By Linda Priestley
With its year-round sunny climate, retro ambience, and iconic palm trees, Palm Springs attracts spa, golf, and outdoor enthusiasts like a magnet. Cacti and rattlesnakes add extra spice to this California adventure.
Welcome to California!
If you fly into Palm Springs, the almost completely open-air airport, where you stroll beneath giant palm trees, sets the tone. Once you’ve got your luggage, get into California Zen mode—relaxed and excited at the same time.
No matter which city you’ve chosen for your stay in the Coachella Valley (also called Greater Palm Springs, it comprises nine cities including Palm Springs), taking the highways is scenic and a little out of this world. With all the sand that accumulates along the side of the road (and, when the wind picks up, on the pavement, which results in sections being closed for cleaning), the incredibly lush vegetation, the four-legged or creeping creatures in the short grass, the breathtaking mountains in the distance, and the thousands of wind turbines that punctuate the landscape, you’re guaranteed a novel experience.
A Healing Destination
The Coachella Valley includes more than 7,000 square kilometres (2,700 square miles) of sand and gravel. It’s part of the Sonoran Desert, which ex- tends for about 260,000 square kilometres (more than 100,000 square miles) as far as Mexico. Travellers who prefer a climate as dry as an extra-dry martini (the preferred cocktail of Frank Sinatra, who was a regular in Palm Springs) will find their happy place here.
The area was once considered a health destination because of its hot temperatures and low humidity levels, both conducive to alleviating lung diseases. The sanatorium, built in 1901, helped to put Palm Springs on the map. People came to breathe deeply of its fresh air, including some Canadian snowbirds—especially those from British Columbia and Alberta, who still value the climate and the region’s proximity. But there’s a caveat: desert weather is not a cure-all—pollution and dust carried by the strong winds can cause sneezing and coughing.
Desert Modernism
Following the seekers of healing came, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the influencers—movie stars such as Dean Martin, Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, and Elizabeth Taylor. To house the cream of Hollywood in the luxury style of Beverly Hills and Malibu, renowned architects such as Albert Frey (a student of Le Corbusier, pioneer of modern architecture), John Lautner, Frank Lloyd Wright, and brothers E. Stewart and Paul R. Williams built homes and luxury hotels with a minimalist design: neutral colours, natural materials, clean lines, and large windows—to take advantage of the bright light and stunning pan- oramas—all in perfect harmony with the desert landscape.
Later, more and more homes were built in mid-century modern style but at more affordable prices, making Palm Springs a haven of modernism.
Festivals, Shopping, Yoga, and Cycling
In addition to swooning over the architecture and palm trees, visitors can enjoy the many activities offered in Greater Palm Springs. There’s something for everyone: golfing at the famous Indian Wells Resort (note to golfers: the Coachella Valley has more than a hundred courses), shopping and visiting art galleries in the El Paseo Shopping District in Palm Desert (nicknamed “the Rodeo Drive of the desert”), exploring the Palm Springs Art Museum, or soaking up culture at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, which happens every April.
Yogis can do sun salutations in a chic hotel, such as La Quinta Resort & Club, or outdoors, perhaps in Wellness Park in Palm Springs. Yoga and wellness retreats are also organized farther away, like at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center; these are a great way to recharge. Cyclists, meanwhile, can unwind on one of the many bike paths that cross the valley, including the scenic 80 kilometres (50 miles) of the Palm Springs bike route network.
Essentials: Water Bottles and Sunscreen
To fully experience Palm Springs, hiking is a must if you want to take your mind off things, admire nature and the landscape, build up your calf muscles, and improve your cardio fitness (especially when the trail begins to climb). The Coachella Valley offers many trails for both beginners and experienced hikers. Among the main trails are the famous 24-kilometre (15-mile) Palm Canyon Trail located at Indian Canyons—tribal lands belonging to the Cahuilla, the first inhabitants of the area—and Tahquitz Canyon Trail and its two-kilometre (one-and-a-quarter-mile) loop, with a steep slope in places, leading straight to an 18-metre (60-foot) waterfall in the middle of the desert.
