The first time I visited Mammoth Lakes and Mammoth Mountain was in 1979. I’ve been a regular visitor ever since. I have probably skied on Mammoth Mountain more than a year’s worth of days in my life. I’ve also spent a lot of time in Mammoth during the summer months. I’ve skied on Mammoth Mountain on the 4th of July. But what I really like during the summer months is warmer weather activities such as mountain biking and hiking.
The first time I rode my mountain bike on Mammoth Mountain, there wasn’t a bike park. I’ve ridden the bike park many times over the years. There were a few years there when the mountain opened the lift closest to my condo and I could just roll up the hill from the condo and catch the lift. There were never many people on that side of the mountain which is probably why they stopped running that chair.
I used to be more daring in my younger days and used to ride trails like Skid Marks. To this day when I look up at Dave’s Run and Dragons Neck in the winter time I still can’t believe that they built a mountain bike trail through that stuff.
I stopped riding up there for a number of years because I didn’t like the trail condition. Let’s face it, I’m getting old and the Kamikaze run doesn’t appeal to me any more. Off The Top is more my speed. The problem was that every switchback turn was ankle deep of deeper in loose pumice. It was difficult if not impossible to ride around the turns because the pumice would rob you of all of your speed.
My son was getting older and had become interested in riding Mammoth Mountain so I took him up. I discovered that the resort was doing a much better job of maintaining the trails and all of that loose pumice was not as abundant. I took a renewed liking to the Off The Top trail and we rode it for several days.
During the summer of 2008 we spent a week up in Mammoth and our friends Don & Pam were up there at the same time. So Jeff, Don and I went riding. The video above is a product of that week. During our days riding the mountain I did some of my best riding ever on Mammoth Mountain. We also rode on trails I had never been on. Toward the end of the last day of riding that we did we rode down a trail called Seven Bridges. The trail travels through Lower Dry Creek. We had ridden the trail a couple days earlier, but when we got to the first bridge we dismounted because it looked a little too hairy to ride. On our last day I was feeling brave, emboldened by all of the good riding I had done up to that point. The end of the video shows what happened next. Let’s just say that I was pretty messed up and it took about a month to recover.
I didn’t ride on Mammoth Mountain at all in 2009 even though I spent close to two weeks up there in the summer. It wasn’t out of fear or anything, it was just circumstances. I’ll ride again, but you can bet that I will dismount at the first bridge on the Seven Bridges trail.
