They called it Crocker's Folly. Francis Freeman Crocker proposed an aerial tramway up the face of the San Jacinto Mountains in 1935, and the reaction from engineers and politicians was polite skepticism at best. The terrain was brutal: sheer granite walls, no roads, no water, no practical way to construct anything at the scale Crocker imagined. The Second World War intervened, then the Korean War, and the folly sat on hold for nearly two decades. When the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway finally opened in September 1963, it was the largest aerial tramway in the world, and Crocker had been vindicated by something even more persuasive than argument — the thing itself, turning slowly against the mountain sky.
The tramway departs from Valley Station at 2,643 feet above sea level, a place where the desert floor bakes in summer and the saguaro-adjacent flora of the Sonoran Desert prevails. Ten minutes later — the same amount of time it might take to walk from a car park to a terminal at Palm Springs International Airport — the arriving car disgorges passengers at Mountain Station, 8,516 feet up and planted in the San Jacinto Wilderness. Between those two points, the tramway passes through five distinct life zones: desert scrub, chaparral, pinyon-juniper woodland, montane forest, and the subalpine zone around the summit. The temperature difference between departure and arrival can exceed forty degrees Fahrenheit. Travelers who board in shorts sometimes find snow.
The tramway's cars were upgraded in 2000 to rotating versions that complete two full revolutions during the ride — a feature that ensures every passenger gets every angle of the ascent without having to angle for a view or crowd a window. On clear days the views from the upper portion of the ride extend more than 200 miles to the north, encompassing the Mojave Desert, the Coachella Valley below, and ranges of mountains that recede in layers of blue and gray to the horizon. The Mountain Station, designed by E. Stewart Williams and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, sits at the edge of a wilderness where mountain lions and black bears are documented residents. The Valley Station was designed by Albert Frey, another of the mid-century modernist architects who defined Palm Springs' built landscape.
Construction required solutions that had not previously existed. Workers and materials were airlifted by helicopter to staging areas on the cliff face. The towers — five of them — were anchored into granite that required drilling and blasting at heights and angles that tested the limits of 1960s engineering. The project took years longer than initially projected and cost more than anyone had originally admitted was likely. All of this was invisible to passengers on the opening day in 1963, who saw only the finished product: cable cars gliding up a mountain face as if the problem of getting there had never been especially difficult.
The tramway has appeared in film and television productions including *Mission: Impossible* and *Columbo*, its dramatic setting lending itself to scenes requiring an atmosphere of height, exposure, and the particular tension of being suspended between two worlds. Beyond its cultural appearances, the tramway serves a practical purpose as the primary access point to the San Jacinto Wilderness, where more than fifty miles of trails allow hikers to penetrate terrain that would otherwise require multi-day approaches. The contrast between the parking lot below — sunbaked asphalt, tourist buses, the familiar infrastructure of a popular attraction — and the wilderness above, where the only sounds are wind and birds, is one of the more abrupt transitions available to any traveler in California.
Located at 33.84°N, 116.61°W at the base of the San Jacinto Mountains escarpment. The tramway cables and towers are visible from cruising altitude as thin lines ascending the dramatic cliff face. Palm Springs International Airport (ICAO: KPSP) is approximately 6 miles to the east-southeast.