In 1887, twenty-five dollars bought a roundtrip ticket on an excursion train from San Francisco to Palm Springs, "the only spot in California where frost, fog and windstorms are absolutely unknown," according to a real estate advertisement of the day. Mule-drawn buckboards transferred passengers from the train station to the Palm Springs Hotel, where they played bridge and drank beer under the palms, soaked in hot mineral pools inside a rickety wooden bathhouse, and picnicked in the Indian Canyons.

Over a hundred years and a hundred golf courses later, today's desert oasis of Palm Springs, and the seven other desert resort cities of the Coachella Valley, continue to lure "snowbirds" south, year after year, for dry, sunny days of golf, tennis, and lazing around the 30,000 swimming pools in the valley. A lively calendar of annual cultural events, fairs, golf and tennis competitions, and festivals, from mid-October to mid-May, invite winter vacationers to come again.

The Palm Springs Hotel and the bathhouse are long gone. On that site, on today's Indian Canyon Drive in Palm Springs, is the Spa Resort Casino, owned by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. As you enter the hotel, you can look down into the bubbling, steaming springs below; the temperature is a constant 106 degrees. This resort and over forty more hotel and spa properties in the valley have direct access to the restorative, mineral-rich waters, offering indoor and outdoor hot pools and spa treatments, from mud baths and body wraps to aromatherapy and massage. The Palm Springs area is known as the birthplace of American spas.

In the glamorous Hollywood heydey of the 1920s and 1930s, movie stars began coming to the Coachella Valley in the winter months to escape their fans and the tabloids. A favorite haunt was a small, European-style hotel, the Ingleside Inn. Clark Gable, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Barbara Stanwyck often sat by the Ingleside pool, watching the sun paint purple streaks across the San Jacinto Mountains. Howard Hughes hid behind the hotel's veil of secrecy, and Frank and Barbara Sinatra had their wedding dinner here. The hotel is still a hideaway for celebrities, honeymooners and shy millionaires; one of the Ingleside Rolls Royces is occasionally seen ferrying John Travolta or Arnold Schwartzenegger from the airport.

The oldest of the Palm Springs area resorts still in existence, the Hotel La Quinta opened in the winter of 1927, just in time to host passengers from a Southern Pacific train marooned in Indio, including the son of former president William Howard Taft. A local newspaper reported that "the party stayed for dinner and enjoyed a social dance in the evening." The original twenty rooms, restaurant and garden courtyards were constructed of adobe bricks and clay roof tiles hand-made by Mexican laborers; the entire hotel cost $150,000 to build. Errol Flynn, Ginger Rogers and a parade of Hollywood stars routinely made the 100-mile trek over the mountains in unairconditioned cars to relax at La Quinta and play on the 9-hole golf course, the first in the valley, for a green fee of one dollar per golfer.

Today, the 640 Spanish-style rooms and suites at La Quinta Resort and Club are surrounded by acres of citrus groves and lush tropical gardens, with more than two dozen swimming pools and thirty-eight whirlpool spas scattered discretely throughout the grounds. Seclusion, privacy and golf remain the order of the day.

No other resort property in Southern California offers as many top-rated golf courses as La Quinta, including the PGA West Jack Nicklaus Resort Course, and four Pete Dye-designed layouts: the PGA West TPC Stadium Golf Course, the Mountain, the Dunes and the private Citrus course. The PGA Tour considers some of the holes at La Quinta to be among the most difficult in the country and vacationing golfers consider them the ultimate test of their mettle. Dye intended the Stadium course to be "the hardest damn golf course in the world.Ó

Annual golf tournaments attract thousands of snow bunnies during the high season of January, February and March, when desert weather is at its clear, dry best. Temperatures are in the 70s and 80s when the annual Bob Hope Chrysler Classic is held on private country club courses, where a raft of celeb golfers vie for the Pro-Am titles. The 1995 tournament at Indian Wells Country Club was one for the history books, when three presidents--Bush, Ford and Clinton--teamed up with 92-year-old Bob Hope, Palm Springs' most beloved permanent resident. The First Players' scores: Clinton 95, Bush 93, Ford 103.

