Cabot's Pueblo Museum

Cabot Abram Yerxa was born in 1883 and lived several lives before the desert, including a stint selling goods in Alaska during the Klondike gold rush. In 1913 he filed a homestead claim on 160 acres of raw Coachella Valley desert, hauling water and supplies by hand across ground that most people considered worthless.

Digging wells with a pick and shovel, he found two separate aquifers on either side of his hill, split by the Mission Creek Fault, a branch of the great San Andreas. One well came up cold and one came up hot, around 110 degrees, and that hot mineral water is what later gave rise to the spas and resorts that named the town.

Yerxa began the pueblo itself in 1941, when he was already in his late fifties, and kept building until he died in 1965. He used sun-dried adobe bricks he made himself and lumber salvaged from abandoned homestead cabins, reusing old nails and windows, which is why nothing quite lines up. He dedicated the Hopi-style pueblo as a tribute to Native peoples, though the Cahuilla are the people whose homeland this desert actually is.

After Yerxa's death the building fell into disrepair and was nearly lost, until an actor named Cole Weston and later the city stepped in to save it. Today it is a museum and a designated historic site, still full of the artifacts, art, and homesteading gear Yerxa gathered over a lifetime.

Inside, the pueblo is a warren of small rooms, low passages, and staircases that turn in unexpected directions. Yerxa built it to work with the desert climate the way older Pueblo builders did, using thick adobe walls and clever placement of windows to hold the cool of the night deep into the day.

The rooms are hung with Yerxa's collection of Native American and Alaska Native art and artifacts alongside the plain tools and furniture of a homesteader's life, so a single visit moves between the personal and the museum-like. Because the whole place was improvised, the pleasure is in the details: a window salvaged from one cabin set beside a door from another, a wall that bulges where the hillside pushed back.

Standing guard outside is Waokiye, which means Traditional Helper, a forty-three-foot monument carved from a single giant sequoia log by the sculptor Peter Wolf Toth. It is one of a series of large Native American tributes Toth placed in all fifty states, and it gives the entrance its unmistakable landmark.

The grounds also hold short interpretive and meditative trails and a trading post, and the hillside setting opens onto long views across the valley toward the San Jacinto and San Gorgonio mountains. Even without a tour ticket, the exterior and the sculpture are worth the drive up the hill.

This is the Colorado Desert, the low, hot western arm of the Sonoran, and the plants and animals here are built for extremes: creosote and smoke trees, roadrunners, black-tailed jackrabbits, and the occasional coyote crossing at dusk. Spring can bring wildflowers to the surrounding slopes after a wet winter.

Summers are genuinely severe, with daytime highs that can push past 110 degrees, so the comfortable seasons run from about October into May. Winter days are often warm and clear, which is exactly why the mineral-water spa town below fills up in the cooler months.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.