Postcard from Palm Springs: into the wind-turbine woods

Drivers heading east from Los Angeles call it the “ah-ha” moment. After two hours, Interstate 10 funnels into the mountainous San Gorgonio Pass, gateway to the nine cities of Greater Palm Springs that have transformed the arid Coachella Valley into an ever-sunny paradise of palms, pools, gorgeous mid-century homes and 100-plus golf courses.

This transition is heralded by a vast, bristling forest of slender white wind turbines spread over 40 square miles that merrily spin away like strange metal flowers. For the weekend crowd it is a dramatic signal that they have reached party central, while romantics are transfixed by this mesmerising gathering of some 1,200 machines rotating more or less in unison. Some of these rise, if you include the blade, to 492ft — as high as a 35-storey building.

It is now 40 years since the wind farm was initiated, an anniversary that has inspired a small historical exhibition in a modest cabin just off I-10. Here, for the past eight years, Palm Springs Windmill Tours has been offering the curious hour-long guided tours by golf cart into this towering kinetic landscape, along with an app-based, self-drive version introduced during the pandemic.

We trundle through a parched land that resembles a crash landing of giant insects

Stepping out of the car I remark, stupidly, how windy it is. “Fifteen miles per hour gusting to 30,” a receptionist clarifies. Thomas Spiglanin, one of the company’s tour guides and its education director, explains that the Pass is one of the most consistently windy places in the US.

At peak times up to 50 cars can drop by in a day and interest is rising, perhaps because the use of wind turbines as a source of cheap, clean, renewable power seems increasingly pertinent given the all too obvious threat of climate change and the energy crisis provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

We have been here before. In 1973 the Middle East oil embargo provoked an urgent quest for alternative domestic energy that led to a California “wind rush” with state subsidies encouraging landowners to put up turbines. In north Palm Springs, Frederick W Noble felt that it was his patriotic duty to participate, shelving plans for a mobile-home park and erecting eight turbines here in 1982. Within five years there were about 4,600 of them in the Pass area, but since then numbers have fallen as older machines are replaced by larger and taller versions that harness the wind more efficiently.

“We’re getting a reputation as a nerd tour,” Spiglanin reflects as we trundle through a parched land of desert dandelions and creosote bushes that is home to a wind-turbine graveyard resembling a crash landing of giant insects. Dating from the 1980s, these ungainly artefacts tell an entertaining evolutionary tale of gyroscopic forces and sand in your magnets, obsessive inventors and pioneering machines such as the Kenetech KVS-33, which resembled “a cockroach on a stick”.

When I inform my host I am more interested in the whirling beauty of this aeolian chorus than the back-science, he agrees that the sight of the massed turbines is engaging — “but not intended to be art”. Granted, but do they have personalities? “Well, we do have a Cranky Charlie and a Noisy Nellie,” Spiglanin admits.

After four decades stimulating the minds of drivers, residents and visitors, the turbines are now an icon of the Palm Springs landscape. Their distinctive shapes appear on T-shirts and greeting cards, while a 52ft blade soars above the Palm Springs Art Museum in a striking outdoor sculpture by Jeffrey Gibson. They can be admired from numerous vantage points, such as Keys View in Joshua Tree National Park, while the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway provides a lofty perspective as it whisks passengers up to 8,516ft in an exhilarating 2.5 mile ascent to Mount San Jacinto State Park.

I also recommend taking a slow cruise along North Indian Canyon Drive at sunset, when the resolutely turning blades are silhouetted against the apricot sky. Enthusiasts can check into the new Azure Palm Hot Springs Resort in Desert Hot Springs, which is set on a hill with a distant view of this gyratory ballet.

The scene is particularly bewitching at night, when the turbines are crowned with blinking red lights that appear to be messaging us in the dark. Is it a hospital emergency? An alarm call for our beleaguered planet? Or just a throng of brilliantly developed machines stoically bringing power to the people?

Follow @ftweekend on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first