We are in a little cinder block room in a motel on the edge of Joshua tree. We look out onto sandy desert for miles and in the distance the mountains of the park. The trip so far has been a great adventure. We drove out to an old citrus grove that has been made into a state park near Riverside in an area that used to be entirely in citrus fruit. The acreage has gone down substantially to make room for more people, but the total acreage, according to our guide at the park, has gone up in CA mostly in the inland valley farther north. 80% of CA crop was eating fruit as opposed to FLA which is almost all juice oranges. I think this may be the moisture etc, but the main significance for me is that it was necessary to be more careful about fruit quality out here. Also shipping eating fruit is more difficult and it seems that much less is shipped east now. Having navels more of the time is one of the nice benefits of living out here. The experience of the park was seeing what rows of orange trees look like. These groves were owned by landholders who lived on them in nice homes surrounded by citrus trees. All the planting, maintenance, watering, and harvesting were managed by a farming company, who took the larger % of the sales and the smaller went to the landholder. This was the typical way of financing the groves throughout Orange County and east to Riverside. Most of the landholders were retirees from the midwest. The park itself had little else, the owners house was still there but not open to tourists.
On the way there we stopped in Redlands. It is a small town in the "inland empire" on the edge of the San Gabriel Mtns, which was a wealthy residential area at the turn of the century. Kimberly Crest is a small mansion in Redlands and a pleasant short tour. I had expected a place something like the mansions in Pasadena but it was much less: a nice frame Victorian on a hill looking out at Mt Baldy with a snow cap. At 5 bedrooms or so, it was not big, and had been owned by the head of Kimberly Clark when he retired from the company. Why he didn't build a bigger place or live in Pasadena we didn't hear and didn't feel comfortable asking the tour guide! Their daughter's husband died early in their marriage and the daughter lived there the rest of her life and became involved in the local women's college Scripps and was briefly the interim president. And she had been a Smithie! So J was quite pleased with the discovery.
The house did have all sorts of gaming stuff, etc, and despite the elegant downstairs furnishings, which suggested parties and social activities, there was a 50s TV, and a 40s radio between the bedrooms on the second floor and it appeared that this was the main center of family life! It gives a sense of the formality and isolation of the society in this region. Not truly rural for it had roads, railroads, etc, but still very isolated from the rest of the cultural world. Then we drove back to Riverside and checked into the Mission Inn which lived up to its rep! It is an old rambling set of buildings, originally a small hotel done in Mission Style Spanish Colonial style to capitalize on the popularity of a Spanish revival in the teens created by the book Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson. No one in the gift shop had heard of Ramona and the annual staging of a pageant play is done in Hemet, which is quite a distance away. The hotel was filled with quirky details: a carillon that played every hour with a mechanical set of moving figurines European style, large patios one of which was decorated in the appearance of a Church exterior (though I dont think there was really a space inside for a service though I think weddings are held there). There is a wall of Mexican style beaten copper "wings" to honor famous airmen of the 20s to 40s who had stayed there and a long list of presidents and celebrities who had stayed there, too. The "President's lounge" is a bar with a big picture of Nixon since he had supposedly was married there, and it seemed like the place a couple from Whittier would think was a "really swell place" to get married. Dinner in the Mission Inn Restaurant was an average overpriced meal served at tables outdoors in a courtyard that was surrounded by Spanish style walls with handing twinkling "star lights". It was movie set surreal! But fun. We had a large nice room off the courtyard that was great.
Saturday we drove around Riverside. We were staying in a main downtown tourist strip which included a River park and a large building, The Ca Museum of Photog, which had modest show of contemporary photographers and is owned and run by UC Riverside. It has an adjoining art gallery which had a conceptual art show, and seemed also to be under the direction of UC Riverside too. The main town is maybe 20 by 50 streets on the east side of the 91. It is backed by a hill and there is another small residential town beyond that, and of course the town is set beside the Santa Ana River. There are large mountains in the distance, the San Bernardinos that form a backdrop to the city.
We wanted to see UC Riverside and finding it was a trick. It is on the other side of the 91, set against a 2000 or so foot mountain, and very sprawling. There does seem to be a central campus, but surrounding it are bunches of apartments and most of the students live in these instead of dorms (saving the state the cost of the dorm real estate in the construction and maintenance) and diffusing the campus. Close to the main campus is the typical student centered shopping mall, also recently built, and looking like any typical CA mall. Spreading out from the campus toward the road was an increasingly low income neighborhood and it seemed that the town had gone to great pains to isolate itself from the students. There was not a sense of a close integrated campus, which J said was also typical of Irvine, another recently build campus. Building new university settings in contemporary real estate markets must be economically challenging for the state, and it must depend on land gifts for it to be possible. And these are not going to be the most valuable land!
