Mt. San Jacinto (aka The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway)

On our last day, we decided to up the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway.  It takes about 10 minutes to rise to 8,800 feet above sea level, and the cool thing is that the inside of the tram slowly rotates.

At the top, one can see Mt. San Jacinto in the distance.

Turn around and you are looking down into the Palm Springs area.

From the tramway station, you enter into the state park. Miles of hiking and we did an easy loop through the forests.

It was 30 degrees cooler here at elevation than down at the valley floor.  The trees and smells reminded me of the Pacific Northwest.

On the way back down to the base and off to the airport.

Around Palm Springs

With the Bay Area being cloudy and rainy, Palm Springs has sun and warm temperatures.  Here's the view from our villa compound.

Breakfast by the pool......

....isn't complete with someone's phone addiction.  I'm talking about me, not pictured!

Our second day, we spent in Palm Springs itself and started with a hike on the mountain above the Palm Springs Museum.  Here's a view from about half way up looking east down the Coachella Valley.

The trail was quite steep and we didn't feel our shoes had enough grip so we came down short of the end.

So we spent an hour or so inside the Palm Springs Museum.  Here's one of my favorite pieces. 

I'll just leave this here.

In the afternoon, we went to a spa where I got a hot stone massage and Onions got a seaweed wrap, and we spent a few hours laying by the pool and enjoyed the steamroom and jacuzzi.  Quintessential Palm Springs!

That evening, based on the recommendations of two friends, we ended up eating at a restaurant called Workshop. Trendy and expensive.  $26 dollars for a hamburger isn't our style.  I think we've decided that going out to fancy restaurants isn't what we really get much out of on vacation.

At the museum there was an exhibit on the furniture of mid-century modern houses of Palm Springs so before we left for the airport the next day, we spent a few hours driving around finding famous mid-century modern houses.  Here's the Kauffman house.  This is the same man who built Fallingwater who had this house built in Palm Springs.

This is the "Tramway Gas Station," now remodeled and open to the public as the Palm Springs Welcome Center.

Elvis spent part of his honeymoon here in this house.

Up in the foothills, this is the Edris house, with its great views.  I'm not a real fan of mid-century modern, but I can see how it became popular in this landscape.

Joshua Tree National Park

In our growing quest to visit as many of America's National Parks as possible, one of the reasons we chose Palm Springs was to visit nearby Joshua Tree National Park.

The famed Joshua tree for which the park is named, but it's a park because of the three different deserts (Mohave, Sonoran and Colorado, as if I could tell the difference) that intersect and overlap in the park.  According to Wikipedia the Mormon's named the Joshua tree because it looked like it has hands praying to god. (Eye Roll)

Driving through the park, there are a couple places with huge swaths of Joshua Trees, but I didn't see any outside the park, however apparently they are found at certain desert elevations in the American Southwest.

Another bonus for the trip was to see the desert flowers.  I expected to see vast seas of colored flowers, but it was more a "look, there's some bright color."  I'm not a desert person, but I was surprised at the many different flowers in bloom.

This picture doesn't give much scale, but this plant, the ocotillo, is over 10 feet tall.

We did a couple small hikes, but the hike up Ryan Mountain gave us some great views of the desert.

Finishing up the clockwise loop from Palm Springs through Joshua Tree, we ended up heading to the Salton Sea.  As we descended below sea level, we saw the magic of irrigation.

The sea is actually an "accidental" sea was formed when a canal was breached in 1905 and for two years water flowed into the Salton Sink, now the Salton Sea.

The increasing salinity means that fish can no longer survive in the sea.

Sunset over the mountains above Palm Springs.