Poolside in Palm Springs

I hear America sloshing.

I smell chlorine and Coppertone. I see two-pieces, one-pieces, water wings, Ray Bans, loungers, lapsters, tanners, towel monitors, drinkers, smokers, fitness fiends, New Yorkers, Midwesterners and Nebraskans. I feel slick tile underfoot, ultraviolet rays on the brow, a stiff dry breeze raking across the date palms and luxury hotels of the Coachella Valley. Above rise the jagged San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains, their ridges so sharply defined that they look like a cardboard-cutout facsimile of a skyline. Now a murderous woman’s voice wafts across the water.

“Get out of my sun,” demands the voice.

Sorry.

It is peak season in America’s swimming pool capital, where the winter sky hangs cloudless and spa water bubbles naturally from the earth. I am here, poolside, to see exactly what we’ve come to, poolwise, since that fateful day when the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians put up the first commercial bathhouse at a natural spring here 123 years ago.

In one very narrow sense, nothing has changed: At essentially the same site chosen by the Agua Caliente entrepreneurs in 1871, where Indian Canyon Drive and Tahquitz Canyon Way now meet in downtown Palm Springs, the pink bulk of the Spa Hotel Resort & Mineral Springs looms five stories high against the sky. The owners of the Spa Hotel? The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, who bought the 30-year-old lodging and spa in 1992, hired a management company and, since reopening on Dec. 15, have once again been touting the restorative powers of a dip in mineral springs.

Otherwise, more or less everything has changed. Just in the municipality of Palm Springs, city planners this month counted 8,427 swimming pools, scores of them attached to hotels. That’s roughly one pool for every five city residents, which the local movers and shakers assert is the highest pool-per-capita ratio in the country. The numbers are no doubt comparable, however, in the neighboring resort cities of Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells, La Quinta, Desert Hot Springs and Cathedral City.

And the pools are clearly getting used. When the Palm Springs convention bureau commissioned a study in 1989 to find out exactly what people do on their vacations in the area, only 21% of those surveyed named golf and just 10% named tennis. About 66% named swimming and tanning a figure surpassed only by the 75% who went shopping. Probably they were buying swimwear.

“Generally speaking, the quality of the pools here is as good or better than anywhere in the country,” says Dick Leimkuhler, co-owner of Mirage WaterFeatures in Palm Desert.

“When you get outside of this area, they’re still using some antiquated techniques.”

They don’t hold with antiquated techniques here. Most of the major resorts, for instance, have in recent years added misting systems, which lower summertime poolside temperatures by as much as 10 degrees by forcing water from special pipes at pressures of 800-1,000 pounds per square inch. The 21-acre Oasis Water Resort in Palm Springs closes for the winter, but from March through fall can boast of nine water slides, a 600-foot-long river inner-tube ride, and a beach lashed by artificial waves. Over at La Mancha Private Villas in Palm Springs, owner Ken Irwin is killing germs in his main pool with a fancy new electronic ionization system, which he says was devised under the auspices of NASA and may render chlorine obsolete. In another development that may have more to do with torts than technology, one may find water slides or steel sculptures or shorelines of imported Hawaiian sand at the hotel pools of greater Palm Springs, but one finds neither diving boards nor lifeguards.

One further result of all this hydro-sophistication is that no shrewdly positioned resort can be satisfied merely to possess a pool; it must have a pool with a personality that will beckon to some segment of the market: pools for grown-ups, pools for kids, epic pools, intimate pools--or pools with historic precedent, such as those of the Spa Hotel, in whose 104-degree bubbles my odyssey began.

In its early days, the first bathhouse in Palm Springs charged 25 cents a dip. Sally McManus, director-curator of the Palm Springs Historical Society, reports that management then maintained a pair of silty pools--one for men, one for women--sheltered by unpainted pine boards.

