Amazing Places in the Desert

May 10-11, 2013

Friday

We left Korakia in the morning (sadly) and drove to Lynne’s friend Anna’s house nearby to pick her up. 

Anna and Lynne

The three of us are going to ride up the mountain on the famous Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, and then go for a hike in the mountains, up where it’s COLD. The Tramway is an engineering marvel; it’s goes almost straight up a canyon to San Jacinto State Park on the upper slopes of the massive mountains that tower over Palm Springs. 

 

View from the Tramway ride, looking down

View from Tramway, looking up

We board the tram at 2600 ft and end up at about 8600 ft—big temperature change from the desert floor! We hike a loop trail that rises up to a ridge, about a 5-mile hike, and have some great views.

 

Hiking the trail

 

It's a different ecosystem up here!

 Also see a few birds to add to the list, the dark-eyed junco, white-throated swift and Steller’s jays. We grab a late lunch before taking the tramway down; then we take Anna home (we plan to see her and her husband Tom again on Sunday) and drive to Desert Hot Springs, about a half hour’s drive, to meet up with the boys at Bubbling Wells Ranch.

Here we are guests of Lynne and Marc’s friends Courtney and Audrey, staying in their comfortable two-bedroom guest house (which is larger than our house at home). 

 

The guest house where we're staying right now.

Desert Hot Springs sits atop the San Andreas Fault, and a lot of hot water is just beneath the surface all around here. The town is filled with spas. Courtney and Audrey have a stone hot tub outside similar to the one at our Korakia hotel back in Palm Springs (see photo from last blog). The water is piped directly out of the ground at 105 degrees F. If you want to sit in the hot tub, you just put the plug in the bottom and turn on the pump and it fills quickly with 105 degree water! You drain it when you’re done, just like a bathtub.

It’s hard to describe this 100-acre ranch. The scenery is beautiful desert with rugged mountains as the backdrop. 

 

The main ranch house.

They have built small lakes and “streams” around the house, however, so it’s like an oasis. Audrey is WAY into art and the whole ranch is filled with all kinds of art, even life-size sculptures of saguaro cactus mixed in with the real cactus—you don’t know what’s art and what’s real here! Some of the art is serious and a lot of it is humorous, like the guy in the outhouse as you drive up the long sandy driveway. In addition, over the years they have built a little western town next to the main house—it’s like a movie set for a western. In fact, they do rent it out as a movie and photo shoot set. Audrey told us that Nordstrom’s department store just did a photo shoot here for a forthcoming catalog. It’s wild! Lots of wildlife too: roadrunners, quail and bunnies are everywhere. The six of us, including Audrey and Courtney, went out to dinner at a great Thai restaurant in town, then we sat in their hot tub for awhile when we got back. Felt great for my aching muscles, after that hike today!

Saturday

Good night’s sleep. We wake up early and both get up to work on our book editing projects for awhile. Jack plans to accompany Courtney later this morning to fly his model planes with a group he flies with, while Lynne, Marc and I are going to see a local museum which is a historic adobe pueblo built singlehandedly by a homesteader, Cabot Yerxa, early in the 20th century. He is credited with “re-discovering” water in this area that allowed more homesteaders and developers to come here (“re-discover” because the local Indians apparently knew all the water sources before any of the white folks who came here later). Great tour—love this guy Yerxa. He was an entrepreneur, a good artist (studied at a prestigious art school in Paris in the 1920s), a really hard worker, and a loyal friend to the indians (he grew up on a Hopi reservation where his parents ran the trading post). He had a very adventurous life. The adobe he built here is four stories and really big. 
 

Cabot Pueblo Museum

 None of the doors and windows are the same size—he scavenged all the building materials in the desert. Art and gardens and interesting “things” are scattered around the place. Fascinating place, fascinating person.

We came back to the house to get Jack and then headed out for another tour, this time of “Sunnylands,” the spectacular home of Walter and Leonore Annenberg, built in the 1960s. 

The Annenbergs were a fabulously wealthy couple (he owned TV Guide, The Racing Form and many other publications, and was Ambassador to Great Britain during Nixon's presidency); they donated billions of dollars over the years to foster education, medicine and art/culture. Sunnylands was the site of many elaborate entertainments; they hosted seven U.S. Presidents, the British royal family, and major entertainers like Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra. The Reagans came all the time—they were good friends. The first President Bush even held an official White House State Dinner at Sunnylands for the Japanese Prime Minister. Lots of history made in this house—it’s kind of like a “Camp David West.”

 

View from the new Sunnylands visitor center.

The Annenbergs are deceased (he died in 2002, she in 2009) and Sunnylands is now a nonprofit high-level retreat center and museum, as they wished. It has only recently opened for public tours—the tour tickets are limited and were hard to get, but Lynne persisted! The place is amazing: set on 200 acres, the Annenbergs truly created an oasis in the desert—so much greenery, and nine lakes, surround the 25,000-square-foot house, which is very modern (called California Mid-Century Modern architecture). 

 

Carol and Lynne outside the house at Sunnylands (unfortunately no photos allowed inside)

 

Carol, Jack, Lynne and Marc

It has a nine-hole golf course, swimming pool, several guest houses and cottages. The house was filled with art, as they collected amazing art throughout their life together, including the great impressionists and sculpture by Rodin; you see ancient Asian pieces along with very modern kinetic art. Wow. I guess they had the money to do whatever they wanted, and they chose to give much of it away. (However, I don’t think their lifestyle suffered from it. This was just one among several residences.)

Just chilling at the guest house tonight, while Marc and Lynne take Marc’s mom out to dinner for Mother’s Day… 

Bird species count: Vermilion flycatcher, turkey vulture, Bell’s vireo, *golden-fronted woodpecker, Say’s phoebe, northern cardinal, greater roadrunner, house finch, common raven, *northern rough-winged swallow, *summer tanager, *prothonotary warbler, *yellow-breasted chat, *yellow-rumped warbler, northern mockingbird, mourning dove, cliff swallow, Mexican jay, black-headed grosbeak, black-chinned  hummingbird, Wilson’s warbler, *Scott’s oriole, chipping sparrow, house sparrow, lesser goldfinch, black-crested titmouse, acorn woodpecker, scrub jay, *western kingbird, white-winged dove, *canyon towhee, *Grace’s warbler, *zone-tailed hawk, *curve-billed thrasher, Bullock’s oriole, Gambel’s quail, great horned owl, black-throated sparrow, *cactus wren, ladder-backed woodpecker, white-crowned sparrow, brownheaded cowbird, Brewer’s blackbird, *pyrrhuloxia, hooded oriole, verdin, crow, Anna’s hummingbird, dark-eyed junco, white-throated swift, Steller’s jay

State count: 11 [Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California]

Odometer count:

Surber, VA: 107,435

Palm Springs, CA: 112,345

Where We Are: