When Juan Bautista de Anza led his colonizing expedition through the region in 1774, the mountains looming to the south and west were a primary navigational reference. His party was among the first Europeans to formally document what local Cahuilla people had lived within for centuries. It was not until 1901 that the United States Geological Survey assigned the name 'Santa Rosa Mountains' officially — making this one of the last named ranges in a region that had been systematically surveyed for decades. The thirty-mile arc of the range, anchored at its highest point by Toro Peak at 8,716 feet, had simply existed without an English name long after its neighbors had been catalogued.

The Peninsular bighorn sheep that inhabit the rocky lower slopes of the Santa Rosas became one of the defining conservation stories of the late twentieth century in California. The subspecies — distinct from the bighorn sheep of the Sierra Nevada — found the Santa Rosas' precipitous terrain ideal, using the steep grade to escape predators and navigating cliff faces that few other large mammals can traverse. By the 1990s, their numbers had declined enough to trigger federal protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1998. That listing directly shaped federal land use decisions for the entire range and accelerated the creation of the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument in 2000 — one of the few national monuments created specifically to protect a single wildlife population's habitat.

The Coachella Valley Mountains Conservancy, created by the California legislature in 1990, was established specifically to manage the complex patchwork of federal, state, tribal, and private lands across the Santa Rosas and neighboring ranges. The conservancy's mandate reflects the unusual land-tenure history of the region, where allotments to the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, Bureau of Land Management parcels, and private inholdings are woven together in ways that make conventional conservation approaches difficult. The National Monument designation that followed in 2000 added another jurisdictional layer, ultimately producing a more protected landscape than any single agency could have managed alone.