The Cahuilla Tewanet Scenic Overlook — a signature interpretive pull-off high on Route 74, with Cahuilla-themed panels and a grand view down the Santa Rosa Mountains into the desert canyons that were, and are, Cahuilla homeland.
Coming up on your right is one of the signature stops of the whole drive — the Cahuilla Tewanet Scenic Overlook. Pull in. There's a viewing area with interpretive panels, and a big sweeping look out over the Santa Rosa Mountains dropping away into the desert. It's a beautiful spot, and it's named to honor the people whose homeland every mile of this is: the Cahuilla.
The Cahuilla have lived in these mountains and the desert below for something like three thousand years — long, long before the road, before Palm Desert, before any of it. They knew this country in a way that's hard for us to imagine, moving with the seasons between the cool mountain oak and pinyon groves up high and the warm palm-oasis canyons down below, following the acorns and the pine nuts and the mesquite. That whole vertical world you're driving through in an hour, from desert to pines — they lived up and down it, on foot, for a hundred generations. "Tewanet," the name on this overlook, is a Cahuilla word, and Boone will tell you more of their story, and of the spirit the Cahuilla say still haunts these very peaks.
Take a few minutes with the view and the panels here — it's one of the most peaceful, wide-open spots on the mountain. Then we'll press on up into the pinyon country.
Photo: shastared from Philadelphia, USA · CC BY 2.0