In its new incarnation, the Spa Hotel boasts of its just-completed $9-million renovation, rents out 230 rooms at peak-season “off-the-rack” rates of $125 and up, (though introductory discount rates of $94 nightly were available in January) and offers spa services to non-guests for $20 and up. I didn’t stay there; for all its recent improvements, the place still has that built-in-1963 look to it, and fits awkwardly into a middle category, less luxurious than the desert’s newer resort hotels, more impersonal and expensive than the many inviting small hotels nearby. (I stayed happily at one of those smaller hotels, the Casa Cody Country Inn, which in proper Palm Springs style had not one but two residential-size pools serving its 17 units.)

But I did sign up for the Spa Hotel spa, which was busier than the hotel and entirely silt-free. The best deal seemed to be the $30 back massage: half an hour of pummeling, along with daylong access to the big hotel pool, two outdoor spring water pools, and most elements of the inside “spa experience.”

First stop, to clear the sinuses and open the pores, was seven minutes in the 100-degree Eucalyptus Inhalation room, which was not unlike being trapped in a burning Sucrets factory. Then a spell in the 150-degree sauna, and another spell in a tub for one, being scalded in an agreeable way by a jet stream of the hot water that gave this city its name. (Bowing to state law and the limits of human endurance, the hotel uses cold water to bring the 106-degree spring water down to 104 degrees.) Finally, a top-notch massage. A good deal all the way around.

The Spa Hotel has tenure, but no reasonable discussion of the Coachella Valley, swimming pools and history could get far before arriving at the entrance to La Quinta Hotel Golf & Tennis Resort.

It stands in the shadow of the Santa Rosa Mountains, a few miles off California 111 and about 20 miles southeast of Palm Springs proper, with the rows of cypress trees carefully tied into uniformity along the entrance drive, the colorful flower beds, the well-appointed acre after acre of one- and two-story tile-roofed casitas.

La Quinta opened in 1926, and from the beginning served as a desert hideaway for various movie stars and prominent persons. The place feels like a very rich village, one with golf and tennis facilities on all sides. There is lots of room, and not much in the way of bells and whistles. No one could afford to build a new hotel this way, and evidently, it’s been problematic sustaining an old one. Last July, the resort and its three 18-hole golf courses were sold at an auction held by the Resolution Trust Corp., fetching $136.4 million from the KSL Recreation Corp.

Among its 640 guest rooms, La Quinta’s proprietors have spread 25 swimming pools and 38 spas, several of which are now named for former hotel familiars--Gable, Garbo, Lombard, Dietrich, Renker (that’s Fred Renker, La Quinta’s first tennis pro)--and the whole place seems to radiate venerability and satisfaction.

But then, every guest has his own agenda. As I looked over the 60-year-old Renker Pool one dusk, a lone bather slipped in the gate, stepped into the hot bubbles of the poolside spa, and leaned back his head beneath the sky full of stars, the jagged mountain silhouettes, the still water of the pool. It was dead quiet. An ideal scene, by my standards. The bather, 22-year-old Mark Henny, a resident of Whidbey Island, Washington, and guitarist for the aspiring heavy metal band Grumble Thorp, seemed to think so, too, then raised his eyelids to half-staff, surveyed this world and found one element missing.

“Hey,” he asked, “anybody know where a person can get a can of beer around here?”

Sorry.

*

But a bather in greater Palm Springs can’t wallow in history, or deal in modest proportions, for long. Quickly, you’re on to the epic waterscapes, the panoramic views, the sand from Hawaii, the water slides and private water holes.

Vant to be alone? The 18-year-old La Mancha Private Villas and Court Club, in Palm Springs, discretely offers 32 pools and 41 spas in all, most of them privately attached to one of the hotel’s 54 units. “The locals in Palm Springs live by their pools,” says owner Ken Irwin. “They eat by their pools, they drink by their pools--quite a lot, in fact--and they do some other things by their pools. When we opened, we said, ‘Why don’t we give the consumer a taste of what the locals have?’ ”

Looking for child-friendliness? At the 4-year-old Stouffer Esmeralda Resort in Indian Wells, 560 pricey rooms are stacked and several dozen palm trees are arrayed around a big squarish pool with a bar in its middle and, yes, sand at one end. The sand is imported from Hawaii, concierge Nancy Jeskey reports, because “the sand here is too yellow.”

