On a crisp morning in Idyllwild, Josh pulls his propane truck onto a familiar driveway. Before knocking on the door, he'll shovel snow from the walkway. Inside, an elderly customer will ask if he wants to see her new kitten. He'll say yes, even though he's running behind schedule. This is how business works in Idyllwild: not with transactions, but with relationships.

Josh didn't set out to fall in love with a mountain town. Born in 1980 at the Naval Hospital in San Diego, the son of a Navy father and a prison guard mother who worked six days a week, he grew up in the Inland Empire. Moreno Valley, Hemet, always within a thirty-mile radius. But something about Idyllwild kept calling him back.

"When I was a kid, my parents had family members in Moreno Valley, so we'd come up here in the wintertime," he remembers. "I was probably between three and ten years old, playing in the snow, going to the hardware store and gas station. I remember A-frame houses, but when you're that young, you're not really aware of street names or what's around you."

Those childhood memories, hazy but warm, planted seeds that would take decades to fully root.

Learning How Not to Do Business

Twenty-five years ago, Josh entered the propane industry working for a large corporate company. It wasn't the career he dreamed of, but it brought him to Idyllwild seven days a week, winter after winter. More importantly, it taught him something invaluable.

"They taught me how not to treat people," he says bluntly. "They have a corporate mentality, everyone's just a number. So it taught me how not to do business."

Five years ago, Josh and his partner Nick decided to burn the ships. They started Propane West Coast with no safety net, no plan B. For Josh, who had just gone through a divorce, bankruptcy, and child support battles, failure wasn't an option.

"I didn't have a bunch of money sitting in the bank to start a company," he explains. "But I had labor and I had drive. When you don't have a plan B, you have to make it work. You can't fail. Whether you've got to be there seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, if you've got to leave your kid's birthday party and jump in a truck, you do what you do."

The gamble paid off in ways that transcended profit margins. When Josh told his Idyllwild customers he was starting his own company, they didn't hesitate. "I brought over probably a couple hundred people who just said, 'Hey, we don't care about the other company. We care about you.'"

2,800 Relationships

Josh doesn't call them customers. He calls them relationships.

"We go to people's houses and they're like, 'Hey, do you want to see my puppies?' or 'Check out my kitten I just got,'" he says. "You have these meaningful connections. So when someone tries to undercut my price or take my customers, they're not going anywhere. We have a connection with everybody."

This is the Idyllwild way: a place where accidentally cutting someone off on the road earns you a friendly wave, not road rage. Where being a dollar short at the sandwich shop isn't a problem. Where the propane guy becomes someone you'd call to help change a tire.

"I'm kind of from a broken home," Josh admits quietly. "But there are people up here I've just met a few times who I could probably call right now if I needed help. That's the kind of place this is."

The connections run deeper than business. He spent hours with Jo-Carroll Dennison, Miss America 1942, listening to her stories before she passed away four years ago. He bonded with an elderly customer in Garner Valley over vintage cars, walking through the man's shop naming obscure tools from the 1930s. The man's own children thought it was all junk, but Josh understood the value of things saved through the Great Depression, the lessons his own grandparents had taught him.

"What do I have in common with a ninety-year-old lady?" he asks. "But I was around my grandparents a lot as a kid. My grandfather was born in 1922, during the Depression. Everything back then was a handshake. If I tell you something, you could shake on it, and it's a done deal. You just see their character, and you kind of gravitate to these people."

But it’s not just propane or snow shovels that connect Josh to people. He also has a passion for baking elaborate cakes for his friends and family, the kind that look too good to eat. At some point in the conversation, he’ll pull out his phone and scroll through his camera roll, showing photo after photo of his creations with quiet pride. He even teases the local bakery about his cakes being better than theirs, sending them pictures just to keep the rivalry alive. It’s another way he builds relationships.

Winter's Promise

In 2019 on Valentine's Day, after floods washed out the roads, highways 243 and 74 both impassable, Josh and his team drove two hours through Temecula and back around to reach Idyllwild customers. Other companies, the big corporate ones, flat-out refused.

