The hook
One man spent decades hand-building a four-story, thirty-five-room Hopi-style pueblo out of other people's cast-offs, and it still stands in Desert Hot Springs exactly as he left it.
01Why it's worth it
Cabot Yerxa was a desert homesteader, adventurer, and self-taught builder who started raising this pueblo in 1941 from whatever he could scavenge, and he kept at it until he died twenty-four years later. The result is gloriously irregular: four stories, five thousand square feet, thirty-five rooms, sixty-five doors, and a hundred and fifty windows of which no two are the same, old telephone poles driven through the walls and salvaged glass set wherever it fit. He built it as a tribute to the Native peoples of the desert and filled it with his collection. Nothing about it is level or matched, and that's the whole charm; it's a life's work of improvisation set in adobe. You see it on a guided tour of about forty-five minutes, which is the only way inside and the right way to understand it.
02How to experience it
It's on Desert View Avenue in Desert Hot Springs, about eight hours from the Bay. Tours run most days for a fee and are the only way in, though you can walk the grounds on your own. Summer afternoons are punishing here, so come in the morning or in the cooler months. It pairs with a soak at one of Desert Hot Springs' mineral spas.