..but my wife and I are out in Palm Desert this week. Some friends had an extra week on one of their timeshares and they let us use it. We arrived yesterday afternoon and we plan to leave on Saturday. Anyway, today was going to be the hottest day of the week so we figured it would be best to go up the Palm Springs Tramway to the top of Mount San Jacinto (we'll wait for some 'cooler' days to go to the zoo and the air museum). When we got there, a little after noon, it was 92Ëš at the bottom but 52Ëš at the top (8520 ft altitude). Anyway, it was a beautifully clear day with very little haze.
The trams runs every 12 minutes or so and while we were waiting for our ride back down, the tram coming up had just discharged its passengers when the attendant came in an told us that there was a problem and that we would have to wait for the next cycle before we can go down. Note that tram the is operated by a private entity and they had strict, no exception rules posted all over the place about people wearing masks both in the trams itself and when waiting to board and immediately after exiting the gondola as people are still walking in close proximity to each other (once you were out on the patios and observation decks, the rules were a bit more lax).
Anyway, it seems that in the load that had just arrived while we were waiting, that a group of maybe six or seven people, when the gondola was about halfway up, they took off their masks (the gondola can hold maybe 20-25 people max and we were pretty close to full on our trips up and back down). When the attendant on board told them that they had to put them back on, they refused, probably thinking, what can they do now. Well, when they got to the top, the attendant and the people meeting to meet the tram, they refused to allow them to get off and made them ride immediately back down, just them, and the attendant (that's why we had to wait for the next cycle). Someone asked one of the people working at the top about what was going to be done about this, and they said they were going to be met by security and if they don't make a big fuss they would simply be asked to leave. He seemed to imply that they've had incidents like this in the past as they were fully prepared as to what to do and what to tell everyone. Note that many of the people waiting to board the tram for the downward trip expressed the notion that they hoped that the people got MORE than just a warning and an invitation to leave.
OCU
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