We deduce a structurally inductive description of the determinantal probability measure associated with Kalai's celebrated enumeration result for higher--dimensional spanning trees of the $n-1$--simplex. As a consequence, we derive the marginal distributions of the simplex links in such random trees. Along the way, we also characterize the higher--dimensional spanning trees of every other simplicial cone in terms of the higher--dimensional rooted forests of the underlying simplicial complex. We also apply these new results to random topology, the spectral analysis of random graphs, and the theory of high dimensional expanders. One particularly interesting corollary of these results is that the fundamental group of a union of $o(\log n)$ determinantal 2--trees has Kazhdan's property (T) with high probability.