Southern California Geography

The land we call Southern California is an island, ecologically isolated from the rest of the continent by a combination of geographic and climatic factors. Helen Hunt Jackson once said of Southern California: "It's an island on the land." Carey McWilliams popularized the phrase in his definitive history of the region, Southern California: An Island on the Land. The land's island nature is apparent when you enter it from the north or east. When you round Point Conception and the north-south orientation of California becomes east-west, it is obvious that you have entered a unique geographical province. If you come to Southern California from the east through Cajon Pass or San Gorgonio Pass, the change is immediately evident. Light is softer, the climate more temperate.

The land includes seven counties: Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego. Usually, only those parts of San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego Counties "west of the mountains" are in Southern California, but a case can be made for including all of them and adding Imperial County as well.  

Some boosters insist Southern California's northern boundary is San Luis Obispo or even the Monterey County line, but geographically and ecologically it's at Point Conception. Southern California is the land south of the Transverse Range, which knifes across California toward the Pacific, just north of Santa Barbara.

Southern California is protected from the Mojave Desert by the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountain Ranges on the east and walled off from the San Joaquin Valley by other Transverse Ranges. The lowlands are covered with alluvial fans formed by earth washed down from the mountains. The coastal plain is "watered" by some of the driest rivers in the west: the Los Angeles, Mojave, San Gabriel and Santa Ana. Mark Twain may have been joking about them when he said he'd fallen into a California river and "come out all dusty."

Compass directions can be confusing to both newcomers and old-timers. "Up the coast" in other parts of the world is usually taken to mean north, but it's not north in Southern California. To travel north from L.A., you head directly into the Mojave Desert, crossing east-west trending mountains in the process. If you traveled a straight line, as the crow flies, from San Bernardino to Santa Barbara, you would travel 137 miles west and only 27 miles north.

Carey McWilliams has suggested that "The analyst of California is like a navigator who is trying to chart a course in a storm: the instruments will not work; the landmarks are lost; and the maps make little sense."
California may be geographically cockeyed and Southern California even more so, but we day hikers before heading for the hills, ought to get our bearings. Spend some time with a good map and instead of orienting yourself by freeways, use mountains and valleys as landmarks. Orienting yourself to Southern California isn't that difficult, particularly of you’re aware of the east-west orientation of a good portion of the region.

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