The Orocopia Mountains are located in Riverside County in southern California, United States, east of the Coachella Valley, west of the Chuckwalla Mountains, and south of Interstate 10 in the Colorado Desert.

The Bradshaw Trail passed through the mountains, the first recorded route to the Colorado River from Riverside, California.

The dramatic and variable terrain was shaped primarily by movements of the adjacent San Andreas Fault over millennia.

Most notably, the Orocopia schist, a blueschist assemblage found in the range, matches the Pelona schist found over 250 km away in the San Gabriel Mountains along the San Andreas fault.

Hill and Dibblee (1953) first noted this similarity (a piercing point), and used it to construct the first estimates of the offset on the fault.