The Arrowhead on the Mountain

Look north from this part of the valley on a clear day and you will see it on the face of the mountain: a natural arrowhead shape formed by lighter vegetation against the dark chaparral, pointing downward. It is approximately fourteen hundred feet tall. It has been visible from the valley floor since before any European arrived in this region.

The Serrano people, for whom these mountains were home, regarded the arrowhead as a landmark of significance. It marked a place. The springs that issued from the base of the mountain below the arrowhead were fresh, cold, and reliable in a desert climate where water sources defined survival.

In the late nineteenth century, a company recognized what all that cultural weight could be worth commercially. The Arrowhead Spring Water Company began bottling water from those springs and selling it, nationally. The arrowhead shape, which the Serrano had not drawn and did not own, became a brand logo. It appeared on labels and eventually on delivery trucks and in grocery stores. The company built a resort below the springs that drew Hollywood celebrities in the nineteen thirties and served as a retreat for the film industry.

The resort went through successive owners and redevelopment phases. The springs, according to regional sources, are now dry. The logo persists.

What the brand sold, in the end, was the aura of something ancient and natural, drawn from a mark that people had navigated by for thousands of years before anyone thought to put it on a bottle. The commercial transaction here was not just water. It was a Serrano sacred landmark, converted to packaging.