Things to Do in Palm Springs in April

April is the festival month. Coachella takes the second and third weekends, Stagecoach takes the one after, and for most of the month the eastern end of the valley is organised around the Empire Polo Club in Indio.

If you are not going to a festival, April is still a good month to be here. It is just a month where you need to know where the traffic is.

Coachella did not start in April, and it lost money

The first Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was held in October 1999, over two days, with Beck, Tool and Rage Against the Machine at the top of the bill. It lost something in the region of a million dollars and there was no festival at all in 2000.

It came back in 2001 as a single day, moved to April for the milder weather. The two-weekend format — same lineup, same art, same place, different people — started in 2012.

So the thing that defines April here is only in April because October was too hot and the first attempt did not work.

More: Coachella dates · expectations vs reality · is one day worth it · Stagecoach

The polo club has no polo in it

The Empire Polo Club is an actual polo club, with twelve grass fields, established in 1987. Its polo season runs from the middle of December through March.

Which means that by the time 125,000 people a day arrive to look at it, the polo is finished for the year. Everyone who has ever said “wait, is there actual polo?” while standing on that grass has been standing there in the off-season.

More: the Empire Polo Club · drinks near the polo club

What locals actually deal with

Not the festival. The road.

The City of Indio closes Avenue 50 between Monroe and Madison from late March until early May — weeks before the first festival and weeks after the last one — for build and teardown. The city publishes detour routes for residents every year: Washington, Jackson, Calhoun and Golf Center Parkway going north and south, Highway 111, Fred Waring, Miles, Dr. Carreon and Avenue 54 going across.

That is the real April in Indio. Six weeks of a closed road, of which six days are a festival.

More: festival traffic, what to avoid · where to stay for Coachella

The other twenty hours

A festival day is maybe eight hours on the grass. The rest of the day, most people are somewhere in the valley with nothing planned and a car they do not want to move.

Two useful things about April specifically. The mornings are still cool enough to hike, which they will not be in three weeks. And the western end of the valley — Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Desert Hot Springs — is comparatively quiet, because the crowd is concentrated forty minutes east.

The bloom has moved uphill

If you came for wildflowers, the valley floor is done. Joshua Tree National Park publishes its bloom by elevation, and by April the low desert has finished. Three to five thousand feet runs from early March to early May, and anything above five thousand feet runs April through June.

In April you drive up for flowers, not out.

More: how crowded is Joshua Tree · the Indio entrance route

The date gardens are working

March and April are pollination and bunch thinning in the valley’s date gardens. Not harvest — harvest is late September through December. If you drive past a grove in April and see people up in the palms, that is hand pollination, which is how essentially every date you have ever eaten got made.

The ground moved in April too

A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck near Joshua Tree on the night of 22 April 1992. It turned out to be a foreshock: two months later the magnitude 7.3 Landers quake tore open more than 70 kilometres of surface — the longest rupture in the United States since 1906.

More: earthquake weather

The numbers

Average high 87, average low 59, and 0.09 inches of rain for the entire month. April is the handover: the first half behaves like spring and the last week starts hinting at what is coming.

More guides

• Things to do in Palm Springs this weekend
• May in Palm Springs
• March in Palm Springs
• Quiet spots in the valley
• The best hikes in Indian Canyons

Weather figures are NOAA 1991–2020 climate normals for Palm Springs International Airport. Hours and dates change; check the operator before you go.