Palm Springs Aerial Tramway

The idea was born in the heat. In 1935 a young electrical engineer named Francis Crocker was driving through the desert, mopping his brow, when he looked up at the snow still clinging to the peak of Mount San Jacinto and wished he could go up there where it was cool. Getting there meant somehow scaling the sheer cliffs of Chino Canyon, and the scheme was so audacious that a newspaperwoman nicknamed it Crocker's Folly, a name that stuck for years.

It took decades to answer her. A tramway bill passed the California legislature twice in the early years only to be vetoed both times, and it was not until 1945 that a new law created the Mount San Jacinto Winter Park Authority to make it real. Design work began in 1950, funded by private revenue bonds rather than taxpayers, and crews hauled much of the material to the towers by helicopter across terrain too steep for roads. The tramway finally opened in 1963, Crocker's folly made good.

For its first decades the tram cars were fixed, and riders crowded to whichever window faced the view. Around the turn of the millennium the tramway installed the Rotair cars, each one eighteen feet across, that turn slowly as they travel so the floor completes a full revolution over the course of the trip. Stand still and the entire Coachella Valley drifts past your window, then the canyon wall, then the valley again.

The line rises about two and a half miles up the canyon, gaining nearly six thousand feet from the Valley Station to the Mountain Station at 8,516 feet. It is one of the steepest tramways anywhere, and the ride crosses a series of towers strung between rock faces that seem impossibly sheer. The whole climb takes about ten minutes, long enough to feel the world change around you as the cactus below gives way to the pines above.

Step out of the Mountain Station and a paved path drops down into Long Valley, the gateway to Mount San Jacinto State Park. Here you will find a ranger station, picnic tables under the trees, and a natural history museum that explains how a subalpine forest ends up perched above a desert. The park protects a rugged high country of granite, meadow, and conifer that feels a continent away from the palm groves below.

From Long Valley the trails fan out to suit every visitor. The easy Desert View loop runs less than two miles with overlooks back down toward the valley, a gentle way to stretch your legs at altitude. Stronger hikers can push on to Round Valley or, for a serious full day, all the way to the 10,834-foot summit of San Jacinto Peak, a climb John Muir once called one of the most sublime views in America. In winter the same meadows become a quiet playground for snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.

The single most useful thing to know is how much cooler it gets up top. The Mountain Station commonly runs thirty degrees or more below the desert floor, so a visitor who leaves a hundred-degree afternoon in Palm Springs can arrive to a brisk, breezy forest, and in winter to real snow. Bring a jacket no matter the season, and take the thin air at eight thousand feet slowly until you adjust.

Give yourself unhurried time on both ends: the observation decks, the two documentary theaters, and the cafes at the Mountain Station are worth lingering over, and the state park trails reward anyone who walks even a short way past the crowds. Many visitors time the last car down for dusk, when the valley below flickers to life in a carpet of lights and the whole desert seems to glow beneath the mountain.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.