Wilderness express

THE trip to the top of Mt. San Jacinto is as easy as hopping into a gondola via the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway and soaring one vertical mile above granite escarpments, lodgepole pines and waterfalls spilling into gorges choked with wild grapevines. It’s a slice of the Sierra and prelude to a challenging hiking path with a controversial future.

Disembarking at 8,516 feet high, you find there’s a 400-yard serpentine paved ramp that leads down to Long Valley, where trails to the summit and elsewhere begin. It is perhaps the most hated sidewalk in California.

Clomping down the steep grade is bad enough; climbing up is misery. Some people haul themselves up by the handrail, others push up a few yards at a time, then fall gasping over the rail. Even state park rangers -- men and women with bulging calf muscles -- complain. “It never gets any easier,” says ranger Jed Reghanti.

To ease bellyaching and blisters, a new idea has emerged: Install a Swiss-engineered people mover, the Monorack, a mountain-worthy variation of a monorail, that will extend the machinery atop the mountain farther into the wilds. The idea comes from the folks at the Mt. San Jacinto Winter Park Authority, which operates the aerial tram. They think whisking visitors effortlessly up and down the ramp makes sense and is a logical extension of the tram.

The concept of a people mover seems fine for many day-hikers who schlep the grade, which sometimes is called Heart Attack Hill. For many people who are disabled, overweight or aging, smoothing out the rigors of the hiking path makes sense. On a recent day, Florence Allen, a Burlingame resident with a lung condition, struggled up the incline. When she heard about the people mover idea, her comment was: “Oh, how nice.”

But to many environmentalists, building a people mover in mountain backcountry is an unnecessary and unwarranted intrusion into the wilds. Environmentalists bitterly fought, and lost, when the aerial tram opened in 1963. Forty-two years later, the debate is being renewed. Some worry a people mover would lead to creeping commercialization and wreck the natural experience.

Set in an amphitheater of craggy peaks and lodgepole pine forests, Long Valley is the heart of Mt. San Jacinto State Park. Scott Silver, executive director of Wild Wilderness, an Oregon-based advocacy group, says that by making this shortcut, “they’re making wilderness less wild. The wilderness near the people mover isn’t going to be wilderness at all.”

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A history of conflict

AT the stroke of 10 on weekday mornings, Mt. San Jacinto starts to hum just like the grumbling spirit Tahquitz in Native American legends of the mountain. This growl is not coming from Tahquitz, but from the tramway’s five towers, 27 miles of cable and 600 tons of steel.

The first gondola lifts above the granite spires of Chino Canyon and about 10 minutes later, bumps into the dock at the 8,516-foot-high mountain station. Men with toddlers on their shoulders and women in flip-flops step off the tram platform, walk through the lodge and out the back door to face the steep concrete ramp that leads from the mountain station down to Long Valley.

For most people, the tram is the only way to get to the top of Mt. San Jacinto. You can’t drive to the summit, and the trails from the desert floor are so steep that only the hardiest hikers attempt the ascent.

Jeff Morgan, a Palm Springs spokesman for the Sierra Club, has a season pass for the aerial tram and rides it almost every week to reach his favorite hiking trails. “It’s there, so I use it,” he says.

Yet despite its popularity, the tram, and the very notion of mechanized transportation on the mountain, has a history of controversy.

At one time, it was uncertain whether the tramway would be built. Its construction was the subject of a 17-year dispute, one of the most protracted conservation battles in Southern California history. The leader of the fight was Harry James, a former silent-film director who helped preserve the San Gorgonio wilderness and founded the Desert Protective Council. In the 1940s, James and his Sierra Club allies objected to the proposed tramway route that crossed a section of federal wilderness area and encroached on a state park known for its primitive allure. They feared it would open a wedge into the wilderness.

James “saw the tramway as a mechanistic intrusion that would destroy, or at least seriously harm, the wilderness nature of this high mountain country,” wrote John W. Robinson in “The San Jacintos.”

Today, some environmentalists say the tram should be dismantled, just as dams and urban developments in national parks should be removed. Building a people mover, they argue, only mimics a bad trend, and at a time when many funiculars -- think Mt. Lowe Railway above Altadena and Mt. Tamalpais Railroad in Mill Valley -- have disappeared.

A ride to the top on the Palm Springs tram costs $21.50 for an adult, and more than 400,000 people annually seem happy to pay the fee. The tram conveys about 1,000 people per day into the high country. Add a people mover to ease the steepest part of the mountaintop trail and, critics say, more people will reach the backcountry and potentially damage sensitive resources, such as the meadow in Long Valley.

“This is one of the last refuges in Southern California where you can go and get away from intrusive urbanization,” says Monica Bond, a wildlife biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “There have not been any studies on how many people they can have up there without serious environmental damage.”

