It was a eerily quiet closing day at Mammoth. Mammoth had initially announced Memorial Day weekend as their closing weekend. Quietly last weekend, they extended the season indefinitely. Late last week they announced that Saturday, June 1 would be the final day of the season.
There were a number of reasons that the turnout was low today:
• Many people had already done their last hurrahs last weekend.
• It may not have been worth a long trip or overnight stay for just one more weekend day.
• Conditions were very warm and coverage is getting thin low on the mountain.
So how crowded was it? For the first hour today, we counted 6 skiers and boarders on the mountain. In the second hour, the number doubled to about 12. Somewhere around noon, a gondola attendant claimed that RFID scans showed that only 100 people showed up for skiing and riding today. That number may have increased in the last hour as locals arrived for the last run of the season.
Conditions today started out just right at 7am and continued to slushify and become glue-like all day. That did not matter as there were smiles all around. The day ended with the last fifty gondola cars being pelted with snowballs. When the cars started arriving empty, the small crowd turned on each other with snowballs and then ended with an impromptu Chinese Downhill.
Time to start hiking for turns…