below.

The featured image and the other residential area images in the Additional Images section below were taken near the western edge of Palm Springs where the houses back up to the mountains. There are two images from North Rose Avenue  and three of the same property at W. Stevens Rd. and Camino Norte. There are also images of the many wind turbines near Palm Springs. One of those was taken from Keys View in Joshua Tree National Park.

About Palm Springs

Palm Springs is a desert resort city in Riverside County, California, within the Colorado Desert’s Coachella Valley. It is the largest city in Riverside County by land area. Palm Springs is a retirement location as well as a winter snowbird destination so between November and March the city’s population triples compared to the remainder of the year

The city became a fashionable resort in the 1900s when health tourists arrived with conditions that required dry heat. It became popular with movie stars in the 1930s and movie star neighborhoods were established. There have been hundreds of notable residents – Please see the links to Palm Springs in the Additional Information section below.

History suggests that Palm Springs architecture became the model for mass-produced suburban housing, especially in the Southwest. This “Desert Modern” style was a high-end architectural style featuring open-design plans, wall-to-wall carpeting, air-conditioning, swimming pools, and very large windows.

Palm Springs Wind Farms

There are multiple wind farms in the Palm Springs area with thousands of wind turbines – they parallel I10 from north of Palm Springs west through the San Gorgonio Pass. The San Gorgonio Pass is a transitional zone from a Mediterranean climate west of the pass, to a Desert climate east of the pass which makes the pass area one of the windiest places in the United States. There is a distant photograph of this area in our post about Keys View in Joshua Tree National Park and I estimated the winds were 60 to 70 MPH when we were at Keys View.

Additional Information

Palm Springs History: Palm Springs

Palm Springs: Wikipedia

Palm Springs Wind Turbines: Palm Springs

Additional Images

Technical Data