A Palm Springs Day Trip from the High Desert

When you want a change of pace from the high desert — a proper restaurant strip, a swimming-pool-and-palm-trees afternoon, or a ride up a mountain — Palm Springs is about fifty minutes down the hill. It's an easy day trip, and the contrast with Yucca Valley is the fun of it.

Ride the tram

The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway is the headline. Rotating cars carry you from the desert floor up the sheer wall of Chino Canyon to a mountain station near 8,500 feet, inside Mount San Jacinto State Park. It's routinely thirty to forty degrees cooler at the top, with pine forest, hiking trails and, in winter, snow — you can go from cactus to snowball in ten minutes. Bring a jacket even in summer, and buy tickets ahead on busy weekends.

Midcentury modern everything

Palm Springs is a temple to midcentury modern architecture, and half the pleasure is just driving the neighborhoods looking at butterfly rooflines and breeze-block walls. Self-guided architecture maps are easy to find, guided tours run too, and every February the city throws Modernism Week. Downtown, Palm Canyon Drive is the walkable core of shops and restaurants, and on Thursday evenings VillageFest closes the street for a night market.

Desert gardens and canyons

• Indian Canyons — on Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians land, these palm-lined canyons (Palm, Andreas and Murray) are shady, watered and beautiful, with easy walking.
• The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens — over in Palm Desert, a well-regarded desert zoo and botanical garden, and good with kids.
• Moorten Botanical Garden — a small, old-school cactarium in town if you want more spines in your life.

Plan around the heat

In spring and autumn Palm Springs is glorious. In midsummer the valley floor is brutally hot — which is exactly when the tram, an air-conditioned lunch or a hotel day pass earns its keep. Whatever the season, the drive back up Highway 62 at sunset, with the Morongo grade climbing into cooler air and the light going pink over the ridgelines, is a fine way to end the day.