We all know the San Andreas Fault is out there. Californians first learn about the looming underground threat during childhood earthquake drills and geology lessons, before growing into anxious adults clicking on headlines about when the next “Big One” could strike along the infamous fault. 

But it’s one thing to learn about the power of the 750-mile-long fault and another to stare it in the face. And from the Devil’s Chair in Devil’s Punchbowl Natural Area in Los Angeles County’s high desert, hikers can look straight down at a landscape touched by the San Andreas itself.  

The Devil’s Punchbowl is a unique “geological wonder” spanning 1,310 acres of transitional landscape where the mountains give way to the desert, according to Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation. The punchbowl formation is located in a deep gorge-like canyon, where near-vertical pink and tan layered sedimentary rocks suddenly rise up from the ground. The striking layers were once horizontal but were pushed, squeezed and tilted up out of the ground over millions of years by a combination of ongoing forces from three nearby faults: the smaller Punchbowl and Pinyon faults, and the powerhouse San Andreas Fault. 

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