Camp Joe Scherman
At 5,500 feet in the San Jacinto Mountains, the air smells of pine and the temperature drops twenty degrees below the Coachella Valley floor. This is where the Girl Scout Council of Orange County established its 700-acre mountain camp in the late 1950s — on land where the Cahuilla people had summered for generations before any European name was applied to the hills. The camp they built carries the name of a man who understood public land stewardship before the concept had a modern vocabulary.
California's First Ranger
Joe Scherman was born in 1902 and became California's first state park ranger — a position that existed before the state park system had fully taken shape as an institution. He was, by definition, making the role up as he went. The camp named for him reflects an attempt to honor that legacy of careful stewardship: a place where generations of Girl Scouts would develop their own relationship with public wild land. Scherman's connection to the San Jacinto Mountains region gave the naming a geographic logic that pure honorary designation often lacks.
Cahuilla Land, Cahuilla Words
The 560 core acres of the camp were purchased in 1959 for $96,500 — a negotiated transaction with previous landowners that took place on what had been Cahuilla territory for centuries before any deed was written. The final 140 acres followed in 1977. In a deliberate act of cultural recognition, the camp's unit names were drawn from the Cahuilla language: Keeway means North Wind, Wabanino means East Wind, Wanish means Stream, Adoette means Big Trees, and Snoqualmie means Moon People. These were not decorative choices — they embedded the names and concepts of the land's original inhabitants into the daily vocabulary of every camper who learned their unit name.
The Mountain as Teacher
What a summer camp at 5,500 feet teaches that a valley-floor facility cannot is partly environmental and partly about scale. The San Jacinto Mountains rise to over 10,000 feet just miles from the camp, and the surrounding San Bernardino National Forest provides a living classroom in plant communities, wildlife ecology, and the physical experience of altitude. For Orange County girls who grew up on flat suburban lots near sea level, arriving at Camp Joe Scherman was an encounter with a different California — one that still had darkness dark enough to see the Milky Way, and silence quiet enough to hear a deer moving through brush at dusk.
From the Air
Camp Joe Scherman is located in the San Jacinto Mountains near Idyllwild at approximately 33.65°N, 116.59°W, at an elevation of about 5,500 feet MSL. The camp sits within a heavily forested mountain environment where visual identification of specific clearings from altitude is difficult. The San Jacinto peak (10,804 ft) is the dominant terrain feature, rising sharply to the east-northeast. Nearest airports: Palm Springs International (KPSP, approximately 20 miles east), Hemet-Ryan Airport (KHMT, approximately 18 miles northwest). Mountain flying caution: the steep western face of the San Jacinto range creates significant mechanical turbulence and downdrafts in westerly flow conditions. Maintain substantial terrain clearance when transiting this area.