Mt. San Jacinto State Park plans to assess the condition of the meadow in a management plan that will be completed in about two years. According to Reghanti, the park ranger, the meadow already has been harmed by human traffic. “It’s exceeded its limit,” he says. “There’s going to need to be some sort of regulation of the number of folks coming up here.”

But the tram -- and by extension, the people mover -- is seen as vital to the Coachella’s Valley’s most important industry: tourism. While the trails and meadows atop San Jacinto are managed by Mt. San Jacinto State Park personnel, the tramway board operates independently, with members appointed by the Palm Springs City Council, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors and the governor.

The goals of the Winter Park Authority are commercial: to increase ridership and revenue. The goals of the state park include preservation of wilderness. Some activists say the two entities -- with aims that at times conflict -- have become too cozy.

The state Department of Parks and Recreation general fund receives 75 cents for each tram ticket sold, an arrangement that theoretically gives the state parks a financial stake in increasing ridership. To boost ridership, the park authority searches for new ways to attract tourists. It is also proposing a skating rink, an elevated walkway and a new visitor center in Long Valley. “You do something new and after a while, it’s not new any longer,” says tramway spokeswoman Lena Zimmerschied, explaining the need to innovate.

Over the decades, suggested improvements have included hotels, a glider port, backcountry hostels and even a second tramway to San Jacinto Peak. A four-passenger incline railway called a “hillerator” -- a conveyance that is strikingly similar in concept to today’s people mover, running from the mountain station into Long Valley -- was proposed by the park authority in 1963, but it was defeated by the state parks department.

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Assessing access

TRAMWAY president and general manager Rob Parkins says the people mover is necessary to provide backcountry access for the disabled. “It’s not a toy,” he says.

But wilderness advocates doubt access to the device can be restricted to disabled people. Further, they wonder whether the tram operators are taking advantage of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Though the proposed skating rink, elevated walkway and visitor center would be subject to review under Mt. San Jacinto State Park’s forthcoming Long Valley Management Plan, the people mover proposal would be exempt because the park authority says it falls under the purview of the disabilities act.

“It’s not like we’re skirting environmental laws, but in my view, we don’t have to include it [the people mover proposal] in the Long Valley plan,” says Gary Watts, Inland Empire district superintendent for the state parks department. The device, he adds, would be subject to review under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Many visitors to the top of Mt. San Jacinto are outdoors people who could handle the grade when they were younger, but now struggle as their knees and backs age. Peg Sperry, 77, of Palm Springs can still make the climb, but she says the people mover might help aging hikers reach trails. “The older people won’t hurt the habitat in the meadow,” she says.

Yet, Californians for Disability Rights holds that the people mover was not what it had in mind when the group won a lawsuit in August against the state parks department for greater access.

The Monorack “is not an ADA project because it’s not even close to accessible,” says the group’s president, Laura Williams. She questions whether the Monorack can carry power wheelchairs that weigh as much as 350 pounds, and she says many people in wheelchairs are not able to transfer, or climb, into a people mover car, even with an attendant to assist.

Parkins has provided few specifics of the device, but says it is being modified by the manufacturer to suit the tramway’s needs -- leaving the possibility that the final version will meet the needs of disabled people.

Zimmerschied, the park authority spokeswoman, says the people mover would not be just for the disabled, but rather “it’s for anyone who wants to take it.”

Long Valley, terminus for the people mover, is not designated wilderness. When the tram was built, the area was rezoned, a process that removed it from the wilderness eligibility. The official wilderness begins less than a mile from the mountain tram station.

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Wild at heart

IN Long Valley, the wind shakes the treetops overhead; down below the meadow is a bubble of stillness infused with the butterscotch scent of the Jeffrey pines.

A shimmer of a stream flows through the meadow in wet years. Signs say: “Fragile area. Stay on the Trail,” yet there are big bare patches blotched with footprints all around the signs, along with flattened yellow monkey flowers and rangers buttons.

Without the tram, the only way to get here is via an eight-mile hike from Idyllwild or the 12-mile near-vertical Cactus-to-Clouds trail from Palm Springs, one of the most arduous day-hikes in the country. If you take either of those routes and camp out in the mountains, arriving in Long Valley before the first tram in the morning, you’ll catch a glimpse of the valley as it was when the state park was dedicated in 1937.

State Parks and Recreation Commission Chairman Joseph Knowland pledged at the time the pristine high country “will never be entered by a highway.”

He hadn’t reckoned on a tram, or on the human tendency to create boundaries and regulations that can muddle our interpretations and uses of wild lands. However, we still gauge wilderness by ancient and visceral criterion.

If you look up at night from Palm Springs, you’ll see a single light, the tram’s mountain station, beaming in a mile-high black wall. By the measures that matter, the blackness all around the light is wilderness.

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Ann Japenga is a writer living in Palm Springs. Some of her essays have been anthologized in “True Tales of the Mojave: From Talking Rocks to Yucca Man.”