In fact the skiing and riding was quite good today at Mammoth. We made the one day rally to Mammoth Mountain today for what is supposed to be their last weekend of the season. While operations have become more limited in the last few weeks, there’s still plenty of fun for the taking.
Mammoth was operating Chairs 1, 3, 6 and 23 today, as well as the upper and lower Gondola. Runs with 2000′ of vert are still possible due to Mammoth’s excellent snow management. There’s been some aggressive snow farming and salting over the last two weeks to keep some areas of the mountain accessible. WROD conditions are in affect for the last few hundred yards of Forest Trail, St Anton’s and the Race Courses. A lot of snow was also pushed to keep the top of chair 3 in business.
Liberal salting and continuous grooming has also helped keep groomers in great condition. Other areas of the mountain have deteriorated a bit:
• Chairs 2 and 5 closed this week due to limited coverage.
• The public superpipe is closed as much of that snow has been pillaged to keep other runs open.
• The number of park features and size is greatly reduced.
• Off piste runs are not seeing enough traffic in most areas to knock down sun cups. Most off piste runs are now filled with super-sized sun cups that increase in size as the terrain gets flatter. So as an example, the tops of Climax and Paranoids are great, but the bottom run outs can be treacherous. Some of the more popular runs like Drop Outs and Wipe Outs have some narrow strips of “skier groomed” snow where cups are less prevalent.
We spent most of the morning lapping Cornice, Climax and the Face from the upper Gondola. As the snow got mushy in the afternoon and race training stopped, we turned our attention to the heavily salted race courses and made many fun hot laps.
Notably, Broadway is still pretty fully covered all of the way to the main lodge. Mammoth Mountain hinted on their Facebook page this week that it was their “policy” to stay open as long as Broadway is skiable. We also heard that Mammoth is already committed to some race camps over the next week – and the logic is that they may as well continue to offer public access. Although it’s not official yet, Mammoth is expected to announce tomorrow that operations will extend through June 2nd. If so, we will be there again next weekend.
Monday update: It’s now official. Mammoth will continue operations “indefinitely” as long as the snow on Broadway holds out. The temps are forecast to remain cool through Thursday, then rapidly heat for the weekend. It’s a pretty good bet they will remain open through next weekend, making lift served turns in California in June a good experience…unless you’re into the WROD mini park at Boreal’s Summer Shred on the 15th of June. Next weekend looks like a good time to put the top down on the convertible, head to Mammoth and get some more laps on Cornice and Climax.
