Photo: Mammoth Mountain
It’s fun to sit back and watch which ski resort will open first each season. The bragging rights of saying “first” is something ski and snowboard areas long for, leading to lifts spinning at the slightest dip in temperatures and a few patches of snow on the ground, natural or manmade doesn’t matter. On the flip side of that coin we have the resorts at highest elevations hanging on to the final threads of a season and squeezing out extra days deep into the calendar year.
Mammoth Mountain often stays open later than most western resorts, and locked up the title of latest season in California earlier this week when Palisades Tahoe announced it’d be shutting down on May 24. Mammoth’s only known plans at the time were to run through at least Memorial Day, which would leave them with one extra day at least. On Thursday the resort announced in an email and on social media that they have at least one more week of skiing and riding in them.
“With coverage holding up great on the upper mountain, we are going to keep the lifts spinning daily for skiing & riding through May 31,” resort PR said.
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Mammoth currently has nine lifts running and over 70 trails open, so there’s still a decent amount of terrain to access. And the new closing date pushes them over the six-month mark this season after winter got off to a slow start. The resort’s original opening day was pushed back twice in mid-November due to weather. Things still didn’t go according to plan when an early season storm promised to bring snowfall levels down to 6,000 feet, then Mother Nature backed off and conditions didn’t live up to the forecast hype. More than six months later though, people are still making turns in the Eastern Sierra as we prepare to flip the calendar to June.
