The mountain makes Palm Springs … well, Palm Springs.
It protects the Coachella Valley from coastal dampness, fog and westerly winds. It’s a natural barrier between climates unlike any other in the United States.
Mount San Jacinto, at 10,834 feet, is not close to being California’s highest peak. It’s not even the highest peak nearby; San Gorgonio Mountain, to the immediate north across the pass, is a bit higher at 11,499 feet—but “Old Grayback” is not nearly as imposing, as its rounded summit almost gets lost among the southern San Bernardino Mountains.
Mount San Jacinto has drawn the attention of visitors for centuries. Indigenous tribes considered it sacred, and today’s travelers along Interstate 10 have a hard time taking their eyes off the dramatic peak. It is the most swiftly rising peak of any in the United States, rising vertically from Palm Springs’ elevation of 452 feet—almost two miles straight up. Mount Whitney (at 14,505 feet) and other Sierra Nevada peaks rise from a valley floor of around 5,000 feet.
J. Smeaton Chase opens his fine 1920 book Our Araby with this sentence: “Mount San Jacinto stands isolated and conspicuous, like another Shasta, at the southern end of the great Sierra which forms the backbone of California. … This desert face of San Jacinto offers to the view a mountain wall unparalleled for its conjunction of height and verticality—in effect a vast precipice of ten thousand feet.”
To the bands of Cahuilla who inhabited the area in and around Mount San Jacinto, the mountain was a sacred place—which became home to the evil, powerful demon Tahquitz. Mukat (Mo-cot), the legendary creator of the Cahuilla, created Tahquitz (Ta-co-wits), appointed him the first puul (shaman) and bestowed many supernatural powers upon him, expecting that he would use them for good. But Tahquitz violated Mukat’s laws and used his powers for evil; he was banished to a cave high up on Tahquitz Peak in the San Jacinto Mountains.
There are many legends about the power of Tahquitz. It is said he craved human flesh and beautiful women. People who disappeared on the mountain were reputed to have been carried off by Tahquitz to his lair—and then eaten. The Tahquitz legends went beyond the Cahuilla tribe and were known by almost every Indigenous person in Southern California.
According to Cahuilla Chief Francisco Patencio, who published much of his band’s oral history in 1943:
The man Tahquitz (Ta co wits) was a man of great power. He was one of the first created by Mukat. But he did not do any good. He never tried to cure anybody, or do any good for anyone. So he did not have any friends among his people, and he knew that he did not deserve any.
He went on up to one of the Moreno Hills and practiced flying over to the next one. This he did until he became powerful enough to fly. He became a very bad spirit. He lives in the world and makes his home in the Tahquitz (San Jacinto) mountains. He speaks through the lightning and thunder, and is seen everywhere. He kills the people, also the spirits of the people. He kills the animals as well as the people. Causes the wrecks of trains and automobiles, and delights in everything that makes people trouble.
People who disappeared on the mountain were reputed to have been carried off by Tahquitz to his lair—and then eaten.
The Cahuilla people lived on both sides of the sacred mountain, and many of those bands, primarily those on the more easily accessible western slopes, ventured into the mountains for the bountiful deer and other game, as well as acorns and piñon nuts.
Indigenous people called San Jacinto Mountain i a kitch, meaning “smooth cliffs,” referring to the rocky cliffs on the peaks. In contrast, they called the rounded dome of San Gorgonio Mountain to the north queri kitch, meaning “bald.”
The first known white men to spot the San Jacinto peak were Capt. Juan Bautista de Anza and his party of 34 who crossed the desert in 1774, opening up a route to coastal California. While they missed Palm Springs—skirting the Santa Rosas on the south side at Borrego Valley and Coyote Canyon to the west of the mountains—they could hardly miss the dramatic peak. The group descended into the present San Jacinto Valley, as Anza wrote in his diary, “keeping on our right a high, snow-covered mountain.” Anza himself is reputed to have named the peak ‘San Jacinto’ after Saint Hyacinth, a Silesian nobleman who later became a Dominican missionary noted for his intelligence and devout piety (1185-1257).
White men began activity on Mount San Jacinto by the mid-19th century. Lumber was being cut; cattle and sheep were grazing in the meadows; and roads were being created farther and farther up the mountainside. Yielding to pressure, President Grover Cleveland signed a bill creating the San Jacinto Forest Preserve on Feb. 22, 1897.
From the air, Mount San Jacinto looks like a sharp molar, with the lower peaks of Tahquitz Peak and Apache Peak (oddly named, since there were no Apaches in the area) giving way to verdant valleys, turbulent streams and bright green meadows, rising past Marion Mountain and through Round Valley to the mountain’s craggy summit.
The view from the top is sublime. To the south, one can see the Santa Rosas turning purple on their long march to the Mexican border; to the west, views extend across the entire San Jacinto Valley to the Santa Ana Mountains of Orange County; and to the north, Old Grayback and the other San Bernardino Mountains are viewed across the San Gorgonio Pass.
Arguably, the most impressive sight is straight down into the San Gorgonio Pass, where one can see the town of Cabazon, Interstate 10 and the railroad tracks—tiny, looking like toys. One can visualize the dynamics of the narrow pass, where the hot desert air collides with moist, cooler temperatures, creating one of the most effective wind funnels in the world.
To the east, across the vast Colorado Desert with its fertile square sections of land, is the Salton Sea; closer in, Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley communities offer squares of greenery amid a light brown desert.
Many times, from Palm Springs, one can see clouds near the mountain’s summit, evidence that the weather on the “other side” is overcast, rainy and about 30 degrees cooler. The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway’s steel cables reflect the sunlight every now and then.
The mountain is mentioned as “lofty pinnacles above, which seem to pierce the sky” by Helen Hunt Jackson in her ageless 1884 novel, Ramona. She was not alone in speaking of the mountain with such superlatives. George Wharton James, Charles Francis Saunders and the aforementioned J. Smeaton Chase are among the many early white settlers to speak reverently about the mountain.
Sources for this article include Our Araby, by J. Smeaton Chase (Star-News Publishing, Pasadena, 1920); Stories and Legends of the Palm Springs Indians, by Chief Francisco Patencio (Times Mirror, Los Angeles, 1943); and Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson (1884).
The shadow of a Large Witch can be seen in the morning hours over Tahquitz Falls. I have pictures of this at various hours of the morning.