The Riders of the Old Trails

The trail you're walking is old — older than the town, older than the tollgate, old beyond reckoning — because these canyon paths were Cahuilla trails first, worn by countless generations of feet moving between the villages and the water and the high country. And I want to tell you a gentler story about them, from the early days of Palm Springs, when folks first came to ride these trails on horseback.

Back around nineteen thirty, when Palm Springs was still a small, dusty desert village just beginning to draw winter visitors, a group of riding enthusiasts formed up a club they called the Desert Riders. And what they loved to do was saddle up and ride out into these canyons and up into the mountains, along the old trails, into country most visitors never saw — the palm oases, the high passes, the secret green places in the folds of the San Jacintos. It was the great romantic adventure of early Palm Springs: a long day in the saddle through wild, beautiful desert.

But here's the part I want you to hold on to, because it's what makes this a good story rather than just another tale of outsiders wandering onto Native land. These were Cahuilla trails, on Cahuilla land, and the riders knew it, and rode them with the tribe's leave — and their guide, the man who knew these trails and this country better than anyone and led them safely through it, was a Cahuilla tribal member, a superb horseman named Lee Arenas. Think about that picture: the newcomers following the tribesman, along his people's own ancient paths, through his people's own country, because he was the expert and the authority and the one who truly knew the way. That's how it should be. So as you walk this old path today, know that it has carried Cahuilla feet for thousands of years, and that the early riders who came after went where they went because a Cahuilla man showed them how — the right way to enter someone else's homeland: humbly, and with a good guide. Walk on down the old trail.