The hook
In ten minutes a rotating cable car lifts you from the desert floor to an alpine forest eight thousand feet up, and the car spins slowly so everyone gets the view.
01Why it's worth it
An engineer named Francis Crocker looked up at the snow on Mount San Jacinto from the desert heat in 1935 and decided he wanted to get up there where it was cool. It took until 1963, with helicopters flying in the tower materials, and the result was called the eighth wonder of the world: the largest rotating aerial tram car anywhere, climbing two and a half miles up the sheer wall of Chino Canyon. You step on in the Sonoran Desert in shorts and step off in a pine forest that can be forty degrees colder with snow on the ground, into Mount San Jacinto State Park and its miles of trails. The floor rotates on the way up so the whole canyon wheels past you. It's a genuinely startling ten minutes.
02How to experience it
The valley station is on the north edge of Palm Springs, about eight hours from the Bay. It's pricey and popular, so buy ahead and go early. Dress for the mountain rather than the desert, since it's dramatically colder at the top, and in winter there's snow and even snowshoe rental. Give yourself time to hike once you're up.