"You might have grandparents, older couples who aren't mobile, who really can't get out of their house," he explains. "But it wasn't an issue for us. We'll even shovel your driveway or your front door to make life a little easier."

During big weather events, Propane West Coast doesn't stress. They're already prepared with good tires, chains, winches, extra clothes in the trucks for when you step in mud or snow. More importantly, they have monitors on customer tanks, allowing them to be proactive before storms hit.

"We're always accessible," Josh says. "Facebook, Instagram, calling, texting, email, or coming to the office. A lot of people have our personal numbers."

Thirty Minutes from Chaos

Every morning, Josh checks his calendar to see where he's headed. Sometimes it's Hemet, sometimes San Diego, sometimes the high desert—anywhere within their hundred-mile service radius.  But the days he drives up Highway 243 toward Idyllwild feel different.

"We're only thirty minutes from chaos," he reflects. "I could drive down to Hemet and see homeless people, drug addicts, ambulances, fire trucks, crime. Here, it brings you peace. It's calming. It recharges you."

Even before he arrives, just seeing Idyllwild on his schedule shifts something inside him. "It's like your dog knows you're going for a walk because they see the leash. I already know okay, it's going to be a good day. I'm not going to deal with problems. It's like a chill pill, just knowing I'm coming up here."

His nineteen-year-old son, who has been riding in propane trucks since he was three years old, feels the same way. "He loves coming up here. This is so much better than going down to the hustle and bustle of the city or the desert in summertime when it could be 120 degrees out there."

He's trained his son to eventually replace him on deliveries so he can focus on other aspects of the business. But it's more than job training, it's passing down a way of being in the world, a work ethic inherited from his own father, who took five-year-old Josh to construction sites on weekends, paying him fifty cents per house to sweep sawdust, then taking him to 7-Eleven to spend his earnings.

"Then I knew: I work, I get money, then I can buy what I want," Josh says. "Those work ethics passed on to me. I've done the same thing with my son. He just got his commercial license to drive semi-trucks. He wants to do this. It's what he knows."

The Sounds of Home

There's a spot Josh goes to when he needs to breathe. Past the radio towers, where you can see almost all of Diamond Valley Lake and on the Fourth of July, watch illegal and legal fireworks paint the sky. There are fallen trees cut into seats, big boulders to sit on, other locals who know about it, stealing a moment of peace before heading home to their families.

Idyllwild itself is filled with these moments.

"I like the running water up here, like in Strawberry Creek when we have water," he says. "If you look at my Instagram, we're always taking videos if we're by water. And in the springtime, we have quail up here, the little cooing of the quails, and seeing the baby quails follow the mom and dad. And when it gets breezy and you can hear the wind through the trees."

On his phone, Josh has ten thousand pictures: pine cones, acorns, trees photographed from the ground looking up. "Down the hill, what am I going to take pictures of? It's not inviting. Up here, it's like everything is saying, 'Take a picture of me.'"

He laughs. "I'll walk by a handful of acorns and think, 'Oh, those are cute,' and I'll draw little faces on them."

This is what Idyllwild has done to him, slowed him down in the most positive way. "Stop and smell the roses," he says. "It's got me to appreciate things more that I probably wouldn't appreciate before. You could have your eyes wide open and still be missing things."

The Fourth of July and Tree Lighting

If you ask Josh about his favorite time in Idyllwild, he'll give you two, and both are about the same thing: unity.

"Fourth of July," he says immediately. "It's always twenty degrees cooler up here, and the whole town comes together for the parade. Your color doesn't matter, your sexual orientation doesn't matter, your political views don't matter. You see everybody from all walks of life just together for the day. Especially with all the stuff nowadays where no one can get along. Up here, it doesn't matter." He stays away from politics. He has never registered to vote.

