Spokane, WA is a beautiful city, with one of its best features being the numerous waterfalls that can be found along the Spokane River running through downtown.
Riverfront Park is a great area to walk around to view those falls, but the city has a feature that makes viewing Spokane Falls even better – the Numerica SkyRide.
The Numerica SkyRide at Riverfront Spokane is a gondola ride that transports you over the river and falls, giving you a superior vantage point. You start off at the ticket office in the southwest corner of Riverfront Park, on the corner of N Post St and W Spokane Falls Blvd. After getting your tickets, you head outside to the ride’s entrance.
Numerica SkyRide has at least a dozen cabins along the cable, with them being spaced out in groups of three. The cabins come to a complete stop when passengers board and disembark, so it’s not like ski lifts, the London Eye, etc. that keep moving as people get on and off.
Once everyone has boarded in your group of three cabins, the ride starts up again and you start heading up. At the start of the ride you pass by the Washington Water Power Post Street Electric Substation and start getting some views of the Lower Falls.
The ride then starts heading down 200 feet past the falls.
Due to the gondola ride pausing every minute or so due to people getting on and off the SkyRide, you get several opportunities to take photos without having to worry about blur from the ride moving. On the way down, some of the best views will have a cabin in front of you. The great thing is that on the way back up, you’ll be in one of those falls-side cabins.
The ride continues beneath the Monroe Street Bridge, a deck arch bridge that’s more than 100 years old. It then turns around to take you back up past the falls.
In addition to the waterfalls, keep an eye out for marmots along the ride as we spotted one as we headed back up under the bridge.
It’s the second half of the Numerica SkyRide where you get the best views as you don’t have any other cabins passing by in front of you. March-June is apparently the best time of year to visit because snowmelt upriver means that the water cascading over the waterfalls is at its strongest.
The cabins can fit 5-6 people, but it wasn’t very busy when we visited in April and so we had the cabin to ourselves. It was about 65°F that day, but the cabin felt significantly warmer than that. There was a little breeze coming in through the small open windows, but I wouldn’t have wanted to ride it in the height of summer. In fact, in the summer when temperatures reach 90°F or more, they close the ride until it cools down as the cabins would simply be too hot for anyone to ride in them. They therefore recommend that if visiting in the summer months that you ride it early in the morning.
After one final stop over the falls while other people boarded the SkyRide, it was a short distance back to the beginning where we disembarked ourselves.
To give you an even better idea of what the ride is like, here’s a video of our experience.
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