Photo: Mammoth Mountain
It’s pretty tough to enjoy spring skiing if Mother Nature decides to just skip spring altogether and point it straight into summer by March. That’s the most straightforward way to summarize the wave of early resort closures across the Western U.S. in recent weeks. Resorts were stressed by an already slow winter with little snow before a heatwave arrived in mid March. A slew of mountains changed spring skiing plans, and those plans were “there will be no spring skiing,” including Palisades Tahoe, which typically holds one of the latest closing dates in California.
Mammoth Mountain, however, announced back in mid-February that a historic storm had locked the Eastern Sierra resort into its “second season,” and lifts would spin through at least Memorial Day. It was fair to question if plans might change as we watched resort after resort announce shuttering operations anywhere from weeks to nearly a month early, but Mammoth told The Inertia in a March 20 email things were still “business as usual” with two more months of skiing still planned at the resort. Mammoth was running 24 lifts with over 170 of its 180 trails open at the time.
Those operations have scaled down a little bit now as the resort said on Sunday that it would be closing several chairs: Chairs 7, Cloud Nine Express (9), Eagle Express (15), 20, 22, 25, as well as Snowmobile Adventures, Tubing at Woolly’s Adventure Summit, and Tamarack Cross-Country Ski Center.
But the bigger news is that Mammoth is staying firm on that Memorial Day finish line. “Our base is holding on well up high and we are still on schedule to be skiing and riding through Memorial Day,” officials said.
According to On the Snow, that leaves 19 of 25 chairs still running and 131 of 180 trails open while most resorts are winding down operations rapidly. South Lake Tahoe’s Heavenly, for example, which summits at over 10,000 feet, is down to just 16 trails and expects to close April 20. At 11,053 feet, Mammoth is California’s highest resort and it benefited from higher snow totals in the Eastern Sierra this winter. The resort averages over 400 inches per year, but was still well below seasonal averages at about 250 inches this year.
