About 35 miles north of Palm Springs, and 20 road miles west of the entrance to Joshua Tree National Park, there’s a hidden gem waiting for the Mojave Desert adventurer. It’s called Pioneertown, and it’s well worth your time. Now, we’re not talking ’bout your usual town, fit for city folk. Once you’re on the
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Malki Museum, housed in a traditional one-room adobe building on the Morongo Reservation in Banning, California, is a walk through time, displaying in all its grandeur the history and culture of the Cahuilla (spoken as: ‘Caw-we-ah’) Native Americans. The pride shows, and the journey is well worth your time. Morongo is a word of Serrano
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A visible reminder today of St. Boniface in Banning, California, is the line of olive trees extending north from Gilman Street. The trees at one time bordered the drive to the campus grounds. Indian School Lane use to lead directly into the campus and was originally a traditional trail leading from the Morongo Reservation (then
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Mescal, Arizona, located about 40 miles Southeast of Tucson, Arizona, near the town of Benson, is the home of Old Tucson’s second western movie town location. Situated on 60 acres of land which is leased from the Arizona State Land Department, Old Tucson Studio is surrounded by acres of wide open spaces and not a
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Take a drive through Lake Havasu City today and it is hard to imagine a time when Jet Skis and speed boats weren’t racing through the wide expanse of blue water, or when Spring breakers and snow birds weren’t making it a prime destination in the desert. The London Bridge was purchased by Robert McCulloch
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Corn Spring is in the Chuckwalla Mountains of the Colorado Desert seventeen miles southeast of Desert Center. Native Americans relied on the springs, and they engraved many petroglyphs on the rocks in the area.
The Chemehuevi, Desert Cahuilla and Yuma bands frequented the spring and carved elaborate petroglyphs in the nearby rocks. Some of the oldest rock art is over 10,000 years old…
Bluff Lake is a reservoir located just 3.8 miles from Big Bear Lake, California. Located at 7,600 feet, Bluff Lake Reserve has towering pines, a 20-acre lake and meadow, and majestic outcrops of quartz monzonite.
Once a stopover resort for pack burro trains and stages bringing tourists to Big Bear in the late 1800s, it is home to several species of rare plants and is a thriving animal habitat…
When Roy’s Hotel is not ground zero for multiple thriller film shoots or welcoming the throngs of dusty tourists getting their fair share of the Route 66 experience, the quiet of Amboy settles in all around.
The solitude is so profound it’s almost deafening. The peace of the ghost town with its long-abandoned St. Raymond Church and nearby pioneer graveyard consumes you. It invites you to explore and renew.
Give yourself time to absorb this little time capsule of a town and its cemetery just a bit east on Route 66…
Take a short walk on this quiet mountain trail, surrounded by pines and open spaces, and you see it up ahead. White crosses in a semi-circle, around the gnarled truck of a tree. So, what have you stumbled into here? Well, give us a minute or two and we’ll tell you about the mountain town that refused to live.
Here, just above the highway, are about 25 marked graves in the little cemetery that served the town mining town known as Doble. The names of those interred here, except for one child, are a mystery. crosses were placed here by Boy Scouts during the 1940s.
Before it was Doble, the place was known as “Bairdstown.” It came to life after the brothers Carter filed four gold mining claims in 1873, on the mountainside that now wears their name. The utterance of the word ‘gold’ was usually all it took, and the rush was on, probably before the brothers finished unpacking their picks and shovels…
There was a time when cowboys ruled the day, or at least the airwaves, and the good guy always won.
From Tom Mix in the early 1900s, to Clint Eastwood and Kurt Russell today, most of us have wanted to be a cowboy or cowgirl at one time or another.
Many of us grew up knowing that among the cowboys of the cinema, Roy Rogers was king, and Dale Evans was his queen.
Fast forward. After going through a few years of relative dormancy, in 2015, the Roy Roger’s Double R Bar Ranch came into the sights of Jim Heffel.
Now an accomplished horseman and part-time stunt rider, Jim and his wife Deena bought the farm in a friendly manner of speaking…