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Palm Canyon, Murray Canyon and Andreas
Canyon are all listed on the National Register of
Historic Places. They really are amazing environ-
ments that have been home to the Agua Caliente
Band of Cahuilla Indians for centuries.
Palm Canyon, the largest of the three, is espe-
cially remarkable because it is considered the
world’s largest California Fan Palm Oasis, where
some 3,000 native palms line the flowing creek
along 15 miles of the canyon.
My personal favorite here is Murray Canyon
where the Seven Sisters Trail winds about 2 miles
to a rocky waterfall on Murray Creek. A little less
traveled than Palm Canyon, Murray Canyon bears
witness to the geological uplifts that formed here
at the meeting of the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto
mountain ranges. The colorful rock formations lin-
ing this trail are in themselves sights to behold.
Andreas Canyon is the easiest of the three trails
here, offering a lovely one-mile trail through a
palm tree oasis along its own creek. The bonus in
Andreas Canyon is catching a glimpse beyond the
trail’s chain-link fence end to see a scattering of
stone homes that really blend into the terrain.
These 21 homes were built in the 1920s for mem-
bers of the private Andreas Canyon Club. A tribal
ranger here told me years ago that these remark-
able homes are never sold, only handed down from
generation to generation.
Drive about 190 miles west of Palm Springs to
reach Ojai, a bucolic small town in an east-west
valley among the Western Traverse Ranges about
15 miles inland from the coast.
Ojai’s nickname is Shangri-La, evoking that mys-
tical, harmonious paradise where people are al-
ways happy. It’s been called that ever since Frank
Capra used aerial shots of this valley to depict
Shangri-La in his 1937 film adaptation of James
Hilton’s novel, “Lost Horizon.”
Left: Trails wander an old ranch at Santa
Ysabel Open Space Preserve West.
Right, top to bottom: A female California quail,
our state bird, and a Western Bluebird.
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