San Gabriel Mountains in the context of "Antelope Valley"

The San Gabriel Valley (Spanish: Valle de San Gabriel), sometimes referred to by its initials as SGV, is one of the principal valleys of Southern California, with the city of Los Angeles directly bordering it to the west and occupying the vast majority of the southeastern part of Los Angeles County. Surrounding landforms and other features include:

• the San Gabriel Mountains to the north;
• the San Rafael Hills to the west, with the Los Angeles Basin beyond;
• the Crescenta Valley to the northwest;
• the Puente Hills to the south, with the coastal plain of Orange County beyond;
• the Chino Hills and San Jose Hills to the east, with the Pomona Valley and Inland Empire beyond; and
• the city limits of Los Angeles bordering its western edge.

The San Gabriel Valley derives its name from the San Gabriel River that flows southward through the center of the valley, which itself was named for the Spanish Mission San Gabriel Arcángel originally built in the Whittier Narrows in 1771.

Pomona College (/pəˈmoʊnə/ pə-MOH-nə) is a private liberal arts college in Claremont, California. It was established in 1887 by a group of Congregationalists who wanted to recreate a "college of the New England type" in Southern California. In 1925, it became the founding member of the Claremont Colleges consortium of adjacent, affiliated institutions.

Pomona is a four-year undergraduate institution that enrolls approximately 1,700 students. It offers 48 majors in liberal arts disciplines and roughly 650 courses, as well as access to more than 2,000 additional courses at the other Claremont Colleges. Its 140-acre (57 ha) campus is in a residential community 35 miles (56 km) east of downtown Los Angeles, near the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Claremont (/ˈklɛərmɒnt/) is a suburban city in eastern Los Angeles County, California, United States, 30 miles (48 km) east of Los Angeles. It lies in the Pomona Valley at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. As of the 2010 census it had a population of 34,926, and in 2020 the population was 37,266.

Claremont is home to the seven Claremont Colleges and several other educational institutions and is known for its tree-lined streets with numerous historic buildings. Because of this, it is sometimes referred to as "The City of Trees and Ph.Ds." It was named the best suburb in the West by Sunset Magazine in 2016, which described it as a "small city that blends worldly sophistication with small-town appeal." In 2018, Niche rated Claremont as the 17th best place to live in the Los Angeles area out of 658 communities it evaluated, based on crime, cost of living, job opportunities, and local amenities.

The Mount Wilson Observatory (MWO) is an astronomical observatory in Los Angeles County, California, United States. The MWO is located on Mount Wilson, a 5,710-foot (1,740-meter) peak in the San Gabriel Mountains near Pasadena, northeast of Los Angeles.

The observatory contains two historically important telescopes: the 100-inch (2.5 m) Hooker telescope, which was the largest aperture telescope in the world from its completion in 1917 to 1949, and the 60-inch telescope which was the largest operational telescope in the world when it was completed in 1908. It also contains the Snow solar telescope completed in 1905, the 60-foot (18 m) solar tower completed in 1908, the 150-foot (46 m) solar tower completed in 1912, and the CHARA array, built by Georgia State University, which became fully operational in 2004 and was the largest optical interferometer in the world at its completion.

Mount Wilson is at the peak of the San Gabriel Mountains, located within the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument and Angeles National Forest in Los Angeles County, California. With only minor topographical prominence the peak is not naturally noticeable from a distance, although it is easily identifiable due to the large number of antennas near its summit. It is a subsidiary peak of nearby San Gabriel Peak. Quartz diorite is the dominant bedrock.

It is the location of the Mount Wilson Observatory, which is an important astronomical facility in Southern California with historic 60-inch (1,524 mm) and 100-inch (2,540 mm) aperture telescopes, and 60-foot (18.3 m) and 150-foot (45.7 m) tall solar towers. The newer CHARA Array, run by Georgia State University, is also sited there and does important interferometric stellar research.

The Transverse Ranges are a group of mountain ranges of Southern California, in the Pacific Coast Ranges physiographic region in North America. The Transverse Ranges begin at the southern end of the California Coast Ranges and lie within Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside and Kern counties. The Peninsular Ranges lie to the south. The name is due to the ranges' east–west orientation, making them transverse to the general northwest–southeast orientation of most of California's coastal mountains.

The ranges extend from west of Point Conception eastward approximately 500 kilometers into the Mojave and Colorado Desert. The geology and topography of the ranges express three distinct segments that have contrasting elevations, rock types, and vegetation. The western segment extends to the San Gabriel Mountains and San Gabriel fault. The central segment includes mountains that range eastward to the San Andreas fault. The eastern segment extends from the Cajon Pass at the San Andreas fault eastward to the Colorado Desert. The central and eastern segments (near the San Andreas fault) have the highest elevations.

The San Rafael Hills are a mountain range in Los Angeles County, California. They are one of the lower Transverse Ranges, and are parallel to and below the San Gabriel Mountains, adjacent to the San Gabriel Valley overlooking the Los Angeles Basin.

The Crescenta Valley is a small inland valley in Los Angeles County, California, lying between the San Gabriel Mountains on the northeast and the Verdugo Mountains and San Rafael Hills on the southwest. It opens into the San Fernando Valley at the northwest and the San Gabriel Valley at the southeast. It is nearly bisected by the Verdugo Wash, a smaller valley separating the Verdugo Mountains from the San Rafael Hills. Most of the valley lies at an elevation of over 1,500 feet (460 m).

The San Gabriel River is a mostly-urban waterway flowing 58 miles (93 km) southward through Los Angeles and Orange Counties, California, in the United States. It is the central of three major rivers draining the Greater Los Angeles area, the others being the Los Angeles River and Santa Ana River. The river's watershed stretches from the rugged San Gabriel Mountains to the heavily developed San Gabriel Valley and a significant part of the Los Angeles coastal plain, emptying into the Pacific Ocean between the cities of Long Beach and Seal Beach.

The San Gabriel once ran across a vast alluvial flood plain, its channels shifting with winter floods and forming extensive wetlands along its perennial course, a relatively scarce source of fresh water in this arid region. The Tongva and their ancestors inhabited the San Gabriel River basin for thousands of years at villages like Puvunga, relying on the abundant fish and game in riparian habitats. The river is named for the nearby Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, established in 1771 during the Spanish colonization of California. Its water was heavily used for irrigation and ranching by Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers before urbanization began in the early 1900s, eventually transforming much of the watershed into industrial and suburban areas of greater Los Angeles.