THE NEW YORK TIMES - The steep trail near the top of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway was covered in inches of spongy fallen needles and peppered with ankle-twisting pine cones. It was also shady, which felt remarkable after the first seven miles of the grueling Cactus to Clouds hike offered little more than a brittlebush leaf’s worth of relief.
I had already hiked up 7,549 vertical feet and still had about 3,000 to go to the top of Mount San Jacinto, a granite crag towering just west of Palm Springs, Calif.
...
“The environment and life look very different down in the Colorado-Sonoran Desert than at the top of Mount San Jacinto,” said Melanie Davis, a lead field botanist with the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of California, Riverside, a few days before I hiked. But it’s the in-between zones that are the most interesting, she said. “That’s where there will be the most biodiversity.”