Palm Desert — the Palms End of the Drive

Welcome to Palm Desert, and to the Palms to Pines Scenic Byway — and welcome aboard. I'm Ranger Quinn, and I'll be riding with you the whole way, keeping you pointed the right direction and telling you what you're looking at. And riding along with me is Ranger Boone Merrick — he carries the tales, and you'll be hearing plenty from him along the way.

You're starting at the visitor center for the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument, right on Highway 74, and this is the "palms" end of the drive — the desert floor, barely a couple hundred feet above sea level, warm and dry, with fan palms and creosote and that huge open Coachella Valley stretching out behind you toward Palm Springs. Take a good look at it, and take a good look at that wall of bare, steep mountains rising up in front of you — because in the next hour we are going to climb straight up and over them, and come out the other side in a cool pine forest a mile high. That's the whole promise of this road: palms to pines, desert to mountains, in one afternoon.

Here's the plan. We'll drive up Route 74 — folks have called it the Pines to Palms Highway for almost a hundred years — as it switchbacks up out of the desert, through pinyon woods and high mountain meadows, past a lake and a record-setting old dam, to the little mountain town of Idyllwild. Then we make the one and only turn of the whole trip and roll down the far side on Route 243, down to the windy pass at Banning. Sixty-odd miles, all of it beautiful.

A couple of things before we roll: top off your gas here in town, because there's not much of it up on the mountain, and bring a jacket — it can be forty degrees cooler at the top than it is right here. When you stop and shut the engine off, the tour pauses; tap play to pick it back up. All right — pull out onto Highway 74 heading up into the mountains, and let's climb from the palms to the pines.