Tag Archives: cable car

A Gondola to Nowhere

There is an interesting tourist attraction in Spokane that I hadn’t been expecting. A gondola ride starts up in the park area, drops down the hillside near the falls and crosses the river where it does a U turn and heads back the way it came. There are groups of the pods together on the wire and they slow everything down to board them. Consequently, you will come to a halt periodically during your ride while people embark and disembark.

The ride is never terribly high off the ground, so it comes right over you if you are walking around the hillside near the falls. A slightly surprising thing to see when you aren’t expecting it. I wonder whether the view of the falls from the gondola is impressive. This is the sort of thing that I would normally be expected to try. However, we only had a limited amount of time there, so I skipped it. Maybe I’ll find out some time in the future?

Squaw Valley Aerial Tram

AE7I4462.jpgIf you want to go the top of the mountains, you might as well travel in style.  An aerial tram (cable car for the Brits out there) runs from the center of the resort to the top of High Peak.  We went in to buy our tickets only to find out that they were running a special for the last weekend of the ski season and both of us could go up for less than I was expecting to pay for one of us!  Nice result.

AE7I4384.jpgWhenever I see these contraptions, I can’t help but think of them in the context of so many movies I saw as a kid.  Invariably, someone would end up on the roof in a perilous situation.  The real thing is of course a lot less dramatic.  The larger these things are the smoother the run seems to be.  The only disturbance is when you pass over the towers but this one was large enough that the transition was very gentle.  The swing was nicely damped too so it was really a non-event.

AE7I4392.jpgThe thing I find quite amusing is how the cables sag under the load of the car.  As you get towards the steepest part of the climb, the car seems to head straight for the cliff face before it pulls up to the next tower.  It is all very simple really but it still looks cool.  Our trip up was pretty quiet because we were early.  By the time we came down, things were quite a bit busier.  I liked the display screen in the car that had all of the key parameters for the service so you could see that the loads and wind speeds were well inside limits.  Just as well!

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