Mammoth, Jan. 5, 2017

Tony Crocker

Administrator
Staff member
Since I've retired I've tried to avoid the monster storms that shut most of Mammoth down, but it didn't work this time.

It had snowed 40 inches over the past ~40 hours with just another 3-5 expected today. That should mean the weather is winding down, but no such luck. At breakfast the lift situation projected looked similar to Wednesday afternoon. With 10 open we could go to the Stump parking to start. We got Liz' ticket first, seeing chair 10 running, but by the time we booted up it was on wind hold. We spent an hour in the Mill waiting to see if it would reopen. When it did not we got a rain check for Liz' ticket and I took her back to the hotel. FYI June's upper lifts were all on wind hold too.

Since I'm on a season pass I drove up to Eagle and got in the 10+ minute line there at noon. Line, for a high speed 6-pack on a nasty weather day? That's the way Mammoth is when 3/4 of the mountain is shut down. I stayed on Eagle for 2 runs because I knew the slow chair 8 to come back would have an insane line (30 minutes per someone riding the chair who had been there) with chair 16 closed.

On my 3rd ride I learned that 4 and 16 had opened so I headed that way. 16 had a 10+ minute line so I rode 17 to get to 4. As I arrived 4 got shut down so I beat most of the crowd to the short chair 20. From there I went back to Canyon Lodge and through the 10 minute line on 16. From there I could take the trail across Lincoln to the top of chair 8, then continue on to Eagle, where I called it a day around 2:20 with a modest 5,400 vertical.

Most of my skiing was in the trees between the blue runs near chairs 15, 8 and 17. It was like skiing smooth groomers because the wind had packed the snow even in the trees. While I expect we will get on some steeper terrain Friday during the break between storms, I expect similar wind packed snow.

This trip and weather pattern are reminiscent of January 1-3, 2006: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1573 The upcoming weekend will be ugly with similar or worse lift closures as the past 2 days. This first storm has dumped 4-7 feet of snow and the next one i supposed to be bigger. It may not produce much powder skiing but it makes it more likely we will have legit July skiing in 2017.
 
with facebook constantly stroking the 38 MM people in California to come to mammoth, it's a place I avoid like the plague. can't imagine what a zoo it'll be this weekend let alone Tahoe......

thanks for the TR
 
Mammoth's lift capacity is more than up to the task when all of them are running. I probably see shorter lift lines overall at Mammoth than at Alta/Snowbird. Far shorter than at major areas in Tahoe or Front Range Colorado or areas with limited capacity like Revelstoke.

The longest lines are on days like yesterday when so few lifts are open. I would never buy a lift ticket on a day that restricted but with a season pass it was worth checking out for a couple of hours.

It will be interesting to see how Mammoth's attendance turns out this season. The current disparity in conditions vs. Tahoe is the most extreme in my experience. We have had huge atmospheric river events that rained very high at Tahoe before. The most notable were in 1986 and 1997, but there was already a deep snowpack before those storms.

Storm total at patrol site was 42 inches with the next storm projecting 47. Close to double those numbers up top.
 
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