My mom recommended this place as well – the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway (I hesitate to include the link since their website makes it look more cheesy than it is, but so it goes). It’s an impressive feat of engineering – basically a cable-driven elevator that goes several thousand feet up a mountain to Mount San Jacinto state park. It’s the second-steepest tramway in the world (I’m not sure which is the steepest), and most of the mechanical parts are Swiss-made. Some of the towers that suspend the cable are not accessible by road (as I recall, only the first two out of five are), so many of the construction materials had to be delivered by helicopter. There are makeshift steel helicopter pads atop the upper towers. The tram cars that are currently in use have a rotating floor so that passengers can see the view from all angles without trampling anyone. Before we boarded, I was imagining that the rotation was powered mechanically by a gear system that attaches to a fixed cable running alongside the moving cable that pulls the cars. I pictured the operator pulling a lever to grip the cable just like they do in the San Francisco cable cars. This seemed easier than running electricity to the cars. However, thanks to the recorded narration that played during the ride, I realized that the cars did in fact have electricity, and I think the rotating floor ran on said electricity. Some other visitors complained about the narration. I would have slightly preferred the ride without it, but I didn’t have a big problem with it until the end of the ride down, when it mentioned that the latin music that was playing throughout the ride was available in the gift shop at the bottom.

Two retired tram cars sit as decorations in the parking lot – a nice sort of adaptive reuse.

The tram cars seem to be the only way to get up and down the mountain aside from a grueling hike or a special helicopter ride, perhaps. A couple of employees rode to the top with us, and I later discovered that the cars have water tanks underneath them to bring fresh water up to the top. I saw some pipes running down the mountain, which I imagined, were for sewage.

The rides up and down were quite fun. The tram cars move at what seems like a steady 30 miles per hour, and they run quite close to the terrain in some sections, so one can see the side of the rock whizzing by. There’s a bit of a swing as the car passes over each tower, and the passengers make a collective “whoa!” each time.

The tram cars are spaced out about evenly across the cable, so they counterbalance each other. The motor pulls the descending tram car down, which, in turn, pulls the opposite car up. There’s a counterweight at the top that moves up and down to adjust the cable tension based on the payloads in the cars and their position relative to the towers. Also, I noticed that the tram cars don’t loop all the way around like ski lifts – they go in a straight line and then reverse, so the top and the bottom each have two docks – one on either side of the cable.

At the top, there is a lounge (with a restaurant / bar, a theater for their informational short films, gift shop, etc.), an expansive plateau with a network of trails and some permit-only wilderness areas. Also, there’s an “adventure center” which rents out snowshoes and cross-country skis, but there was no snow in sight this time. In a way, it feels like cheating to take this cable elevator up the mountain, but one of the points that their informational film made was that it makes the mountaintop accessible to people with mobility issues. So I can see it being useful for that – the lounge and the cement path down to the start of the trail are wheelchair-accessible. I didn’t see anyone with any noticeable mobility issues up there, but there were some older folks who otherwise would probably not get up there.

We hiked a short 1.5 mile trail. Once the crowds thinned out, it was shockingly quiet. It made me realize that I hadn’t experienced absolute quiet like that in years (I think). The trail led to a series of lookout spots that each gave a different perspective of the landscape. We could see so much at once but hear nothing. And the town of Palm Springs below looked absolutely still from that distance. The scale was unfathomable – it seemed I could ride a bike down this mountain and use the momentum to coast up the other side.