A High-Wire Act for Crews Redoing Tram

For decades, tourists ascending the 8,500-foot Palm Springs Aerial Tramway have held on with white knuckles while gazing at spectacular views of jagged Mt. San Jacinto and the sprawling Coachella Valley.

But for the next few weeks, while the tram is closed for a major overhaul, daredevil construction workers from around the world are enjoying a far wilder ride, blasting cliff walls while suspended on nylon ropes and maneuvering steel beams atop 200-foot support towers.

Long an icon of this desert city, the tram is getting an $11-million make-over. The rejuvenated tram, scheduled to reopen Aug. 19, will feature 18-foot-wide cylindrical cars that will rotate slowly as they ascend the mountain.

The new tram cars--now shrouded from public view under blue tarps--will be the world’s largest, and the first in North America to rotate, tramway spokesman Tim Jones said.

To make room for wider tram cars, the metal structures of the tram and even the mountain itself must be reshaped. Crews experienced in aerial cable construction have flown in from Austria, Switzerland and ski resorts throughout the United States to remake in a matter of weeks a tramway that took nearly two years to build, from 1961 to 1963.

“These are specialists who have worked in heights most of their careers,” Jones said. “They are used to working in adverse conditions.”

Indeed, their expertise lies in a kind of extreme construction that rivals high-rise and bridge building in its danger and daring. Fit and wiry, with sunburned faces and tousled hair, these high-wire builders hop from mountain to mountain around the world to repair ski lifts in the Rockies and tramways in the Alps.

“It’s fun,” said Graham Klisares, 40, of Utah, who has been working on ski lifts and tramways for 14 years. “The danger’s an adrenaline rush. And it’s a great office: being outdoors in the mountains.”

At the tram station atop the mountain one recent day, workers were perched 40 feet above a rocky outcrop, piecing together the platforms where riders will board and disembark.

One welder lay across a steel mesh strip, a shower of sparks from his torch flying toward his face. Another worker, without hard hat or harness, scooted down a bundle of cables from the roof and leaped across the chasm to the platform, while a third shimmied up a steel beam, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“You don’t think about the height,” said worker Aaron Bauer, 33, of Colorado. “You just do the job.”

When tram officials began planning the renovation in the mid-1990s, they commissioned Von Roll, the Swiss company that built the tramway nearly four decades ago, to redesign it for the larger cars.

Engineers drew up plans to raise and widen the saddles that support the tram cables on each of five towers, and to expand the loading and unloading docks. They built and shipped nearly 400 tons of prefabricated steel parts that fit like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

To make way for the wider cars at the tramway top, workers rappelled 60 feet down 150-foot cliffs, drilled 12-foot holes, stuffed them with dynamite and blasted away 2,000 cubic feet of rock.

In the final phases, massive helicopters called Skycranes airlifted 12- to 15-ton steel beams and supports, while workers fitted the hulking pieces of hardware into place. The two cranes, like prehistoric dragonflies the size of city buses, were flown in from out of state and cost $8,000 an hour to operate.

“In one weekend we had a $125,000 helicopter bill,” Jones said.

Workers on the tram stations and towers are now fitting together smaller steel beams and other remaining parts of the new structure.

They are ferried to work by Jet Ranger and Long Ranger helicopters flown by Landell’s Aviation, the Desert Hot Springs company that pioneered helicopter construction techniques during the tramway’s original construction.

The flight itself is a dizzying spiral above plunging cliffs. During one landing, pilot Steve De Jesus touched down on a single skid atop a rock spire. Workers hopped off and climbed up scaffolding to the tower platform where they labor, secured whenever possible with heavy-duty harnesses.

“It’s always safety first,” Bauer said, eliciting a round of chuckles. “Unfortunately, sometimes there’s nothing to strap into.”

This band of high-wire builders thrives on daily confrontation with danger in work and play. By Klisares’ reckoning, they are “lunatics. There’s a lot of testosterone flying around here.”

Godi Bircher, 59, has been doing tramway construction 45 years, since he joined his older brother’s business in his native Switzerland. His son, Karl Bircher, 29, is also on the crew. The best part of the job, the elder Bircher said, is “the fresh air, the height, a shot of whiskey at night--and sometimes at lunchtime.”

Nathan Shake, 25, started out as a ski instructor and worked his way up to ski lift construction, installing equipment on 60-foot lift towers. The tramway, though, is a step above anything else he’s done.

“It’s more exciting,” said Shake, of Boise, Idaho. “It’s more of a challenge. I haven’t had to fly to work before.”