Idyllwild

Located on Hwy 243 above 5300 feet on the south side of Idyllwild, the tahquitz Inn has been serving guests since 1977. Tahquitz is the name of the Indian tribe that inhabited the region in the 1700 and 1800's.

As some of you might have noticed, I spent a great deal of my youth up in Idyllwild, about 2 months each summer and the 2 week Christmas break....Usually in the summer I was just up with my cousins, my mom, dad and sister, especially my sister would all be at home in Upland.
I can remember one Christmas break in 1958, when the whole family was together at my aunt and uncles place and it was real cold, -7 degrees daytime highs and about 4 feet of snow on the ground. One day we all decided to go sledding. We were right at the base of Suicide Rock and had all of the roads to ourselves, except other people who lived up there....The Sheriff and the CHP had closed the mountain down because of the heavy snow fall and the below zero temperatures...Essentially we had the streets of a very frozen Idyllwild to our selves.

That's what my uncle Al asked me one summer while I was staying with my cousins up in Idyllwild....I was about 7 at the time and there would be about 100 mules and horses with about 25 Cowboys and Skinners including my dad going up with us.
They carried every thing from metal braces for the tram way, as well as food and other supplies for the crews working up at the summit on Mt San Jacinto. This was in 1960 and this was the building of the Palm Springs tramway.
The trail started in Idyllwild at the stables my Uncle Al Smith owned at the time....The trail wound out west of town and up towards Tahaquez Rock and then up the rock face rim of the North Face of Mt San Jacinto.....This is the side of the Mountain you always see as you travel out the Banning Pass on highway 10 to Palm Springs and the Southern Desert...It is also the side that is 10,000 feet straight up from the valley floor....It is also the side that the snow stays on right through the summer time.....So it colder and very windy up there on the top of that rock face, and where something happened that I still remember to this day.

This event took pace in 1955, if my memory serves me right....My dad had volunteered to take a load of hey up to Idyllwild up the back side of the mountain which is steep and winding but easier to get up than coming up from Hemet. That road was full of double backs, real steep and longer if you are coming out of Ontario Like he would-be doing.

I remember that we all went....My Mom, dad driving of course since he was a truck driver at the time, and me and my sister sitting back in the cab Quarters. I was about 12 at the time and my sister about 6, and a real pain in the but if you know what I mean.

The trip out Mission was uneventful. No trouble at all out on the Ramona Expressway out through the Perris Valley and our turn on to the north bound 79 was no problem either. You must remember that the 60 and 10 freeways did not exist out this far yet so we were coming out mission to Van Buran crossing through Sunny just North of March Air Force Base and heading east on SunnyMead Road.

In Idyllwild, there is a precipitous rock that looms over the northern part of the community that we always referred to as 'Lilly Rock' but is better known as Suicide Rock. As a kid my family owned the stables in town and most of the land north of the community, even the bowling alley was owned by Uncle. Today those stables are long gone, replaced by grocery stores and condos.

But I degrees, lets get back to Lilly Rock. I was told when I was about 10 the story of Lilly Rock. The reason was because I notched that large drops of water came off the rock long after the snow had melted. So I asked my relatives, who were all Indians, where the water was coming from. At the time they lived right at the base of Lilly Rock, and you could hear the water drops hit the top of the trailer all night long. So here is the True story of Suicide Rock or as we always knew it, Lilly Rock.