At the Westin Mission Hills Resort in Rancho Mirage, too, occupying children is a priority. When the desert dust cleared after the resort’s renovation and reopening by Westin in August, 1991, the 512-unit Moroccan-style property’s main pool (there are three) included a 60-foot-long curving water slide. Up the hill nearby, the 5-year-old Ritz-Carlton Rancho Mirage holds court near the top of Frank Sinatra Drive and ushers guests through a formal interior of dark wood and low lights to a large and languorous pool area. There were a few kids on hand during the afternoon of my visit, but the place clearly isn’t in business for their sake. The featured attractions are the view--about 180 degrees of desert --and pampering for grown-ups. Towel monitors and waiters scurry. Glass of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice? $3.77.

The Hyatt Grand Champions Resort in Indian Wells seems mostly a place for the well-fixed and grown-up, too, but in a less men’s-clubby fashion. While I was sitting by its two curvilinear principal pools , the water seemed to serve as a sort of immense coffee table, standing in aid of a humming cocktail party. As at the most interesting cocktail parties, all sorts of people were there , including a mane in a yellow T-shirt with bright red letters: HELL’S KITCHEN, NEW YORK. At the same poolside, I met Richard Dreizen and Helen Makohon, two more New Yorkers, reclining on the last day of their vacation.

“We’re hoping our flight will be canceled. No luck so far,” said Dreizen, behind shades. About 36 hours later, the Northridge earthquake struck, briefly closing down Los Angeles International Airport. Careful what you wish for, Richard.

*

A few miles northwest of Indian Wells, the loudest bells and whistles in the valley clang. An indoor-outdoor lake. Electric boats. A receiving line of flamingos by the pond out front. An eight-story atrium. The 895 rooms. The pair of golf courses. The gleaming, verdant, sprawling, 1987 excess of Marriott’s Desert Springs Resort & Spa.

The main pool lies close by the lake, and basks in Hawaiian monster-resort glory, stretching about 35 meters long, about 25 meters wide. On a Sunday afternoon, I found a pianist and percussionist pounding out live music for the masses, drink servers circulating. When the weather is warmer--the highs were in the 70seach day I was there--the scene is completed by a bevy of fit young men and women who bound about moistening guests with spritzer bottles.

The Marriott pool certainly looked to be among the largest in the valley (the Shadow Mountain Resort & Racquet Club’s 160-foot-long, 48-year-old model in Palm Desert is another contender), but the Marriott people, who have their flamingos to feed and electric boats to recharge, don’t bother to brag much about that. In fact, sifting through the pitches of local lodgings, one finds that the boasts of “Palm Springs’ largest pool” instead come from the Wyndham Palm Springs Hotel and the Palm Springs Riviera Resort & Racquet Club.

Each hotel is evidently thinking of the City of Palm Springs--thereby excluding the outlying big resorts--but even so, someone was stretching, and nothing makes a reporter happier than throwing a spotlight on someone stretching.

The Wyndham, a 410-unit hotel attached to the Palm Springs Convention Center, was a pleasant place that did have a large and popular pool, along with refreshment service and a sunbather who noted that by comparison, “the beach sucks in January.” The Wyndham management estimates the pool is 5,000 square feet.

Next stop: the nearby Riviera, with 480 rooms, a celebrity impersonator show in its lounge and Bono restaurant, owned by that guy who used to sing with Cher, next door. Eric, the 16-year-old son of a convening General Motors executive, lay near the pool, savoring his last few hours before the return to Michigan and zero degrees. “Gotta get as much as I can,” said Eric, sounding a common local sentiment.

So how big is the Riviera pool? The Riviera engineering department estimates . . . 280,000 gallons. And no, they say, they’ve never measured square feet.

Nothing makes a reporter unhappier than mathematics problems involving multiple variables. And even if you’re in the swimming pool capital of civilization, enough is enough. I came home the next morning. But when I need another desert dip, I know my options.

