The Best Things to Do in Palm Springs With Kids
Palm Springs has a reputation as a grown-ups' town — pools, cocktails, architecture tours — and that reputation is not wrong so much as incomplete. There is a very good zoo, one of the best aviation museums in the western United States, and a cable car that delivers children from 100°F to snow inside ten minutes.
What the town does demand is that you take the heat seriously and plan around it. So here's the list, organised roughly by how well each thing survives a hot day.
Best Family-Friendly Attractions
The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens, 47900 Portola Avenue, Palm Desert, is the single best day out for children in this valley and it is not close.
Admission is $44.95 for adults, $34.95 for ages 3 to 17, free under 3, $37.95 military. The zoo is entirely cashless. Allow two to three hours; families with small children routinely spend four.
Hours are the important bit and they change dramatically by season. 1 June to 30 September: 7am to 1:30pm daily, last admission 12:30. 1 October to 31 May: 8am to 5pm, last admission 4pm. That 7am summer opening is a deliberate, sensible response to the climate — and it means the summer version of this trip starts at dawn or not at all.
What to actually do there: feed a giraffe ($10, daily 8am to 1pm, and worth every dollar), ride the Endangered Species Carousel ($3 a go or $8 unlimited, October to May only, 9am to 4:30pm), and spend longer than expected at the G-scale model railroad, which runs a miniature route from Palm Springs to the Salton Sea and quietly captures every adult who claimed not to be interested. There's also the Oasis Splash Pad, the Goat Kraal, and a viewing window into the Tennity Wildlife Hospital.
Strollers rent for $8 to $10, wheelchairs $15, mobility scooters $30.
In summer, buy tickets the night before and be in the car park at 6:50am. The animals are active at 7 and asleep by 11, the zoo shuts at 1:30, and every family who turns up at 10 gets a hot, quiet zoo and a bad morning. In winter, arrive at 8 for the same reason with more margin.
Rainy or Hot Day Indoor Activities
Palm Springs Air Museum, 745 N Gene Autry Trail, is the correct answer to a 110°F Tuesday, and it is a good museum in absolute terms rather than a heat refuge that happens to have planes.
More than 80 aircraft across 91,000 square feet of air-conditioned hangar, and crucially, almost no ropes — kids walk under wings and through fuselages rather than looking at them across a barrier. Open daily 10am to 5pm, closed Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The pricing is unusually family-friendly: adults $25, seniors and teens 13 to 17 $23, and children 12 and under free with a paying adult. Active-duty military and immediate family go free, and family packs run $65 to $95. Leashed dogs are welcome, which no other attraction in this article can say.
If someone in the family is going to lose their mind about this, the museum also sells warbird rides — from around $195 in a C-47 up to several thousand in a P-51 or T-33 — mostly on weekends between November and May.
Children's Discovery Museum of the Desert in Rancho Mirage is the option for under-8s: fully indoors, hands-on, $19.95 per person aged 1 and up, $17.95 military, and $5 through Museums for All with an EBT card. Open Monday to Saturday 9am to 4pm, closed Sundays.
Splash Pads & Pools
Honestly? In summer, your hotel pool is the main event and everything else is an excursion from it. Book accordingly.
Beyond that, the Oasis Splash Pad at the Living Desert is included with zoo admission and is the reliable free-with-entry option. The Palm Springs Swim Center, 405 S Pavilion Way, is the municipal answer — $3.50 adults, $2.50 children 4 to 12, open 6am to 7pm Monday to Thursday and shorter hours at the weekend.
Knott's Soak City is gone. It was renamed Wet 'n' Wild Palm Springs in 2013, closed permanently in 2019, and was demolished. Old guidebooks and a lot of stale web pages still list it. The site is now the Palm Springs Surf Club, which is a surf-session venue at $100 to $250 a head — not a family water park, though non-surfers can use the lounge pool, lazy river and slides.
Kid-Friendly Hikes
Andreas Canyon in Indian Canyons is the one. A 1.2-mile loop rated easy, following a year-round creek under fan palms, past bedrock mortars where Cahuilla families ground mesquite, with picnic tables at the trailhead. Admission is $12 adults, $6 for children 6 to 12, free under 5. No dogs, at all — this catches families out constantly.
The Desert View Trail at the top of the Aerial Tramway is about 1.5 miles, partly paved, and at 8,500 feet it is 30 to 40 degrees cooler than the trailhead you drove from. In practice this is the only comfortable family walk in the valley between May and September.
Moorten Botanical Garden, 1701 S Palm Canyon Drive, is not a hike but works beautifully as a slow half-hour with children: one acre, over 3,000 varieties of cactus and succulent, and the Cactarium — the world's first greenhouse built specifically for cacti. Chester "Cactus Slim" Moorten and his wife Patricia started it in 1938 and it still feels like someone's very obsessive garden, which is the charm. $7 adults, $3 for ages 5 to 12. Closed Wednesdays October to May, and Friday to Sunday mornings only in summer.
The Tramway, Which Is Its Own Category
The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway is the outing children talk about afterwards. Ten minutes, 5,873 vertical feet, rotating cars, and a pine forest at the top with — in winter — actual snow on the ground while it's 75°F and sunny in town.
$20.95 for children aged 3 to 10, $36.95 adults, plus $15 to park. Bring proper coats; the temperature difference is not a figure of speech.
One planning note: the tramway takes an annual maintenance shutdown in early autumn — in 2026 it runs 8 September to 4 October. Check before you build a trip around it.
Family Restaurants
Great Shakes, 160 S Palm Canyon Drive, is the downtown institution and an easy win — every shake arrives with a warm mini donut threaded onto the straw, baked in house. The Date Walnut is the local order. It's a walk-up counter, so it works with restless children in a way sit-down restaurants don't.
LuLu California Bistro at 200 S Palm Canyon Drive has an enormous menu, a big patio on the main street, and the tolerance for noise that a family of five needs on a Saturday. King's Highway at the Ace, a converted 1960s Denny's, serves diner food from 7am to 11pm, which covers both the pre-zoo breakfast and the collapsed-at-9pm dinner.
Two Things Worth Knowing Before You Book
Check seasonal closures. Several of the free and cheap attractions here go dark for the summer. Sunnylands — free admission and parking, lovely gardens, Wednesday to Sunday 8:30am to 4pm — takes a summer hiatus and reopens 9 September 2026. The Village Green Heritage Center downtown is closed until 15 October 2026.
Respect the numbers. Average highs are 102°F in June, 106°F in July, 105°F in August and 101°F in September, and overnight lows hover near 80°F, so there is no cool window at either end of the day. The valley record is 124°F. Between June and September, treat outdoor activity with children as a before-10am proposition and build the rest of the day around water and air conditioning. Do that and a summer family trip here is genuinely good value. Ignore it and you will have a miserable week.
Good to know
The Living Desert Zoo in Palm Desert is the anchor — giraffe feeding, a big G-scale model railroad, a splash pad and a carousel. The Palm Springs Air Museum puts 80-plus aircraft in air-conditioned hangars with almost no ropes between you and them. And the Aerial Tramway takes kids from a hot desert floor to snow at 8,516 feet in ten minutes, which reliably astonishes them.
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