Tag Archives: Gondola

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?

Gondola That Doesn’t Go Far

If you want to get from street level to the Salesforce Park, there is a more unusual method.  A gondola runs from the ground up to the park level.  We first came across it as we walked through the park and passed the top station.  For some reason they only want you to use it in one direction so we watched the car come up and then moved on.

After we had come back downstairs, we checked out the base station.  It was not a busy day so there wasn’t any form of line but there were customers taking the ride to the top.  It was a simple device and slightly odd.  The car was a box with no effort made to style it in an interesting way.  However, it did provide a point of interest.