Claudia grew up here, left, and came back on purpose. Her parents moved to Idyllwild in 1979, ran a little real estate business called Mountain Greenery — in the building where the Egg House is now — and she went to Idyllwild School through seventh grade. Then life took her elsewhere. She came back. That was the place. She has been here since, and is now building something she calls by its right name: a legacy. 

She lives in Mountain Center, on seven acres she and her husband Jody built from nothing, starting in 2015 with raw land and a dream, not enough money and a great deal of determination. Jody is a man from Georgia she met in the Marine Corps — she joined after Yucca Valley High School, where her family had moved when she was in seventh grade. They tried Georgia, they tried the desert, different versions of a life that didn't quite fit, before they drove back up the mountain and stayed. She raised three sons on the same street she grew up on before they needed more space — three boys, dirt bikes, bow and arrows — and bought this land. The house took four years. In the middle of building it, there was a fire. She was at a conference down the hill when it started, couldn't get back up because the roads were closed, and had to call someone to come evacuate her teenage sons while CHP stood at the barricade. The house wasn't there yet when the fire came through, which she says was a blessing, even if it didn't feel like one at the time.

They lived in the trailer during the build. They did everything themselves, she and Jody, heads together over every decision, every project. The greenhouse. The barn. The garden. The goat pen. She says it mattered to them that the property would become something real, something that could be passed down, something that her sons and their children could build a life around. Her oldest son Kevin is having a baby and lives in a trailer on the property now, the same way his parents once did. She talks about this with quiet satisfaction — the circle of it, the rightness of it, the fact that the thing she built is already holding the next generation before it's even finished. Seven acres, room to grow, a place that could hold generations. It is not common in Idyllwild. She knows how lucky she is.

The Halloween Parade Was Her Mother's Idea

To understand Claudia, you have to understand her mother. Her mother was on the Chamber of Commerce, ran the real estate business, organized the town hall recreation programs, had an art guild, and moved through Idyllwild with the energy of someone who believed a small town worked because people made it work. Trick-or-treating was hard up here — cabins spread out, most of them only part-time, not enough porch lights on any given street. So her mother had an idea: bring the kids downtown, have them trick-or-treat the businesses, make it a parade. That was sometime around 1988 or 1989. Claudia has a photograph of herself from around 1992, in costume, downtown, at the parade her mother started.

The Christmas tree lighting was her mother's idea too, she and her best friend Pam, both of them on the Chamber, before there was even a fort to stand next to. Just a big empty lot, a cauldron fire, people standing around singing Silent Night with candles, a man named Mountain Mike dressed as Santa in leather, convincing every kid that this was just what mountain Santas looked like.

Claudia doesn't go to the Halloween parade much anymore. She says it has become something else, a Hallmark version of itself for people who don't live here. She says this without rancor, just with the particular sadness of someone watching a thing she loves become unrecognizable. She is not interested in performing nostalgia. She is interested in keeping the real thing alive.

The School Is Her Second Home

She is an instructional coach at Idyllwild School now, which means she works with teachers on improving practice, adapting curriculum, bridging the gap between what the district mandates and what actually works in a school this small and this specific. She spent ten years teaching fifth grade at Val Vista Elementary in Hemet, right at the bottom of the hill, which was good placement while her boys were in Hemet High — when the fire came or the road closed, she was already down there with them. But once her youngest graduated, she set her sights on the only job she actually wanted.

She couldn't choose a school in the application process, but she found ways to make her intention clear. In every interview, every conversation, she kept bringing it back: she had grown up in this school, her kids had gone through this school, she had taught every grade level, she understood this community from the inside. She was the right person for this job and she needed them to know it. It worked.

Now she walks the same hallways she walked as a child, works alongside teachers who were once her teachers, and hears the names of kids she knows three generations deep. When a child is having a hard day, she knows the family, knows the grandmother, knows what the parents are going through, knows which neighbor might be able to help. She calls it a fishbowl, which it is, but she means it warmly. This is her family. All of them.

She has thought carefully about why Idyllwild School's test scores are consistently higher than comparable schools in the district, and her answer is not about money or demographics. It's about intentionality. The people who choose to live up here, she says, have already made a deliberate choice, and that deliberateness runs through how they raise their children. They show up. They engage. They sacrifice convenience for something they believe in. That same quality shows up in the classroom.

That's a Fairy Cup

Her mother used to tell her stories. You pick up an acorn cap and someone says: that's a fairy cup, did you know that? The fairies go down to the creek and use them to drink. Claudia is now the one picking up acorn caps and telling kids the same story, forty years later, in the same place. She became a teacher because of this, because she believed that children who grow up in a place like this — feet in the creek, pine cones in their pockets, real artists teaching them real skills through the SMART program — grow up differently, and that difference is worth protecting.

There are kids in Hemet, she says, who have never climbed a tree. Never seen a pine cone or a squirrel or held a snake. She finds this genuinely sad, not as a judgment but as a loss. Up here, the ordinary is magical. That's what she wants to preserve, for her own grandchildren and for every child who comes through that school. That's her legacy. Not a monument, just a living thing she keeps tending.

Spring Is Her Favorite

She knows this mountain in all its seasons and she loves them all, but spring is hers. The creek runs fast with snowmelt. The lilacs come in. The hills go so green they look like Ireland. The birds start up again. Everything begins over. She says the grotto in June is her favorite smell on earth — azalea and jasmine and whatever else is blooming down there, the water moving beneath it all.

Her favorite sound is different: the silence after a heavy snowfall, when the world goes glowy and still and every sound is muffled and you feel like you are the only person left on the mountain. She loves that. She has always loved that.

She hikes the forest service land behind the property with her dogs, Copper the red heeler who is her best friend. Jody comes in a close second. Jody hunts this mountain, knows every ridge of it from a different angle, bags the deer and calls his friends who come to help carry it back, because that is how it works here. She grows vegetables in the garden, not enough to sustain the whole family but enough to keep the intention alive. The goats — eleven adults, with five more kids due this spring, more than she might want to admit — clear the underbrush for fire abatement. Everything has a purpose. Even the things she loves just for being lovely have a purpose.

The Mountain Is Her Everything

She cried a little when asked what community means to her. She said: it's my everything.

When her son Kevin was bitten by a rattlesnake last August, she wasn't home. Brody, her youngest, called 911. The neighbor across the street heard the screaming and showed up to sit with the boys while they waited for the ambulance. Claudia, off the hill, called the church, called the forest service, called anyone who might know where they were taking him, managed to get word through to someone at the helipad at Lake Hemet about which hospital the helicopter was flying to. A few days later, the paramedic who had treated Kevin stopped by the property just to check how he was doing.

She tells this story as an example of what community means. Not the big ceremonies or the events or the parades. The neighbor who heard the screaming. The person who answered the phone.

She has a turkey, chickens, goats coming home at sunset, a grandbaby coming, a son in the forest service, a son studying business in college. Seven acres to grow into. When she thinks about all of it at once — the land, the sons, the grandchild on the way, the school where her mother's Halloween parade still runs every year — it is almost too much to hold. Her hope for Idyllwild's future is simple: that it keeps its magic. That it stays small in the ways that matter. That the new people who keep arriving learn — the way she was never not learning, even though she grew up here — that this town works because people show up for each other, not because anyone tells them to.

She is the mountain. In a way she probably understands better than anyone, the mountain is her.