Back in the USA: Day 12 - San Jacinto Peak

When planning our route for our trip we looked at possible stop off points between LA and Grand Canyon and Palm Springs looked ideal. When we looked at what there was to do there we saw that the main attraction was the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. The tramway was opened in 1963 and is the largest rotating aerial tramway in the world. It has been used as a filming location including an episode of Columbo.

Columbo - Short Fuse

We'd read about the hiking trail to San Jacinto summit the walk sounded amazing so we decided to try and factor that into our stop off in Palm Springs. The aerial runway had been closed for maintenance for the whole of September and we were concerned that it wouldn't have reopened in time for our visit. Luckily they reopened it 2 days before! So we booked our tickets for the first tram of the day. The trip on the tramway took 12 minutes and was 2 miles long. It reminded me very much of the cable car ride up Santis der berg in Switzerland which passed perilously close to the rocks at times although this trip was a lot warmer and there was no snow at the top this time 😊

The tramway takes you to a height of 8500 ft and the hike to the summit involves a 11 miles round trip with 2000ft elevation gain to 10,834 ft.

After a quick look at the views and a few photos (just in case it's dark on our return) we were ready to set off. The State Park volunteer in the visitor centre seemed really surprised when we told her we were hiking to the summit, not sure why.

We stopped off at the rangers hut first and filled in our permits. Then set off on the hike at 10.55. Straight away we noticed the air was much thinner and before long we found we were having to stop regularly as it was hard to get your breath which was made more difficult by the intense heat. This took some getting used to. So we took things steady and stopped at regular intervals for a drink, as we climbed higher I started to feel a bit queasy and a couple of times I considered turning around but really wanted to complete the walk as I know we'd both been really looking forward to it.

There weren't many people out on the trail today but the people we did meet we enjoyed chatting to, it's one of the things we've really enjoyed about doing these hikes is meeting such friendly people. As a rule we prefer to hike alone as we do most of our walking at the weekends and it's a chance to wind down and de-stress but we really love chatting to people along a route and then continuing our separate ways.

We had about a mile to go and I was really starting to feel unwell, we met a group of 3 girls just on their way down and they said how fantastic the views were so I knew I had to press on. A short scramble and we reached the summit at 15:00 - there were 3 others already at the small summit, we enjoyed exchanging stories of our trips, we took photos and then started the descent.

By now I felt quite sick. The waves of nausea were awful and I haven't experience anything like that since I had morning sickness quite some years ago. Although I'd had plenty of re-hydration drink I hadn't actually eaten much apart from a bit of trail mix since we'd left the car this morning as I just hadn't felt well enough to eat so I think this added to the nausea but when I attempted to eat my packed lunch I felt worse. Eventually as we got lower I started to feel a little better and we were soon at the ranger station and at 5 pm we posted our return permit.