The Bump and Grind's Front Door Moved, and So Did Its Calendar

By six in the morning the cars are already lining Painters Path behind Desert Crossing, headlamps clicking off as the sky goes from purple to gray. Everyone calls it the Bump and Grind, and everyone who lives in Palm Desert long enough ends up walking it at least once a week once the heat breaks. September does that to a neighborhood. The trail comes back to life the way a pool does after the cover comes off.

Regulars know this climb by feel: where the switchbacks bunch up, where the shade disappears, where the view opens onto the valley floor. But two things about this loop are not what long-time hikers assume they are, and the evidence for both is sitting in plain sight at the trailhead if you know where to look.

The Entrance Everyone Uses Now Sits Behind a Target

Ask a hiker where the Bump and Grind starts and most will point toward Painters Path, behind the Desert Crossing shopping center, a few hundred feet from the Target loading dock. That answer is correct today, but it was not always the only answer.

For years, hikers also entered from older trailheads tucked into residential streets on the Rancho Mirage side of the mountain. Those access points still exist as physical trails, but they are no longer the sanctioned way in. The U.S. Forest Service's own page for the trail notes that recent decisions by local jurisdictions have changed the trailhead location and precluded access to the top of the trail from Rancho Mirage, and that an official trailhead is no longer located there at all. Multiple trail-tracking sites now carry a specific warning: Rancho Mirage is restricting entrance from those older residential trailheads, and hikers are told plainly not to use them.

What that means on the ground is that the loop Palm Desert residents treat as their own actually used to open into someone else's neighborhood. The version everyone hikes now, starting at the Hopalong Cassidy-Mike Schuler Trailhead behind Desert Crossing, is the settled version of a dispute over foot traffic through residential blocks a mile or so away. The trail did not always live entirely on the Palm Desert side of that boundary. It moved there.

Ninety Days, Two Bills

The second piece of settled history involves the calendar, not the map, and it explains a contradiction you will find if you search around online. Some sites list the trail's upper section as closed from January through September. Others say February through April. Both cannot be current, and only one traces back to an actual law.

The real number is ninety days: February 1 through April 30. That specific window did not come from a park ranger's judgment call. It came from the California State Legislature. Assembly Bill 880 first established a three-month lambing-season closure to protect the endangered Peninsular bighorn sheep that raise young in the terrain above the trail's upper out-and-back stretch. A companion bill, AB 1097, went further and locked in the exact dates, February 1 through April 30, removing the guesswork a general "three months" had left open. Governor Jerry Brown signed the clarifying bill that October, and the compromise it produced still governs the trail today.

The fight to get there was not quiet. Two hundred or so Palm Desert hikers showed up to a public meeting over the closure, and a Facebook group called Save the Bump & Grind became the gathering point for residents who felt the state had moved too fast. The compromise that eventually passed did not give hikers everything they wanted, but it also did not close the mountain outright, which is what some in the room that night feared most.

What carried the day was a genuine trade: the Bighorn Institute, the nonprofit that studies the local herd, signed off on a schedule that keeps the summit segment open nine months of the year, May through January, in exchange for giving the sheep an undisturbed lambing season the other three.

So when a hiking app tells you the trail is closed nine months out of twelve, it has the math backward. Nine months open, three months partially closed, only at the top, only February through April. Right now, in September, none of that closure applies. The loop is fully open, and it will stay that way straight through the winter hiking season locals actually look forward to.

Three Names for One Climb

The trail's segment names sound almost like a puzzle until you know the backstory, and the story belongs entirely to Palm Desert.

• Hopalong Cassidy-Mike Schuler Trailhead – the official starting point, named in part for the fictional cowboy character brought to life on screen by actor William Boyd, who retired to Palm Desert. His widow and the city later named the trailhead for him.
• Herb Jeffries Trail – the steep middle stretch, named for another Palm Desert resident, a singing cowboy actor who performed with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
• Mike Schuler Trail – the gentler return leg that closes the loop back to the parking area.

None of these names describe scenery or difficulty. They describe two entertainers who lived in this city and left their names on the hillside above it. The loop hikers do today, up the Hopalong side, across the Herb Jeffries stretch, back down the Mike Schuler trail, is a walking tribute to two Palm Desert neighbors most hikers have never heard of.

What This Means for Your Fall Loop

None of this changes how the trail feels underfoot. It is still a dusty, exposed climb with no shade and a real chance of overheating if you start too late in the morning. The Desert Recreation District still lists the best window as roughly October through spring, which is exactly the stretch Palm Desert is entering now.

What it does change is where you should start, which is the lot behind Desert Crossing and nowhere in a Rancho Mirage neighborhood, and when to expect the upper section to narrow, which is February through April, not any earlier. It is also worth glancing at the posted signage before you bring a dog. Rules on that upper stretch have shifted over the years as the bighorn dispute played out, and what is posted at the trailhead today is the version that matters, not whatever an old app listing says.

The trail behind Target has been Palm Desert's busiest cardio loop for years. Fewer people realize it is also a small monument to two settled disputes, one about where a boundary sits, one about how a calendar gets written, both still visible if you know what you are looking at on your next sunrise lap.

Palm Desert has a way of turning practical arguments into permanent fixtures of daily life, whether it is a hiking trail or a property line. If you are curious how those same kinds of details play out when a home in this neighborhood changes hands, Douglas Turold is always glad to talk through what is actually on file for a property here. Book a consultation whenever you are ready.