Ever since Dave McCoy strung cable up this mountain by hand in the 1930s and powered it with a Model-T Ford engine, Mammoth has served the southern California market. For decades, Mammoth has been Los Angeles East, stuffed full of La La Landers on the weekends, dead empty on week days, difficult to reach, somewhat inconvenient as far as amenities go, rustic in its own funky way and pretty much ignored by everyone outside California. Last season, the place still was caught in its '70s time warp, with no real resort center, no posh hotels, not even a true shopping mall. That, however, is about to change in a big way. Intrawest, the conglomerate that transformed Canada's Whistler and Mont Tremblant and is in the process of reinventing Copper Mountain in Colorado, has landed squarely at Mammoth.
Skiing is no longer a sport, it's now recreation.
Last summer brought the other half of the gondola system and a new base lodge. And then, there are the new condo hotels. When all is done, you'll have a ski hill laced with modern lifts and new on-mountain restaurants, a master planned neighborhood and two pedestrian villages. And there is a sizable potential market for Mammoth in the Northwest. Approximately 20 percent of all households in greater Seattle have skiers, and there are 475,000 active skiers in the state, says Doug Campbell, president of the Pacific Northwest Ski Areas Association.