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About San Bernardino County
San Bernardino County covers 20,052 square miles in southern California, and is the largest county in the United States in land area. Deserts, sparsely covered with creosote bushes, cover vast areas of the county. Joshua trees, cactus and many other desert plants can also be found in selected areas. Numerous mountain ranges dot the area, including some tall, rocky peaks, but many more moderate and even small ones, sometimes barely rising above the sandy desert floor, but always equally rugged and rocky. The desert valleys stretch for miles between the mountains, covered sparsely, but very uniformly, with creosote and other small bushes. Although flatness is the rule, the ground more often is not level, but slopes at a gentle, steady angle for many miles towards the nearest mountains.
San Bernardino, the city, lies in the southwest corner of the county, below the San Bernardino Mountains, which separate the coastal ares from the interior deserts. 1,766,237 people live within the county, most of them in or near San Bernardino. The San Bernardino Mountains contrast the rest of the county in greater rainfall and beautiful forests, and provide the water necessary for urbanization in San Bernardino.
Part of two national parks extend into San Bernardino County. Death Valley National Park, the lowest, hottest and driest place in America, lies on the northern boundary, and Joshua Tree National Park lies along the southern boundary. The Mojave National Preserve, also a unit of the National Park Service, preserves a large area of the Mojave Desert in the eastern part of the county. Historic Route 66 traverses the county from east to west, which today has been supplanted by Interstate 40.
For More Information:
See Wikipedia's San Bernardino County article.