Once the private retreat of Old Hollywood, Palm Springs is now a golfer’s paradise
“There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …”
Judy Garland’s famous words from The Wizard of Oz ring as true to Pacific Northwest residents today as they did to Kansas’ Dorothy Gale. We love our mountain and water views, our progressive cultural and civic mindset — even our four distinct and ever-changing seasons.
That said, we can click the heels of our ruby golf shoes together all we want, and it’s not going to change the fact that golfing in the Northwest between November and March is more “tornado” than “rainbow.”
So this year, we’re following the advice of Judy Garland herself, who — like dozens of the biggest stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age — spent many winters between the San Jacinto Mountains and the Salton Sea, in a palm-tree laden, sun-drenched town that has become an American symbol of living the good life: Palm Springs.
Golfers, celebrities and business moguls alike have been making Palm Springs (located in the Coachella Valley, roughly two hours southeast of Los Angeles) their winter home for nearly 75 years. Few roadways embodied the glitz and glam of old Hollywood like California’s famed Palm Canyon Drive, where mild winter temperatures and a sense of isolation among the surrounding mountain ranges created a semi-private playground for the world’s most famous stars. With the city serving as a celluloid substitute for the Arabian desert, the Mexican highlands and other exotic locales, Palm Springs in the winter months had almost as many stars as Hollywood itself — and where the stars go, the star-crossed public follows.
Thousands of vacationers flocked to the Coachella Valley in the 1950s and ‘60s, cruising down Palm Canyon Drive (now officially State Highway 111) in their cherry red Cadillac convertibles with the hopes of spotting Bob Hope at the El Mirador, Frank Sinatra holding court with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr., at the Racquet Club (rumored to be the spot Marilyn Monroe was first discovered) or Elvis Presley lounging poolside at the Caliente Tropics.
While Hope, Sinatra, Gene Autry, Dinah Shore and the rest of the Old Hollywood set live on only in the streets that bear their names, Palm Springs continues to be a mecca for wintertime vacationers — not of the movie star or celebrity-seeker variety, but rather a more unlikely desert voyager … golfers.
With over 120 courses — including quality public tracks and some of world’s leading golf resorts — and wintertime temperatures that hover between 70-85, there are few cities in the entire world whose very identity is as entwined with the game of golf as Palm Springs.
Relatively quiet in the summer, when the thermometer reads well into three digits and the sprinklers run practically 24-7, Palm Springs’ population nearly doubles from November to April, as thousands of “snowbirds” (as the city’s winter vacationers are called) flood Palm Springs International Airport and clog the eastbound lanes of I-10 out of L.A., all flocking to the desert for months of sun, golf and pina coladas on the clubhouse deck.
We’re certainly not the first from this corner of the country to venture south for the winter. Many of the club pros and resort representatives we spoke with said that residents of the Pacific Northwest represent one of the fastest-growing segments of Palm Springs’ snowbird population.