The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway is your second climate

Outdoors · Palm Springs

What do you actually do at the top of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway?

The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway carries you from the desert floor at the northwest edge of town up the flank of Mount San Jacinto into Mount San Jacinto State Park. You step out of the car into pine forest, thin alpine air and a temperature nothing like the one you left. There are walking trails, a ranger station, and in the winter months, snow. Tickets and operating hours change with the season.

Almost everyone treats this as one ride: up, viewing platform, photograph, coffee, down. That is a fine afternoon, and it misses what the tramway is for when you live here. It is a second climate you can reach on the same day, in the same clothes, without leaving the city. The desert floor sits at roughly 480 feet. The upper station is in subalpine forest. That difference is the entire point, and it is available to you every week of your stay.

Ride on a weekday morning, as early as the schedule allows. The first cars are the quietest, the light through the pines is better, and the valley haze has not built up yet. Then walk past the paved loop where almost everyone stops, and get onto the trails in the state park proper. A wilderness permit is required for the backcountry and is available at the ranger station; it is quick to fill out and easy to forget. The meadow beyond the developed area is where the noise stops entirely. If you are fit and properly acclimatized, the summit route is a serious full-day effort at altitude, and altitude is the part people underestimate when they have come straight up from the desert floor.

This is the one Palm Springs attraction that inverts the seasonal logic. From June through September, when the desert runs highs commonly between 108 and 115 degrees and the city genuinely empties out, the top of the tram is where residents go. The temperature drop is dramatic, and it is the only real relief from the heat that does not involve leaving the valley. In January and February the upper station can hold proper snow, and you will want boots and layers that are almost certainly not in a suitcase packed for the desert. Wind through the San Gorgonio Pass can suspend service with little notice, so check the status before you drive over.

Bring a jacket even in October. People arrive in shorts because it was warm at the bottom and stand shivering at the top, every day, all year. Bring water, because dry air at altitude dehydrates you faster than the desert floor does. And do not schedule anything tightly afterwards — the ride runs on a schedule and the line at the lower station in the cooler months is the least predictable part of the day.

If you're here for a month or more

Watch the weather rather than the calendar. Living in Palm Springs for a month or more means you can go on the clear cold Tuesday instead of the crowded Saturday, and turn back when the pass wind gets up without feeling you wasted a trip. In July and August the tram stops being a novelty and becomes a routine — a morning in the pines, home before the afternoon — which is one of the few honest arguments for a summer stay here at all.