Drive Farrell Drive through the middle of Los Compadres and the land on either side still reads like a golf course that closed years ago and got left alone. Flat turf gone brown in patches, a couple of ponds, a paved loop where carts used to run. Dawn to dusk, gates open, nobody stopping you. It has looked more or less exactly like this since Oswit Land Trust took over the shuttered Mesquite Golf Course in 2022 and renamed it Prescott Preserve.
That is about to stop being true. And a few blocks over, on the streets that gave this neighborhood its name, absolutely nothing is about to change, because it hasn't changed in eighty-seven years.
Four years of paperwork behind a fence that still looks empty
The preserve has been legally protected since 2022, but protected and restored are different things, and the gap between them turned out to be long. A neighboring homeowners association sued to slow the project down, and the fight had to be settled before Oswit Land Trust could unlock the money it needed. Only after the Mesquite Country Club HOA board approved a settlement agreement did the California Wildlife Conservation Board release a $3.48 million grant, awarded in May 2025, to fund the first phase of restoration. The official Notice to Proceed didn't arrive until July 2, 2025. Even then, restoration crews cited summer heat and the lingering legal fight as reasons the actual ground work kept slipping.
That is the part most passersby never see: a nature preserve fight isn't usually won or lost over turf removal. It's won or lost in a settlement conference with the HOA next door.
So for most of the past four years, walking the preserve meant walking something suspended in place, not something changing. One visitor review on the site's public listing sums it up by calling the grounds "not super beautiful yet," which is a fair read of where things stood for a long stretch after the sale.
It won't be accurate much longer. As of a July 2026 update, Oswit Land Trust has more than 6,350 native plants growing through what it calls its Nursery to Nature Pathway, an on-site nursery built specifically because regional seed stock wasn't available in the quantities the project needed. Irrigation lines are going in. Permitting is wrapping up. Large-scale, visible planting is scheduled for fall and winter of 2026, timed to the cooler season when new plants actually survive in the desert. If you've been ignoring the preserve because nothing ever seemed to change there, this is the season that stops being a reasonable excuse.
What "restoration" actually means on 120 acres
It helps to know what the finished version is supposed to look like, because it is not a park. Oswit Land Trust has said plainly it doesn't want the property to become "another Demuth Park or Ruth Hardy Park," since Palm Springs already has that kind of recreation area covered. The goal instead is to bring the acreage back to what it looked like before anyone ever built a fairway on it: native wash woodland and creosote scrub instead of turf and cart paths.
The current funded phase covers 28 acres of the property, split between 15 acres of desert dry wash woodland, 11 acres of Sonoran creosote bush scrub, and 2 acres of perimeter buffer. That's less than a quarter of the 120-acre former course. The trust's longer-term goal, according to a state wildlife filing, is to eventually restore native habitat across 90 of the property's 120 acres, which still leaves roughly a quarter of the old course as retained infrastructure: a section of the existing loop trail, some of its bridges, and the ponds that already draw birds and other wildlife, all kept in place on purpose rather than erased.
That same filing places the property between Sunrise Way and El Cielo Road, about two miles from downtown Palm Springs, which is the same stretch most residents already recognize as home.
If you're planning a walk over there this fall, a few practical notes worth knowing before you go:
- Access is dawn to dusk, and street parking along Farrell Drive is the only option since the preserve has no dedicated lot.
- Leashed dogs and bikes are allowed only on the paved multi-use path, not on the interior loop trail.
- Coyotes are year-round residents of the property, not occasional visitors. Keep small dogs close and don't run.
A hundred yards away, on Compadre Road, nothing has changed since 1939
The preserve's transformation is a story about land undoing decades of golf-course maintenance to look more like it did before any of it existed. The Los Compadres Club and Stables, the operation that gave this entire neighborhood its name, never had to undo anything. It has been running the same way since a group of Palm Springs department store employees decided they wanted to ride horses on their day off.
The story, as the club tells it, starts in November 1939, when about forty riders met at the Visalia Saddle Shop on Palm Canyon Drive to organize a new riding club because the one already in town only rode on Thursdays, a day most working people couldn't spare. By November 1942 the group had a name, bylaws, and a state charter. The stables that still operate today were established that same year and accommodate up to forty-five horses, a scale that hasn't changed much in over eight decades.
What has kept the club alive isn't nostalgia, it's a calendar that still runs. Members still gather for a weekly tradition the club calls Wednesday Hamburger Night. Every March, the club hosts its Annual Guest Ride, when outside riders bring their own horses and trailers for a weekend on the property's desert and mountain trails. That one already came and went earlier this year, but it happens every March, so it's worth marking down for 2027.
The bigger date on the calendar is still ahead. The Annual Deep Pit Barbecue falls on the first Saturday of November, which lands on November 7 this year, and typically draws 800 to 1,000 guests, roughly twenty times the number of horses the stables can even hold. The tradition traces back to the 1941 Palm Springs Western Week, a citywide celebration that included a parade down Palm Canyon Drive and a rodeo. The barbecue is the only piece of that original week that survived. Everything else disappeared decades ago. This didn't.
Two clocks, one neighborhood
That's the actual shape of the story for anyone who already lives here. Los Compadres is host to two very different relationships with time, running at once, in the same square mile.
One is a piece of land actively working to look less developed than it did last year, funded by a $3.48 million state grant, slowed for years by a lawsuit, and now finally about to show visible change on the ground this fall. The neighbors paying closest attention to that process organized themselves into the Friends of Prescott Preserve in early 2025, holding fundraising mixers at spots like the Shag House in Little Beverly Hills, and the land trust's second annual Saving Nature Film Festival played to a crowd at the Palm Springs Cultural Center this past April.
The other is a working horse club that never had a golf-course phase to undo in the first place, still running on a rhythm set by people who wanted somewhere to ride after their shift at Bullock's ended.
Most neighborhoods pick one identity and build around it. Los Compadres is currently living through both at once, and this fall is the first time in four years you'll actually be able to watch the slower of the two start moving.
If you already call this stretch of south Palm Springs home and you're curious how either story, the preserve's restoration or the club's unbroken calendar, might shape what your own street looks like a few years out, Team Michael has been reading this neighborhood block by block for a long time. Reach out whenever you want a local's take on it.
