Just after sunrise on a cooling September morning, the gravel lot behind the Target on Painters Path holds two crowds that never quite look at each other. Hikers stretch against tailgates and check water bottles before climbing into the Santa Rosa foothills. A few yards over, in a fenced dirt oval, someone is already running practice laps on a 1/8-scale nitro buggy, the engine's whine bouncing off the same rock face the trail climbs. Both groups showed up for the same parking lot behind the same shopping center, and neither is wrong about what this place is for.
Most people who live in Palm Desert and hike the Bump and Grind on a regular basis know it as one trail. It is actually two trails wearing one nickname, sitting inside a legal compromise most hikers have never read, above a business that pays the city one dollar a year to exist in the same lot. None of that changes the workout. It changes what the trail is actually doing while you're on it.
The Closure Everyone Remembers Already Lifted
Ask a regular why the Bump and Grind's upper section sometimes has a locked gate and most will say something about sheep. That part is true. What gets lost is the timing.
The upper out-and-back stretch of the trail sits inside the Magnesia Spring Ecological Reserve, habitat for the Peninsular bighorn sheep, an endangered subspecies found only in the lower desert between the Coachella Valley and Baja California. After a public fight that spilled into a 200-person town hall in Palm Desert, the state settled the matter with legislation. Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill in 2011 that fixed the schedule everyone now hikes around: the upper gate closes for roughly three months, from around February 1 through the end of April, to protect ewes raising lambs, and stays open the other nine months of the year. The Bighorn Institute, the nonprofit that helped broker the deal, backed the nine-month window as a workable balance between recreation and the sheep's lambing season.
Run the math on today's date and the gate has been open since spring. It reopened in late April or early May, months before this week, and won't close again until roughly February. The reason the upper loop still feels closed to a lot of Palm Desert hikers isn't the sheep. It's July. Nobody with good sense is doing the exposed switchback climb to Ramon Peak at noon in triple-digit heat, gate or no gate. The trail's legal season and its comfortable season overlap for most of the year, but the four hottest months are also the four months when the law says you're allowed up there and the weather says you shouldn't bother. That gap is why so many locals experience the Bump and Grind as a fall-through-spring trail even though the fence itself is only up for a single season out of four.
Two Names, One Ridge
The loop most people run is stitched from segments named for two men who actually lived in Palm Desert, not for geographic features. Starting at what's officially marked the Hopalong Cassidy-Mike Schuler Trailhead, hikers follow the Hoppy trail into the Herb Jeffries Trail before reaching the switchbacks everyone calls the Bump and Grind proper.
Hopalong Cassidy was a fictional cowboy who started as a pulp character in 1904 before becoming a film and television staple in the 1950s. William Boyd, the actor who played him on screen, retired to Palm Desert, and the trailhead carries his character's name at his widow's request. A few hundred yards up the same ridge, the Herb Jeffries Trail honors another Palm Desert resident: a singing cowboy film star who also spent years as a vocalist with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Two entertainment careers built on very different sides of the same 1930s and 1940s cowboy-and-big-band era ended up retired to the same desert town, and a hiking club stitched their names onto the same climb.
Why the Trailhead Only Exists in Palm Desert Now
The Bump and Grind used to have more than one way in. Rancho Mirage, which shares the ridge, restricted access from its older residential trailheads, leaving the Desert Crossing lot in Palm Desert as the only sanctioned starting point for the loop. The result is that the region's most popular low-elevation hike, a trail that climbs into two cities' worth of mountainside, now funnels every single hiker through one Palm Desert parking lot.
That lot sits behind a stretch of national retailers, Target among them, with T.J.Maxx and Marshalls in the same plaza. A few quick facts worth knowing before a first visit:
- The loop runs roughly 3 to 4.3 miles depending on which connector trails you take, with elevation gain estimates ranging from about 960 to 1,430 feet across different trail-tracking sources.
- Parking is free and unmetered along Painters Path, though the lot fills fast on cooler mornings and weekends.
- Dogs are not permitted on the core Bump and Grind trail itself, per multiple current trail listings, even though connector trails nearby allow them.
None of that changes if you've hiked it a hundred times. What's easy to miss is that the retail plaza isn't incidental scenery on the way to the trailhead. It's the reason there's a trailhead here at all, since the parking behind a commercial lot is what let the city consolidate access after the residential entrances closed.
The Parking Lot Has a Second Job
The same fenced dirt oval visible from the trail isn't a leftover construction site. It's the Palm Desert RC Raceway, an outdoor 1/8-scale off-road track that a city staff report confirms has operated on a leased city-owned lot since 2013, at a rent of one dollar per year, on the condition that it keeps the space out of the hands of anything that would create a nuisance for neighboring businesses and residents. It's currently run by Adam and Ronda Drake, competitive racers themselves, and it's described by the hobby community as the only outdoor 1/8-scale off-road RC track in the Coachella Valley.
Hikers heading up to the Hopalong Cassidy trailhead walk directly past it. Most don't register it as anything other than a curiosity, a strip of noise before the quiet climb starts. It's actually a small, functioning piece of Palm Desert's civic footprint, negotiated by the same city government that manages the trail access above it, sitting on the same commercially zoned dirt for over a decade.
The Trail Runs on Two Calendars That Don't Match
Put the pieces together and the Bump and Grind stops looking like a single hike with a single rule. It's a nine-month legal window layered against a five-or-six-month comfort window, both managed by cities and a state agency that don't necessarily talk to each other about it. The gate that closes for the sheep has nothing to do with the heat that keeps most Palm Desert hikers off the ridge in July and August. By the time the gate reopens each spring, the thermometer is usually the reason nobody's up there yet. By the time the weather turns kind again in October, the gate has already been open for months.
Anyone circling back to this trail as the mornings cool off this week isn't waiting on a closure to lift. It lifted a long time ago. What actually changes now is whether the climb is worth doing before 8 a.m. or worth doing at all, and that's a decision the sheep, the legislature, and the city's one-dollar lease with a model car track never had a vote in.
If a trail with this much layered local history is part of what makes a Palm Desert address feel worth having, Lori Ebeling can talk through what else the neighborhood holds close. Schedule a 15-minute consultation to start that conversation.
