Salinas Valley

The Salinas Valley is a major agricultural valley in California, shaped by the Salinas River, which flows northwest along the length of the valley to its mouth at Monterey Bay. The valley runs from south of San Ardo northwest between the Santa Lucia Range on the west and the Gabilan Range on the east, lying west of the San Joaquin Valley and south of San Francisco Bay. It was named during the Spanish colonial period for the seasonal river's brackish, salt-marsh ponds, and is known as the setting of John Steinbeck's East of Eden and Of Mice and Men.