Whichever trail you choose, you’ll need to wear a good pair of hiking boots (in case you step on a scorpion) and bring water and sunscreen, because the sun is very intense.
It’s a Date!
If you’re crazy about dates, you’ll have to stop at Indio and the almost-century-old Shields Date Garden, one of the best-known date farms in the Coachella Valley. Discover a wide variety of dates, including Deglet Noor and Medjool, and enjoy them plain, rolled in coconut, topped with pear or figs, or stuffed with ginger or a mixture of apricots, almond paste, and walnuts.
The Café at Shields offers a menu that features the farm’s star ingredient in dishes like the Date Me Omelet (red pepper, bacon, ham, onion, dates, and feta), the Signature Salad (spinach, cranberries, walnuts, pears, mangoes, and dates), and date pancakes (made with date flour) accompanied by date butter. To top it all off, try a date milkshake. You’ll fall in love with this delicious drink! You can explore the gardens around the Shields farm or, to learn more about growing dates, take a guided tour. shieldsdategarden.com
Pioneertown: Movies and a Western Vibe
Driving from Palm Springs to explore southwest California is a must. About 35 minutes away by car (preferably with air conditioning) you’ll find Pioneertown, a small town in the Mojave Desert near the Yucca Valley. Fewer than 200 people live there—main- ly artists, musicians, and merchants. What makes it unique is that it was built by Hollywood actors and film- makers in the 1940s to make westerns, such as The Cisco Kid and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as authentically as possible.
Today, you can walk down the dirt-road main street past a saloon, a sheriff ’s office, a forge, a jail, and other buildings typical of the Old West. Some have been turned into craft or souvenir shops where you’ll find unusual items and local artwork.
Joshua Tree National Park: Between Surreal and Sublime
About 25 minutes by car from Pioneertown is Joshua Tree National Park, also a must for your California bucket list, especially if you’re a fan of the TV show Six Feet Under, where the flowering yucca for which the park is named symbolizes its main charac- ters’ moments of introspection and reflection.
This massive sandbox—more than 3,000 square kilometres (1,160 square miles) criss-crossed by mountains, valleys, plains, oases, and 30 or so hiking trails (from easy to difficult)— welcomes those who enjoy hiking, climbing, camping, birdwatching, stargazing, archaeology, and US history. Under a blistering sun, two ecosystems meet—the Mojave and Colorado deserts—creating unique landscapes where rock formations such as Skull Rock and Cap Rock, sculpted by natural erosion, are among the most visited hiking spots in the United States.
Botanists are also in luck: about 800 species of plants, perfectly adapt- ed to the dry desert conditions, thrive there, including the yucca, agave, wild lupine, California poppy, and desert lily. The iconic Joshua trees are, of course, the most photographed flora, along with several varieties of cactus—all perfectly Instagrammable. Among them are chollas, hundreds of which grow in the Cholla Cactus Garden.
The area is also home to some 350 animal species, including Monarch butterflies, beetles, crickets, grasshoppers, tarantulas, scorpions, and geckos as well as hawks, coyotes, roadrunners, California squirrels— and the famous rattlesnakes.
One or two days is enough to explore the park (depending on what you want to see), but you’ll need three or more days to do the full tour. You can visit the park by car if you don’t want to do the whole thing on foot— simply park at each spot and then drive on to the next. Travellers who stay in the area for more than a day can camp on-site, stay in a hotel, or rent a house in the communities of Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, or Twentynine Palms. (Twentynine Palms is a few minutes from the north entrance of the park, the least busy of all the access points for Joshua Tree National Park.)
In May, Mazda Canada invited the media, including Good Times, to California to try the CX-70, its new SUV designed for active people. The initiative was prompted by a survey that Mazda commissioned, which showed that 66 per cent of Canadian Gen Xers and boomers wanted to discover new places and 55 per cent of them wanted to do it by car. We visited Palm Springs and Joshua Tree National Park in the CX-70.
