Xperience Days aims to provide customers with any updates relating to Xperience Days along with the latest news from the gifts and experience gifts industry. The following is an article from The Associated Press.

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MECCA, Calif. (AP) — Strolling the San Andreas fault is about as down-to-earth as you can get. And entirely otherworldly.

In the Mecca Hills, the fault zone is a putty-colored, no man's land of pinnacles and ravines, strewn with a rainbow of rocks washed down from surrounding hilltops.

These badlands at the eastern end of the Coachella Valley are just one small section of the 650-mile stretch where the Pacific and North American plates do the bump and grind that Californians know so well.

I didn't set out to tour a source of California's earthquake nightmares. I hadn't a clue where to find the San Andreas fault. I'd just felt a winter trip to Palm Springs coming on and wanted to sample a side of the Coachella Valley that was less golf cart and more Jeep.

Several companies in the area offer desert Jeep tours, and the two I took both turned out to be explorations of the fault zone — which is no coincidence. The San Andreas has been the primary sculptor of the valley's landscape for millions of years.

On a recent Saturday, five strangers rendezvoused in the parking lot of a coffee shop just off Interstate 10 in Palm Desert. Two open-roofed red Jeeps awaited us, as did Gordi — a retired science teacher and a knowledgeable guide for Desert Adventures Jeep Eco Tours. It would be an hour to our first stop on the four-hour Mystery Canyon Tour.

As we drove, first paralleling the interstate and then heading south, Gordi kept up an interesting patter. Stick to the main desert towns — Palm Springs, etc. — and the Coachella Valley seems little more than desert veneered with golf greens. Get farther out, however, and it's heavily agricultural.

He identified fields of carrots, artichokes, potatoes and table grapes, and groves of citrus, pecans and date palms.

When we'd put developed areas behind us, Gordi launched into local geological history. In prehistoric times, the Gulf of California extended this far north; more recently, Lake Cahuilla covered the valley until about 400 years ago. He pointed out the water level of the old lake, a "bathtub ring" around the base of the nearby mountains.

Soon we turned onto unpaved Painted Canyon Road, which led to our destination — the Mecca Hills Wilderness Area, a maze of eroded rock thrust up by the San Andreas fault's seismic shifts. Gordi identified plants — creosote bush, palo verde, ironwood, smoke tree, honey mesquite — and explained how each was used by the Cahuilla Indians.

We piled out for a stroll through the fault gouge — the tortured, crumbling, dun landscape formed as the tectonic plates grind past each other. Before I actually stood on this fractured land, I'd imagined the San Andreas fault as a narrow fissure across an otherwise normal landscape.

But the Mecca Hills' fault zone, with its eerie rock formations, is several miles wide. The San Andreas stretches all the way from the Imperial Valley, south of the Salton Sea, to Point Arena in Mendocino County, where it veers off into the Pacific. Even at its narrowest, the fault zone is 100 yards wide.

We got out of the Jeep again at Painted Canyon, less than 10 miles north of the Salton Sea. The name is a little misleading; this isn't the vivid desert color of Arizona or Utah.

The walls, formed of rock folded and tilted by quakes, are "painted" more by changing light and shadow than by minerals. Gordi's plan was to hike through the gorge to Ladder Canyon, a smaller side canyon with ladders that ascend to overlooks. But the rains had changed the lay of the land, washing rocks and soil into the gorge. The entrance to the canyon seemed to have disappeared.

It was sort of anticlimactic and maybe a little sedate for a Jeep tour; the roads hadn't even required four-wheel drive. But it had been a congenial afternoon.

For the second tour, a group assembled at an intersection north of town to meet our guide, Jordan of AAA Five Star Adventures. Although this was another San Andreas tour, along a different section of the fault zone, the trips' similarities ended there. Forget pavement: We headed north, and in minutes we were off-road in a broad, rocky wash.

We climbed a canyon in the Indio Hills formed by the crashing tectonic plates perhaps as recently as 1,500 years ago. At one spot, Jordan pointed out the alternately fine and coarse layers of sedimentary rock in the canyon wall. They marked dry years — all sand — and wet ones, when rocks were washed down from above. At another stop, he had us savor the pure silence.

Much as I'd enjoyed the previous day's outing, this was a real taste of off-roading ruts, rocks and all. Out of the Jeep, we explored slot canyons on foot, some barely wide enough to squeeze into. There was a much keener sense of adventure and exploration — this was fun.

And then, as I slid farther into a narrow rift between the boulders, someone made the inevitable crack: "What if there's an earthquake ... right ... now?"