Saturday I went back in to Joshua Tree National Park to visit areas of the Park I didn’t make it to on Friday. Among them was an overlook called Keys View, in the Little San Bernardo Mountains in the west side of the Park. From there, at an elevation of 5,458 feet, I could look southwest across the San Andreas Fault and see many towns in the Coachella Valley.
Here is a 7-shot, left-to-right panorama from the overlook at Keys View:
Palm Springs is located directly under the tallest mountain you can in the distance (Mt. San Jacinto, 10,831 feet elevation) in the 5th photo above. Looking right-to-left you can see where Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indio and Coachella are.
It was hazy, a combination of local smog in those various cities, smog from nearby Los Angeles which gets channeled down this direction, and two small wildfires currently burning south of Indio. Nevertheless, is was a spectacular view.