Madness—Mammoth, California

When it Snows More Than Ever Before, the Only Thing That Makes Sense...is Skiing

By Jake Stern

January blurred under the weight of 220 inches of snow that fell at the base of the Mammoth Mountain. Each morning I’d get up at dawn armed with nothing but a little Tuffy and shovel the fresh snow from our long and tiered path down to the car, dig out a trench in front just enough that I could rev out of my spot and trundle to work fitting boots at the shop. A little while later, my girlfriend, Rita, would reshovel the path after the whole thing blew back in. Then, I’d come back home for lunch, and if I were lucky, my spot wouldn’t have fully blown in, or better yet, the plow would arrive. I was unlucky. Often. I’d then have to park in the street, reshovel my spot, reshovel the path again, and find a moment to eat. It was like this for weeks on end.

One evening, as I was eavesdropping on my girlfriend Rita’s webinar, I heard Wade Crowfoot, California’s Natural Resources Secretary, explain, “Atmospheric river events come in families. Last week we saw the first five of this family of 12 sweep through the Sierra Nevada. We’ve got seven more incoming.”

Mammoth had never seen a winter like this. After three years of scant snowpack—between 244 and 281 inches while our average is 400—the mountain’s opening date of November 5, 2022, felt like a blessing. A huge early-November storm opened the mountain early with an unfathomable amount of terrain. We blasted through pockets of windblown powder in the Avalanche Chutes on Chair 22 the first day the bullwheel spun. And the snow kept coming. Our streets slowly rose into canyons as the plows and blowers stacked fallen snow and wind-drift ever higher. By season’s end, the resort had received 715 inches at Main Lodge and over 900 at the summit.

The plow drivers became heroes or villains depending on when they managed to get to you. Of course, they were doing their best. But your shoveled-out parking spot redrifted with four feet of snow two hours after you finished digging; mechanized assistance was like manna from on high.

Living alone was like being buried alive layer by layer. Shoveling demanded at least four shifts a day, so when you were by yourself keeping up was impossible. We’d sojourn through the blizzards to bring our friend Will booze, pizza, and able hands to help him ease the burden on his cracking roof. During breaks in the shoveling chaos, we’d drag a plastic saucer up to the roof and sled off the eaves, dropping into piles of drifted powder below.

The inimitable Chair 23, which ascends to the 11,053-foot-high caldera rim atop Mammoth Mountain, sat dormant for most of January through March. The brief periods when the snow subsided were dominated by gales over 100 mph. We kept to the trees and made endless turns down the Sherwins, a ridgeline in town that Mammoth founder Dave McCoy once tried to turn into an extension of the ski area. The locals are still relieved he failed.

Big mountain backcountry lines that normally see few attempts were getting skied in deep winter conditions. We saw tracks on Mount Baldwin’s Wall of the Future—a 55-degree face littered with chokes and cliff bands six miles and 5,000 vertical feet from the road. I heard tales of parties getting deep into the glaciers of the Palisades and skiing the north face of Middle Pal, one of California’s steepest and most technical fourteeners that rarely sees conditions align for skiing.

Meanwhile, the two constants in our lives were shoveling and Chair 22. Tucked under the sweeping face of the top of the mountain, Chair 22 provides sheltered skiing and the best wind buff on earth. When we could dig ourselves out of our ever-shrinking houses, gravity pulled us toward 22.

The act of skiing became a necessary cornerstone of sanity. We would trundle through the waist-high snow down to our parking spot with piles of gear in hand, mumbling “gotta make some stupid turns for our stupid mental health.”

Eventually, the sidewalls of the trench we’d dug down to the parking lot got too high to throw snow over, so we started compacting the base and just walking on it. Come June, when the snow softened, we’d posthole up to our hips at random for another month until all the snow was gone.

But when we weren’t working, weren’t shoveling, weren’t cursing the gods and the ENSO (El Niño, La Niña and Southern Oscillation) models, you could find us skiing. I can’t count the days on Grizzly Ridge, when the buff was coming off the top just right where I would arc super-G turns through the sparse trees on the fattest powder skis I had. We ran out of rocks to jump off, and the snow piled so high it engulfed the tops of some chairlifts. One of our favorite runs in years past got so deep it was closed for three months. They had to send winch cats up to groom the steep couloir so that they could spin the chair above it. The 9,000 hand charges and 1,000 artillery rounds that our indefatigable ski patrol used to keep us safe rendered our alarm clocks obsolete.

The neverending winter eventually ebbed into an infinite spring, and the days choking on powder turned to early mornings booting couloirs. There is no relief on this white earth like dropping into a 6,000-foot descent of perfect Eastern Sierra corn. In Zen Buddhism, ENSO holds another meaning. It is enlightenment: practiced through a perfectly drawn circle, in which, through repetitive motion, the mind becomes free to let the body create. The stroke of a brush, the plunge of a shovel, the arc of a turn.

The above article runs as the Intro page in the current '23/'24 print issue of POWDER. Purchase your copy HERE!