A Pioneering Experience : Touring the Desert by Covered Wagon Offers an Old-Fashioned Perspective

The freeway is the fastest way to get across the desert, but it’s not the only way.

California settlers made the trek by covered wagon: The trip was rugged, romantic--and extremely slow. You can’t really get to know the desert at 65 m.p.h.; you can get pretty well acquainted rolling along at a mule’s pace.

Neil Fawcett and Craig Allen, a couple of horseshoers from the Coachella Valley, figure a covered wagon is the best way to see the real desert. Passengers have plenty of time to take in the surroundings while getting a feel for what it was like for early settlers.

Fawcett, 48, and Allen, 35, used their skills as blacksmiths to build three covered wagons, which, except for the rubber tires, look like the real thing--or what the average moviegoer perceives to be the real thing after a steady diet of Hollywood Westerns.

Their Covered Wagon Tours operates in the Coachella Valley Preserve, 13,000 acres of desert in Thousand Palms, just north of Palm Springs. The two-hour tours offer large groups of people a peek at the history, ecology and beauty of the desert without causing much of a disturbance.

The two trail bosses say their motive for getting into the desert tour business was money--”there has to be a better way” to make a buck than shoeing horses, Fawcett recalls thinking. Both men work at a polo club where 4,000-5,000 horses come through during the winter season alone.

But clearly money isn’t the only thing that motivates these entrepreneurs. Fawcett and Allen consistently make the point that the desert is a treasure that warrants protection. The tour is structured to be a fun outdoors experience, but also a lesson that visitors won’t soon forget. City folks are noticeably antsy when the covered wagon, pulled by a team of mules, sets out at a turtle’s pace across the preserve.

Tour guide Jennifer Priest Purcell diverts the passengers’ attention to the plants, burrows and critter paw prints nearest the wagon.

Allen rides alongside the wagon on a mule, while Fawcett, wearing a Western-style hat and a full beard, looks the part of a pioneer as he drives the mule team. Contrary to big-screen Westerns, mule power was preferred over horsepower because mules are more durable and sure-footed.

Fawcett got to know his way around the desert while moonlighting as a prospector. That’s when he began to appreciate its natural beauty and solitude.

“Having spent time prospecting, I’ve seen the beauty out there, when it’s not strewn with beer cans and car bodies,” Fawcett says. “It makes me sick to see trash when I come down to the desert.”

Stopping the tour wagon to pick up a piece of trash is automatic.

Though the preserve is open to the public, the only vehicles allowed are those driven by rangers and the covered wagons. Covered Wagon Tours, in fact, has become a sort of desert police force by reporting sightings of unauthorized vehicles, animals or activity in the area.

Fawcett tends to take human insensitivity toward the desert personally, but he explains that the rules out here are strict because people can easily drive over desert inhabitants or disrupt life without even knowing it.

By the time Fawcett and Priest Purcell get through their stories of humans versus nature, everyone is looking over the sides of the wagon, worried now that the wagon might be going too fast for desert inhabitants to get out of the way.

Priest Purcell, 34, is a student of natural resources at College of the Desert in Palm Desert. Her field of study adds another dimension to the tours, giving the visitors a crash course in desert survival and geology.

“The more people learn about the desert, the more they want to preserve it,” she says.

Though the desert preserve may look quite desolate to the untrained observer, the area was able to sustain Cahuilla Indians who once lived here. The Indians knew all about the desert, says Priest Purcell, and had a use for every plant. They also had great respect for natural resources and fellow desert dwellers, no matter how small.

“The Cahuilla understood the life cycle,” Priest Purcell says. “They would never take all of a plant; they would always leave some for the rodents, or as gratitude to the creator.”

Priest Purcell also describes desert plants and their ancient uses. The indigo root, for instance, was used to dye baskets.

Because of drought conditions this year, few plants are at their best, but the recent rain is already making a difference. Priest Purcell, who studies biology and entomology, brought healthy samples from her own yard to give covered wagon passengers a closer look at the colorful flowers, unusual textures and fragrant qualities of desert plants.