GUIDEBOOK

Pooling Resources

Getting there: Palm Springs and its nearby resorts are 110 miles east of Los Angeles, via Interstate 10 and California 111. The Palm Springs Regional Airport, three miles east of downtown Palm Springs, handles flights from several major and commuter airlines. Indio, 20 miles southeast of Palm Springs, has an Amtrak stop.

Where to stay: This article focuses on hotels I saw first hand; there are scores more. Among those listed here, all prices are published, “off-the-rack” rates per room per night for the lodging’s least costly accommodations, assuming double occupancy. Travelers should ask about special offers, which are widely available and often yield substantial discounts.

Casa Cody Country Inn, 175 S. Cahuilla Road, Palm Springs 92262; tel. (619) 320-9346. Winter rates (continental breakfast included) begin at $65, falling to $60 and up on April 30, to $45 on July 5. In spring, summer and fall, prices are reduced $10 a night on Sunday through Thursday nights.

Hyatt Grand Champions Resort, 44-600 Indian Wells Lane, Indian Wells 92210; tel. (800) 233-1234 or (619) 341-1000. Winter rates begin at $240, falling to $119 and up on June 1, rising to $199 on Oct. 1.

La Mancha Private Villas and Court Club, 444 Avenida Caballeros, Palm Springs 92262; tel. (800) 255-1773 or (619) 323-1773. Winter rates begin at $175. Last year’s summer rates fell to $145 on April 14.

La Quinta Hotel Golf & Tennis Resort, 49-499 Eisenhower Drive, La Quinta 92253; tel. (800) 472-4316 inside California or (619) 564-4111. Winter rates begin at $200, falling to $175 and up on March 27, rising to $200 April 8, falling to $130 May 1.

Marriott’s Desert Springs Resort and Spa, 74855 Country Club Drive, Palm Desert 92260; tel. (800) 228-9290 or (619) 341-2211. Jan. 2-June 4 rates begin at $250, falling to $120 and up June 6-July 9.

Palm Springs Riviera Resort & Racquet Club, 1600 N. Indian Canyon Drive, Palm Springs 92262-4602; tel. (619) 327-8311. Until May 31, rates begin at $135 for weekdays and $195 for weekends, falling to $69 and $130 and up June 1.

The Ritz-Carlton Rancho Mirage, 68-900 Frank Sinatra Drive, Rancho Mirage 92270; tel. (800) 241-3333 or (619) 321-8282. Winter rates begin at $260, dropping to $110 and up June 1, climbing again to $190 Sept. 16.

Spa Hotel Resort & Mineral Springs, 100 N. Indian Canyon Drive, Palm Springs 92262; tel. (800) 854-1279 or (619) 325-1461. Winter rates begin at $125, falling to $65 and up June 1.

Stouffer Esmeralda Resort, 44-400 Indian Wells Lane, Indian Wells 92210-9971; tel. (619) 773-4444 or (800) 468-3571. Winter rates begin at $275, dropping to $145 and up June 16-Sept. 30.

Westin Mission Hills Resort, 71-333 Dinah Shore Drive, Rancho Mirage 92270; tel. (619) 328-5955. High season rates begin at $239, falling to $189 and up May 1, to $109 June 12.

Wyndham Palm Springs Hotel, 888 E. Tahquitz Canyon Way, Palm Springs 92262; tel. (800) 822-4200 or (619) 322-6000. Winter rates begin at $169 through May 31, fall to $109 and up June 1-July 4, to $79 July 5-Sept. 6, and rise to $139 Sept. 7-Dec. 31.

For more information: Contact the Palm Springs Desert Resorts Convention and Visitors Bureau (which serves Palm Springs and the resort cities of Cathedral City, Desert Hot Springs, Indian Wells, Indio, La Quinta, Palm Desert, Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage), 69-930 Highway 111, Suite 201, Rancho Mirage 92270; tel. (800) 417-3529 or (619) 770-9000. Also, the Palm Springs Tourism Division (which serves the city of Palm Springs), 401 S. Pavilion Way, Palm Springs 92262; tel. (800) 347-7746 or (619) 778-8418.