“Coulter pine cones pop as they hit Glo Smith’s deck. Several thousand feet below, windmills spin madly. All this wind is fine with Smith. She greets guests with bubble wands and invites them to send bubbles sailing into one of the deepest passes in the lower 48.
“I think of the wind as a kind of music,” she says. In fact, the original owner of her John Lautner-designed residence high up Highway 243 in the San Gorgonio Pass named the house “Windsong.”
The pass — stretching from Snow Creek to Redlands — encompasses the cherry orchards of Cherry Valley; Morongo Band of Mission Indians Reservation; and One Horse Spring near Cabazon, where Willie Boy rested in 1909 while outrunning one of the most determined posses in Western history. On both sides of the pass, mountains rise abruptly 9,000 feet. The gap between the San Jacinto and San Gorgonio ranges narrows to only about two miles…”