The covered wagon trail includes stops at Pushwalla Canyon and Hidden Palms Oasis.

Oases are curious sites in the desert, seemingly contradictions. But the palm trees are simply an indication that an earthquake fault line lies beneath. The palm trees that border the covered wagon trail, Priest Purcell says, indicate the path of the San Andreas Fault.

The oases sprout when two fault plates meet and form underground dams, which create pools of water that sustain plant life. Temperatures are often 10 to 15 degrees cooler in an oasis.

Palm trees and mesquite are among the trees that thrive at Hidden Palms oasis. The Cahuilla Indians used fan palms for food, building and basket-making and for shade. The mesquite is a sprawling tree with thorns, seed pods and tiny yellow flowers. The Cahuilla utilized every part of this tree: the seed pods were mixed with water for a drink, the wood was burned for cooking and firing pottery, and the limbs were used in building frames.

In the desert, winter months are especially pleasant, though once the sun goes down, it really gets cold. Spring is a good time to see the desert in bloom--white, yellow and lavender flowers cover the canyon floors. July and August are too hot for the tours, the owners say.

About sundown at the end of a trail, passengers are greeted with big steaming pots of coffee and hot chocolate.

Tri-tip steaks sizzle on a fire pit constructed with iron and river rock by Fawcett and Allen. Beans, salad, bread and apple pie are laid out on picnic tables. Everyone eats off tin plates as a guitar player entertains.

“I’m in love with the desert,” says Doris Ramsey, a passenger on the tour. “There’s a romance about it. When Jennifer talks about the plants and everything it makes the desert so alive.”

Ramsey adds that she has found new respect for the desert: “All those things are not just weeds out there. It’s a living desert.”

The 13,000-acre preserve is not the only desert left in the Coachella Valley, but that will change by the year 2000, Fawcett says. The handwriting is already on the concrete.

“This valley is all planned out,” Fawcett says. “There’s not going to be any (untouched) land left.”

He finds some comfort in knowing that at least this portion of the wild, pristine desert is going to remain intact, thanks to a little guy called the fringed-toed lizard. Because this desert is the only place in the world this lizard can be found, federal and state agencies worked together to create the preserve. Now the land is looked after by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

“There will never be condominiums here--not that there’s anything wrong with them,” Fawcett says, “but it’s nice to know there will always be desert.”

The effects of automobiles and off-road vehicles on the desert are most obvious in the Mecca Hills section of the Coachella Valley. Gen. George Patton trained troops here in the 1930s--and you can still see the tracks.

“That illustrates how slowly the desert recovers from man’s activities,” Fawcett says.

One of the biggest problems in the preserve, Fawcett says, is guns. “There’s a serious problem with shooting. Most of the trash picked up here has at least two bullet holes.”

These cowboys’ efforts to raise public awareness of the desert isn’t an isolated one; in fact, the California Desert Protection Act (HR 780) is pending before Congress.

The act pits supporters, mostly environmentalists, against a group of mostly off-road vehicles enthusiasts. The areas affected include Death Valley and Joshua Tree national monuments and the establishment of a new, 1.5-million-acre national park in the eastern Mojave Desert.

The desert is there to be enjoyed, Fawcett says: “Most people think the Nature Conservancy wants to keep people out (of the preserve); they don’t. But the idea is to protect the natural habitat, to keep vehicles out. We bring people into the area with a minimum impact--with less impact than the same number of hikers.”

The way Fawcett and Allen see it, the more people learn about the desert, the more they’ll want to preserve it.

“It’s really a thrill doing these tours,” Allen says. “The comments you get when it’s over are gratifying. People say they never realized there’s that much to the desert.”

Covered Wagon Tours, P.O. Box 1106, La Quinta, Calif. 92253; (619) 347-2161. Prices: $50 for adults, $27.50 for children 7-16, ages 6 and under free (without dinner, prices begin at $35).