How the Pines to Palms Highway finally got built — the decades of horseback-only travel, the promoters who wouldn't quit, and the hand-cut gravel road that opened in 1932.
This road you're driving so easily, air conditioning humming, radio playing — let me tell you what it took to get it here, because for the longest time, there was no road at all.
Go back a hundred and some years. If you were down in the Coachella Valley, in the desert, and you wanted to get up to Idyllwild in the cool pines — a place you can now see out your windshield, just up the hill — you could not drive there. There was no way. Your choices were two: you could go on foot or on horseback, straight up the mountain on rough trails, a hard, steep haul. Or, if you insisted on taking a wagon or one of those newfangled automobiles, you had to drive all the way around the whole mountain range — down and around by Banning or Hemet and back up the other side — a journey of about a hundred miles to reach a spot you could nearly throw a rock at. A hundred miles, to get around one mountain.
Folks looked at that and said, there has got to be a better way — let's cut a road straight over. And a couple of stubborn dreamers led the charge, men named J. Win Wilson and Wilson Howell, who spent years and years pushing and promoting and scheming to make it happen. It was not easy. This is brutal country to build a road through — solid rock, sheer canyons, and no easy grade anywhere. But finally, at the tail end of the nineteen-twenties, the crews went to work, blasting and grading a route up through the pinyon flats, foot by foot, and in the summer of 1932 they opened it: a narrow gravel road, at last, straight from the pines down to the palms. Paved a few years after that.
They called it the Pines to Palms Highway, and it changed everything — suddenly the desert and the mountains were an hour apart instead of a hundred miles. So the next time the road curves and you barely have to touch the wheel, tip your hat to old Wilson and Howell and the crews who cut it out of the rock, so you could drive from summer to winter and back in an afternoon. It was a thirty-year dream before it was ever a road. Roll on up it.
Photo: Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, United States · CC BY 2.0
.jpg){kind=link}