The Aerial Tramway up Mount San Jacinto
Near Palm Springs, California
From the desert floor, the sheer face of Mount San Jacinto rises more than ten thousand feet, one of the steepest escarpments in North America. Riding a cable up that wall was one man's decades long obsession. In nineteen thirty-five, an electrical engineer named Francis Crocker looked at the snow capped peak on a blazing hot day and said he wished he could go up where it was cool.
That wish became the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. It took decades. The state created a special authority to build it in nineteen forty-five, but construction did not begin until nineteen sixty.
The terrain was so rugged that no roads could reach most of the tower sites, so helicopters did the work, flying more than twenty-three thousand trips to haul crews, cement, and steel up the mountain. The tramway finally opened on September twelfth, nineteen sixty-three. The ride climbs from around two thousand six hundred feet to more than eight thousand five hundred feet in about ten minutes, passing through several life zones.
People say it is like traveling from the deserts of Mexico to the forests of Canada in the time it takes to finish a coffee. At the top waits Mount San Jacinto State Park, with pine forest and, in winter, snow, while the desert bakes far below. In the year two thousand the old cars were replaced with rotating cars, the largest of their kind in the world.
