Initial Impressions: Mammoth
A view from Mammoth’s Main Base on January 23, 2021.
UPDATE 4/25/2021: We have now finalized our Mammoth assessment and written a full review here.
Yesterday, we spent our first day at Mammoth—perhaps the most popular U.S. mountain we haven’t ranked yet. We mainly explored what we believe to be the Main, Mill, and Summit areas. Here are our initial thoughts.
We arrived to a snowy, low-visibility Mammoth as the mountain opened to 2-3 inches of new overnight accumulation. Several mountain areas were closed during our visit; however, the mountain was already large enough that we didn’t even make it through all the areas open yesterday.
Thin-cover, early-season conditions still persisted on many trails we did, but we found a lot to like about Mammoth’s terrain. We enjoyed a range of easy to advanced-intermediate groomed runs. The advanced ungroomed runs we sampled were very unique thanks to a range of technical obstacles and cool rock vistas. Some of the more advanced runs existed within a distinctive high-alpine environment. A few areas offered expert challenges and substantial pitches, but none of the lines we sampled yesterday were truly extreme. Based on the areas we explored, the resort felt shorter than expected.
Across the terrain we assessed, crowd flow seemed generally decent. Both base areas offered multiple lift options, and mid-mountain areas boasted several lift options as well. However, it looked like the Stump Alley Express (Chair 2) was the only way to get from skiers’ right of the Mill area to anything skiers’ left of there, which constituted an annoying bottleneck. We plan extensive conversations with locals to assess the lines during non-COVID times.
An example of the signage at Mammoth. The color coding took us a second to figure out.
We have some work to do to further assess ease of navigation at Mammoth. At first, it was hard to tell the difficulty scale of certain trail ratings due to poorly designed signage. It took a double take to figure out what the colors for the signs meant—we especially needed a minute to realize that there was a difference between the blue-colored black-diamond signs and the black-colored ones (as it turned out, the blue-colored ones signified advanced-intermediate trails, and the signs also included a hard-to-see blue square within the black-diamond). Even more unintuitive were the advanced beginner trail markings, which boasted a black square behind a green circle (it was beyond us why the square wasn’t blue). It also took us several takes to figure out that all the pink signs corresponded to facility and lift directions—since each of these had a difficulty rating on the right hand side, they all looked like actual trail markers. On the plus side, we didn’t experience many catwalks along the terrain we did; we’ll assess whether this holds up across the rest of the mountain on future trips.
The resort could also benefit from better markings at the top. At the Summit area, we experienced this first hand thanks to whiteout conditions. We think we took an advanced bowl run down from the summit, but due to the lack of clear markings in these conditions, we can’t say for sure.
We enjoyed a rather LA-heavy vibe at Mammoth yesterday. Snowboarders comprised much of the traffic. Despite numerous benches across the resort, snowboarders still seemed to enjoy sitting in the middle of trails. As a result, we experienced a high number of these guests as unexpected trail obstacles. In the areas we visited, we did enjoy the general lack of buildup. Due to the cloudy weather, we failed to really assess Mammoth’s views during our visit.
Some of the obstacles we encountered during our visit.
We enjoyed our day at Mammoth overall, although we only sampled a small portion of the mountain. Given the magnitude and diversity of the resort, we plan on returning several more times this season before posting a full review. We especially look forward to hitting the Back Side as well as the Canyon, Eagle, and Tamarack areas, and exploring the resort’s most trying options once more of a base builds.