Then on to Palm Springs. The first stop was at the dates store in Cabazon just before the outlets. We bought some dates, though the fruit quality was mixed. We also had our first "date shake" a combo of vanilla ice cream and blended dates which is a gastronomic marker of coming out to the desert for Californians of the last generation. (We had bought a bag of cara cara oranges in a stand near the orange grove park, and are starting to get the feeling for eating off the land as you travel in CA!) We went into the outlets in the morning and got a wedding gift, and some stuff for ourselves, another ritual of the traveling Californian. The malls are built on Indian land and a big moneymaker for them, along with the casino down the road. It was hotter than I expected it would be! It would be hard to do much out here but shop in AC malls!
Then we drove on to Palm Springs itself which is about 20 minutes east of the Cabazon outlet malls. First stop was the art museum there. It is a small building will several small collections mostly contemporary stuff, and a large exhibition show gallery which had a show of Baldessari's prints which capture a lot of his verbal/conceptual art, which has become a major element of contemporary art. It was a good show for illustrating the range of his ways of viewing the world, and of using materials of contemporary media. He was born and worked entirely in CA and is a true native spirit in many senses. Along with Ruscha he is a major CA art figure. It gave me a better appreciation of that approach, cf also Heinecken, along with a sense of why this would be central to CA: it comments directly on the consumer marketing culture of this place. A visit to Moorten's cactus gardens after lunch proved to be a bust. An old house with a yard filled with cactus plants that someone had lovingly collected and organized many years ago, but which had gone to seed and not been well maintained in the subsequent years and was now a minor tourist attraction. Parking on the street! Oh well. This is the other side of tourist CA: little oddities that were the inspiration for someone or other wanting to turn their hobby into an income producer. In this case, it was a botanist with a special interest in cactus who went about collecting them and keeping examples in his front yard.
The drive out of Palm Springs on the 62 goes up a dramatic hill to begin the climb to the high desert. 29 Palms Inn is a jumble of small cabins mainly duplexes at the edge of the Joshua Tree National Park. There is some scruffy development around the area that supports a giant marine base further east (inland). The hotel had a small restaurant next to the pool, with white table cloths that tried to be upscale but really couldn't manage, and a singer and trumpet player "band" for Saturday night which appeared to be the major local entertainment. It was pretty crowded with folks with short haircuts who looked to be out of the base. We went back to our little room and played cards for a while and then watched part of SOMETHINGS GOTTA GIVE on TV. (It does have great comic timing, and great dialog. And it is the most annoying middle-aged-woman centric viewpoint, which J loved.)
Sunrise in the desert is beautiful even in this scruffy little enclave. And the air is clean and pure. After breakfast at the place which was ample and free, we drove into the park and soon saw the main feature of the northwest end: giant boulder piles and the Joshua Trees. A 20 minute drive on park roads to Hidden Valley offers an easy trail through the rocks that J and I could do and both enjoyed the incredible variation in boulder formations. Meanwhile groups of rock climbers were up on the rocks trying to get some climbing experience. This is prime country for them because the rock is all granite. We drove past a series of great rock formations and an array of large joshua trees. There wasnt much blooming in this northern/western part. Too early for that. Then on to Key's View: a drive to lookout that gives you a wide view of the coachella valley, Mt San Jancinto, etc. The wind was blowing at least 30 mph and it was dramatic. You can see the San Andreas fault line clearly across the valley. (This created the park effects by causing granitic rock to form, creating the two opposing mountain lines and then opening the space for the granitic rock to break through.) Then on to White Tank, more boulders, and a small rock arch on a short trail, and sat to eat lunch on some rocks. By now the wind was quite strong 10-15 mph even down on the plain, though it was warm and I wasn't feeling cold. The Northern Western side has an array of these strange trees, in the Yucca family, which sprout odd angled leaf groups and blossoms on jagged branches. They are like nothing else you can imagine in a tree. There is a modest ground cover of cacti, etc, but the rest is mostly rock and desert dirt. There is about an hour and a half drive down to the South Eastern side which goes through a cactus forest and extensive low desert with broad views of mountains in the distance. There are lots of off road trails for driving and hiking. That will be another time. We came out at the level of the Salton Sea! A place to check out next time too. It was a short but sweet visit to the park.
