#tahquitz

Tahquitz occupies one of the most powerful and unsettling roles in Cahuilla cosmology, a being who embodies both primordial creation and dangerous, unpredictable force. In the traditional stories, Tahquitz was one of the first beings shaped by the creator Mukat, originally intended as a guardian spirit who would watch over the people. But as the stories unfold, Tahquitz becomes corrupted by power, turning into a malevolent presence associated with sudden disappearances, strange lights, and the eerie sounds that echo through the canyons of Southern California. The Cahuilla describe him as dwelling in the high peaks and deep chasms around what is now called Tahquitz Canyon and Tahquitz Peak, places where the landscape itself seems charged with an older, more volatile energy.

For generations, Cahuilla families told stories of people who ventured too close to Tahquitz’s domain and never returned, or who came back changed—drained, haunted, or touched by something beyond ordinary human experience. These tales served not only as supernatural warnings but also as ecological teachings, marking dangerous terrain, unstable cliffs, and sacred spaces that demanded respect. The flickering lights sometimes seen in the canyon were interpreted as signs of Tahquitz’s presence, and the thunderous booms that rolled through the mountains were said to be his voice. Even today, hikers and locals speak of the uncanny atmosphere around the peak, a sense that the land remembers the old stories.

Anthropologists who recorded Cahuilla oral traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries noted that Tahquitz was not simply a “monster” in the Western sense but a complex figure—part guardian, part destroyer, part reminder of the thin boundary between the human world and the spirit world. His story reflects the Cahuilla understanding that power is never neutral and that beings created for good can become dangerous when balance is lost. In this way, Tahquitz becomes a mythic embodiment of both natural danger and moral ambiguity, a force that shapes the landscape and the imagination alike.

Where is she, tonight? It has been a month and ten days since she mailed this postcard from Idyllwild to Joshua Tree. All we can do is hope that the monster did not put an early end to her Pacific Crest Trail adventure, as so often happens in those movies with Reese Witherspoon. Because there’s a real monster in the mountains around San Jacinto Peak, a real monster who murders people & eats their…

Popular rock climbing location Tahquitz Peak is named after an ancient, evil spirit. Local tribes tell similar stories of a being named Dakwish, Dakush, Takwish, Taakwi, Chaup, Shiwiw, and many other spellings and iterations. Each tribes’ legends differ and overlap, but every story is equally horrifying. The unifying theme is the meteor myth, an important symbol of the desert tribes and part of some creation myths, likely in part because of the enormous Amboy Crater.

One story depicts a bird-like man covered in white feathers and feather ropes tied around its head… This particular man-bird becomes a ball of light as it loses its feathers, which is possibly representative of the trail behind comets.

Here’s the Flipboard link to the story from Desert Oracle, a local literary magazine produced in the High Desert area of California. This story was published in Flipboard. Kind of silly, but worth a read if you can laugh at this sort of stuff, or believe in this sort of stuff. A photo of this thing, apparition, ghost, imaginary friend, hallucination or creative use of Photoshop, from the 1990′s:

Excerpt:

The story you’ll hear most often goes like this: There’s a young Marine on guard duty in some far-off corner of the massive Twentynine Palms desert training base. He hears an awful sound in the dark, something like a growl. Then, the breathing, coming from one side of his lonesome little guard booth and now from the other.

It’s circling him.

He steps out into the dark, his sidearm drawn. There it stands, eight feet tall, an unbearable stench from its hairy body, the eyes glowing like red coals.

Sometimes, the Marine is knocked unconscious by the beast and found hours later by the next shift. One version occurs at the old rifle range, where the watchman — also armed with a rifle — wakes from the assault to find his weapon bent in half.

Since the 1970s, when the Mojave Desert base expanded from its World War II encampment, there have been regular reports of new recruits terrorized by both the Yucca Man and pranks inspired by the tales. But most sightings of the spectral creature come from campers and hikers at Joshua Tree National Park. Tents have been opened in the night by stinking monstrosities, and there is an occasional large footprint or blurry photograph submitted as evidence. A snapshot from the Hidden Valley campground has made the rounds for a decade now: The figure bounding over the boulders looks much like the iconic Bigfoot from the Patterson–Gimlin film of 1967.

But the Natives who lived in California long before European colonization considered these creatures to be supernatural entities, with names that often translated to “hairy devils.” They took care to avoid the gloomy spots where the devils were often seen.

The Tongva People living around the Santa Ana River called the devils’ hideout east of the river’s source in the San Bernardino Mountains the Camp of the Takwis, pronounced the same as the Tahquitz known to the Cahuilla of Agua Caliente. According to John Reed Swanton’s The Indian Tribes of North America, “Takwis” also survives as a site name at the head of the Santa Margarita River, at Temecula Creek. Throughout Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, you’ll see it spelled Tahquitz — the angry specter’s unhappy home in the region is the cursed Tahquitz Canyon.

And here’s one of my photos I took a couple of weeks ago, while I was hiking in the Tahquitz Canyon in Palm Springs, where this Yucca Man might be living. According to local legend from the Agua Caliente tribe, as told to me by a member of the tribe, Takwis (or Tahquitz) was a mean shaman, and after so many evil stunts, he was banished to the canyon, where he took up residence in a cave. When he gets pissed off, he stomps his feet and runs around the canyon walls, which is what causes earthquakes.

Tahquitz Canyon | Palm Springs, California