Thunderclouds often form over Southern California's Mt. San Jacinto, the highest peak in a range that abruptly rises 10,000 feet from its base on the west side of Palm Springs. Clouds stream eastward from the crest of the mountain chain, though storms drop almost no rain on the city, as it lies in the mountain’s rain shadow. On the evening this photograph was taken, the smooth lenticular cumulonimbus cloud dissipated as the sun sank below the mountain’s high horizon.

The main streets of Palm Springs are lined with Mexican Fan Palms, which were planted as a civic project in the late 1940s to attract visitors. Long-lived and up to 100 feet tall, with narrow trunks and rounded crowns, they classically symbolize luxury and carefree lifestyles in wealthy southwestern oases, whether in Palm Springs, Beverly Hills, or Santa Barbara.

While Mexican Fan Palms are indigenous to parts of Baja California and the Sonoran Desert, they are the most planted palms worldwide. The other most popular is a similar-looking and closely related species, the California Fan Palm. This palm’s largest grove lies a few miles south of where this photograph was taken, in stream-fed Palm Canyon, on the ancestral lands of the Cahuilla people. Two thousand years ago, the Cahuilla began cultivating this palm along seasonal streams and the Agua Caliente springs, thatching their homes with fronds and grinding its fruit into flour. In their mythology, the Cahuilla tribe credits the creation of the California Fan Palm as a gift from an ancestral tribal leader, marking it as the first palm on Earth.

Location research and commentary by James Baker.