His second favorite time is the tree lighting, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. "There must be millions of lights in those trees. It's cold, it's brisk, having a sweater on feels good. It brings back childhood, you know? The magic you kind of lose when you're an adult. You hit Thanksgiving and Christmas is around the corner."

He tries to make it up every year, even if it's the week after. Because this is where his heart pulls him.

Fourteen Years Too Late

There's a ghost in Josh's story, a moment that could have changed everything.

"I thought about living here before, about fourteen years ago," he says carefully. "Stuff happens in everyone's life; relationships, marriages, things like that. You can't go back in time. Fifteen years ago, I went through a divorce. I could have bought a house for $100,000. Even stuff was going for $60,000, $70,000."

But divorce brought attorneys, money problems, bankruptcy, child support. The dream slipped away.

"That kind of held me back," he admits.

Now, he has a five-year plan. "Eventually I'll get up here. I just need to get the company dialed in, get my son trained up. I've got a house down the hill, I'm not going to sell it, but I need all my ducks in a row."

He'd prefer to stay in town because Pine Cove gets more snow and "has crazy driveways." Logistically, it makes sense. 

Keep Idyllwild Wild

There was talk, a few years ago, about building condos near the highway. Josh's response is immediate and fierce.

"We need to keep Idyllwild wild," he says. "Keep the dog as mayor. There was a rooster at one time, Kevin, wearing overalls, and they were trying to get him to be mayor. We just need to keep Idyllwild weird, keep it what it is. Keep the big corporations out. We don't need them buying up houses and cabins and businesses. Keep it a small, tight community."

Because once you lose that, he warns, "this is going to be Lake Tahoe. There's no community up there. No values. It's just a tourist town where people want to use it and abuse it and then leave."

He supports the moratorium on Airbnbs. "You hear how quiet it is? This is what it's about. We do have Airbnbs, but we don't need any more. You lose the peace and quiet."

But he's quick to add that Idyllwild needs tourists, just the right balance. "I need tourists to come up here to rent Airbnbs, to crank the heaters to 100 degrees," he laughs. "So we're doing good propane business. But there's a difference between supporting the town and taking over the town."

What Idyllwild needs, Josh believes, is activities. Something for families to do in winter when there isn't snow. He describes places he's seen: inner-tube hills made of PVC, hillside roller coasters powered by gravity. "We have people up here with a lot of money who keep buying houses and commercial property. Why don't we build something fun to do?"

His voice grows somber when he mentions the child who died years ago, sledding down a Pine Cove driveway into traffic. "There's no safe spots, you know? Nowhere you'd even feel comfortable sending your kids."

The Peace of Knowing Everybody

Can you ever be truly private in a town where everybody knows everybody?

"I personally don't mind it," Josh says. "I'm not a people person. I never have been. But being in this industry has made me a people person."

He laughs, remembering calling the office: "Hey, I'm going to be twenty minutes behind because I'm petting some miniature Highland cows right now."

"Even my partner Nick, he wouldn't even say hi to people. He was real quiet. Now he's videotaping himself: 'Hey, this is Nick, we're in Idyllwild.' It makes you bloom, like a flower opening up. Because people up here are so accepting. It doesn't matter where you're from. They just accept you."

He wants to be more than the propane guy, but a neighbor who shows up at the spaghetti dinner fundraiser, who donates to the fire department, who gives Idyllwild customers preferred pricing because "this place takes care of us."

This is what Josh has learned in his twenty-five years of coming to this mountain town: that home isn't just a place you're from, but a place that sees you, accepts you, and invites you to become part of something larger than yourself.

He's still working on his five-year plan, still living down the hill with his son, still making the drive up the 243 several times a week. But every time he arrives in Idyllwild, every time he steps out of his truck and breathes in the pine-scented air, every time a customer invites him to see their puppies or asks him to help move furniture, he's already home.

"I don't have customers," Josh says one more time, as if the repetition makes it more true. "I have 2,800 relationships."

And in Idyllwild, that's not just good business.

It's everything.