Palm Springs Aerial Tramway - Mountain Station

Author's Comments

You ride up through climate zones in ten minutes, which is the kind of compression that should not work but does. The desert floor falls away below the tram car, the rotation gives you the full sweep without your having to move, and by the time you step off at the Mountain Station you are in pine forest with snow on the ground in February and a thirty degree temperature drop in your bones. The view from the observation deck is the reason most people come, and it is genuinely vast. The Coachella Valley unfolds eastward in a long pale geometry of grids and golf courses and salt flats, and on clear winter afternoons you can see all the way to the Salton Sea. Smog is the variable. Summer afternoons here often haze over by two, and the photograph you wanted becomes a softer, less defined thing. Winter and early spring give you the sharper version, the one where the light has edges. I come for the last hour before sunset. The tram runs late enough that you can ride up in afternoon light and ride down in the dark, and the deck at golden hour catches the valley turning from bleached white to amber to something close to rose. It is a wide-lens place. The composition almost makes itself. The harder photograph is the one that includes the foreground pines in silhouette against the valley, which only works for about fifteen minutes and requires you to have already decided where to stand. Bring a jacket you would not otherwise pack for Palm Springs. The crowds thin after the last ascent.

Gallery