San Jacinto Valley Viewpoint

A roadside pullout on the Highway 74 grade west of Mountain Center, where the road begins its winding descent through the San Jacinto River canyon. From here, the San Jacinto Valley opens up in the distance — and with it, your first glimpse of Los Angeles's outer commuter belt. The valley belongs to the Inland Empire, the most densely populated part of Riverside County, stretching deep into neighboring San Bernardino County.

Geographically, you're looking at the Perris Block of the northern Peninsular Ranges: a patchwork of flat valley floors separated by low hill chains, home to most of Riverside County's population. The Inland Empire made this one of California's fastest-growing counties from 1960 to 2010 — almost nowhere in the country was more built in the decade after the millennium, and the county passed the one-million mark back in 1990. Jobs were scarce at first, but after the 2008 recession, waves of commuters working in Los Angeles and San Diego counties moved here for dramatically cheaper living costs and bargain land prices. The crisis hit hard here too: no county in America saw more home foreclosures. And in a darker statistic, roughly one in six US death sentences is handed down in Riverside County — despite it holding just 1% of the national population.