We rode back on the 10 to Palm Springs to find our motel for the night: Ingleside Inn. This is a 1950s motel (that is probably from the 50s) in the heart of "old Palm Springs" up against the mountains and a stream. The room looked like the classic 50s motel room that someone from MAD MEN in CA would take his secretary or girlfriend to for the afternoon. The old bellman and woman at the desk seemed the type to ask no questions and the cars out front were all very fancy! Dinner was at Melvyns which is part of the motel and has a faux fancy tone with a formal maitre d' despite the small size of the restaurant. It was a totally faux.. experience! And we were the youngest people in the place except for a couple that came in who did not appear to be a "real couple".
Palm Springs grew beyond a minor desert stopover to a fancy residential location in the 50s when Hollywood stars moved here to get away from the hustle and air pollution and enjoy the warmer Winters. Beyond that it had no real reason to develop but the housing market boom developed it anyway! Retirement homes and second homes and timeshares for golfers in the Winter and Desert fanciers were built almost willy-nilly as part of the great CA real estate boom of the 60s-80s. PS and environs illustrates one challenge of the CA economy. You gather a mass of people, with limited economic productivity except for serving each other. This provides a sustainable but not a growing economy. So you must find some other basis for growth. The first answer is to invite tourists to enjoy the splendid climate or whatever the region claims. Even a new convention center might be the basis. Then you do new construction for the people who will want to have second homes or move here. Then after all the real estate boom subsides, you realize there is not enough economic activity to sustain the construction, and the developers move on and leave a declining economic shell for a series of "hermit crab" people to occupy. In 20 or 30 years the area may sustain and develop a core community. If not, it becomes one of the many ghost towns in the West that grew up around a boom of gold or water or something, and then dried up, leaving the empty buildings behind. And that is what we see in most of PS: empty buildings and old tourist accomodations.
The next stop on this adventure was Idyllwild. This is a little town at 8000 feet, almost on the peak of Mt San Jacinto (13000). The plan was to do the tramway first to get to the North side of the mountain and views, but we decided to go straight to Idyllwild and skip the tramway, both because J is deathly afraid of the tramway, and it was windy and might not even be running (actually it is probably pretty well screened in that valley). It didnt make much sense to ride up, take a brief walk, ride down and then drive up all over again. This was a good decision because the ride up takes a while and would not have been good in the sunset or dark. Also, it was so cloud covered and rainy that we wouldn't have seen much from the tramway.
The road up to Idyllwild is one of those CALTRANS miracle roads that skirts the edge of the lower mountain and has some excellent views of the valley on the way. It is a twisty turning affair, made worse by wind gusts that kept me focused the whole way up. It plateaus at about 3500 feet and there are a bunch of horse farms. Then you cut off on a second road that goes up to Idyllwild. This is a scrubby little western town, just a bunch of wooden cabins, and a few stores plus a long row of b & bs to stay. It connects to the walking trails of the state park and on to Mt San Jacinto but it would be a very long way to the top, the faster by far to go by the tramway. A lot of the peaks in the state are set up for day hike pitches. (Whitney usually takes two days with a camp over.) This is to minimize the need for mountain camping with its special equipment needs, its littering, and excess physical demands on the hiker. The tram makes this possible on Mt San J.
The town was in fog, with residual snow from a 24" dusting last week. it was the first snow I had seen in a year and the first really cold damp weather. The contrast from being in the desert the day before to being on a pine clad mountain top was amazing. (The road is called the Palms to Pines highway.) We checked in early at the b&b which was a wood clapboard affair but pleasant. There dont seem to be any marketing chains up here: too remote. We had lunch at one recommended spot: Cafe Aroma: a funky food joint that was loaded with locals. Then came back to the room. The walk was a strain at 8000 feet with no adaptation time! Then a nap, and dinner at Mountain House: a couple run this from Riverside an hour and half drive away. Good food simply prepared. Nice wine. And we had made a reservation but were the only people in the place on Sunday night! The quality was much better than Melvyn's but simpler too.
This was the end of the adventure. The next day we did the descent down to Hemet and back to the freeways and home. A quick tour of the various adventures of the desert and lots to come back to.
