This was in many respects the most unusual weekend I have ever experienced at
Mammoth in 30 seasons.
Most obvious were the conditions. Many of you have heard me critique places
like Taos and Crested Butte for being so difficult to cover their steep
slopes. This is the exact problem at the top of Mammoth this season. Season
snowfall is 72 inches, but the largest single storm was only 20 inches on Dec.
26-27. That storm got Mammoth from about 1,000 skiable acres up to maybe
2,000. Many of the storms have been low water content, and most of them have
been followed by clearing winds from the east that have stripped the snow from
the entrances to nearly all of the runs from the top. Cornice is the only
straightforward entry, and it's quite slick from wind and manmade snow. Once
in you can traverse to better snow below Hangman's or the Drop Out rocks. You
can get into Drop Out, but it's firm, narrow and definitely DFU skiing. You
can also step down a gravelly entrance to Scotty's, according to Adam who
skied it Christmas week. Everything else up there is awaiting at least one
classic Sierra dump to be skiable. Those clearing winds have also made lower
St. Anton an occasional minefield, and that's probably where one of my skis
got its battle scar.
The lower mountain is far better than one would expect based on the above. All
the groomed runs I skied were in good shape. The were a few gravel spots over
by Chair 25, but they were avoidable as that's a low traffic area. With 2
small storms totalling 9 inches the past 10 days there's a uniform packed
powder surface, and with the possible exception of the last few hundred
vertical near Eagle Lodge I couldn't tell that much of the base was probably
manmade. I'm told Mammoth's snowmaking system is very portable so they can
move it around to where it's needed. On this frigid weekend it was only being
used to build more features in the Unbound Terrain Park. Intermediate groomed
run skiers have little to complain about at Mammoth now in terms of either
cover or surfaces.
For ungroomed terrain chair 5 was probably best. The face of 3 has some also.
On powder days the locals are skiing in the trees between the lower groomed
trails, but there are still some obstacles. My one real adventure was picking
my way down a rocky entrance to Avalanche 2. Once in, the snow was firm enough
that I skied in survival mode, one turn at a time.
The other unusual part of this weekend was the weather. An impressive Arctic
air mass is dominating the West, featuring low temps of 26F at my house (with
some minor plant damage), -2F at Big Bear, and -16F Friday night at Mammoth.
It was still below zero when we started skiing from Chair 2 at 8:30AM, and
needless to say the mountain was quite empty for the first 2 hours. At the
start of the day it didn't seem as cold as my last such experience at Castle
Mt. Alberta in Feb. 2004, but after 3 runs I was slowly chilling and went
inside to add an extra sweater and face mask. Unfortunately I never completely
recovered and was back in the Main Lodge at 10:30 and 1:30 to thaw out my
toes. Saturday was sunny, and fortunately the only wind was at the top. Temps
remained below zero up there and warmed to about 10F near Main Lodge. Being
confined mostly to groomed runs results in more wind chill and less body heat
than a normal day of skiing for me, as I also recall from the day at Castle
and a similar one at Norquay in 2002. I forgot the camera Saturday, but I
probably wouldn't have taken my mitts off often to use it anyway. Despite all
the breaks I still managed 27K on Saturday.
Saturday night some clouds came in, and thus the overnight lows were about 10F
higher than Friday night. But Sunday's daytime highs were similar to Saturday,
and of course felt at least as cold with no sun. Despite wearing all the
clothing I still needed a short morning break and an hour at lunch after
watching my son Adam's college slalom race. After lunch we made an exploratory
run from the top (where it was -3F with 30-50mph winds) down the backside to
chair 14. We were with Mammoth Forum member Dave and he said the wind had
stripped a lot of snow away back there since Christmas week.
We stopped Sunday at 3PM so we could watch the Chargers' playoff debacle
before we drove home. But I still managed another 23K. Just to show how
spoiled we have become over the past 20+ years, I skied as much vertical this
weekend as any weekend of my first 6 seasons prior to 1984. The weather would
have made life more difficult back then riding slow lifts. My worst ever
Mammoth experience was probably this same MLK weekend in 1987, nearly as cold
with even less snow and no snowmaking back then. There was more fog and wind
then, so I never saw how much snow was on the upper mountain. On that trip we
went to June Mt. the next day and then went home a day early.