More than 100 women pros compete in the annual Nabisco Dinah Shore tournament at the Westin Mission Hills Resort. From the tile-roofed, Moroccan-style complex of buildings, views are of the dramatic San Jacinto range and the Pete Dye resort course, generously endowed, in true Dye fashion, with lakes, waterfalls, railroad ties and 70 looming bunkers. The Mission Hills North course was designed by Gary Player to reflect the natural contours and flora of desert arroyos, with boulder-strewn lakes and sloped fairways added.

In March, thousands of tennis players and fans descend on Indian Wells for the ATP-WTA Tennis Masters; the nation's only Golf Cart Parade takes place in December. Through the winter and spring, the Fabulous Palm Springs Follies wows snowbirds with Ziegfeld-style music and dancing from the '30s and '40s. Chorus lines of ladies ages fifty through seventy-plus perform to sold-out audiences and rave reviews.

For nearly sixty years, the National Date Festival in Indio, in February, has celebrated the Coachella Valley's date industry with camel and ostrich races and a reproduction of a marketplace in old Baghdad. If you come in an Arabian nights costume, admission is free!

Costume parties, festivals, Western dances and horseback rides entertained tourists in the early days, just as they do today. The El Mirador--a resort popular in the 1930s--started the "Desert Riders" club, supplying trail horses, a stagecoach and buggies, cowboy cooks and singing wranglers for daytrips and starlit forays into the nearby canyons and mountains. Outfitted in Stetson hats and custom-tailored Western shirts and jeans, Hollywood types such as Henry Fonda and William Holden, and even Ivy Baker Priest, former U.S. Treasurer, came along for the fun. Author Tony Burke, one of the original El Mirador staff, wrote of the "celebrated personages who participated in our Desert Riders events", including an Englishman with an Oxford accent who wore elaborate riding apparel, a big hat and a monocle. Burke wrote, "He was a pleasant fellow with a liking for Pernod, which he brought along by the case."

Desert safaris these days style are by four-wheel drive Jeep. On a Desert Adventures Ranch Jeep trek into the Santa Rosa Mountains, you can see ancient Indian petroglyphs, waterfalls and palm groves in stream canyons, and sometimes Big Horn sheep. Spring is the best time to venture out on horseback or 4WD, when waterfalls are at their peak and wildflowers run rampant across the desert floor. A bird's eye view is even better, any time of year. Parachutes Over Palm Springs offers tandem jumping for a breathtaking way to see the valley from above. You can sail on a warm desert breeze in a hot-air balloon, or take the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway to 8,516 feet atop Mt. San Jacinto and have lunch with your feet on the ground.

At the Village Green Heritage Center in Palm Springs, you can see photos of the Coachella Valley taken from the Goodyear Blimp in 1930, showing miles of empty desert between the handful of tiny towns that eventually became the eight resort towns of today--Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Desert Hot Springs, Indian Wells, Indio, La Quinta, Palm Desert, and Rancho Mirage.

Writing of Palm Springs in the 1930s, Tony Burke recalled, "The first trailer to roll into Palm Springs was the property of one of the richest men in the nation, Frank Hutton of Wall Street renown. It pulled up to the entrance of the (Hotel) El Mirador hitched to a Rolls-Royce limousine, followed by another Rolls. Hutton and his entourage drove off to camp in the nearby palm trees. The next day he complained to the sheriff that someone had stolen his dress suit with black pearl studs and cuff links."

Burke wrote of "celebrities who came and went like so many sunrises and sunsets." By trailer hitched to a limo, by train and by car, the rich and the famous of seven decades ago made the journey over the mountains from Los Angeles to the green oasis of Palm Springs, to play in the sun and bask in the restorative hot waters, just as today's snowbirds migrate south in the winter, seeking warmth and relaxation in the beautiful Coachella Valley.