THE 



NATURE-STUDY REVIEW 



— : 



Vol. 16 January, 1920 No. 1 



A Journey to the Salton Sea 



Philip A. Munz, Ph.D. 

 Professor of Botany, Pomona College, California. 



If you will turn your atlas to a map of southern California, you 

 will see in the extreme southern and eastern corner of Los Angeles 

 County the town of Claremont. Here is situated Pomona College, 

 and it was from here in March 191 9, that several members of the 

 Botany Department of the College started early on a Tuesday 

 morning for a spring vacation on the Colorado Desert. 



With plant presses on the front and side of the machine, with 

 the other side built up to carry food and camping equipment, and 

 with a huge roll of bedding under one of the plant presses, our 

 little Ford, that trusty desert car, took on at once that air of 

 indifference to appearances, which so many cars of the southwest 

 have, especially those that are accustomed to travel on the desert, 

 The desert with its dry scorching winds and its intense beating light, 

 soon takes away all elegance from a machine sub j ected to its fierce sun. 



We left Claremont early in the morning and drove east through 

 thirty miles of orange groves and grain fields to San Bernardino 

 for breakfast. From there the road we followed was south-east to 

 Redlands, then we began the climb through the chaparral with its 

 beautiful wild lilac, the flower clusters of which look for all the 

 world like those of the lilac, but which belongs to the same genus 

 as does the New Jersey tea, Ceanoihus. We found also a very 

 beautiful lousewort much resembling the Pedicularis canadensis of 

 Eastern woods and fittingly called P. densifiorus . The road soon 

 left the chaparral and led us to the apricot and apple orchards of 

 Beaumont and Banning in Riverside county; then over the San 

 Gorgonio Pass which separates the desert from the fertile valleys 

 of the Pacific slope. 



This pass has to the north of it, San Bernardino Mountain 

 (11,600 feet), and to the south, San Jacinto Peak (10,987 feet); 

 both peaks white with snow and visible from the desert below. 



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