Coastal Traveler - Winter 2008 - (Page 43)

coastaltraveler have the urban sprawl that happened at Park City and Vail,” said Sue O’Brien, a real estate agent who has lived in Mammoth Lakes since 1991. On my visit, I chose the oldest lodging in town, Tamarack Lodge, built in 1924 on the shores of Twin Lakes, southwest of town. It’s now part of the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area property and has a French-themed restaurant. Still, at least ammoth some feeling of the wild outdoors prevails. The management advised me not to leave any food items in the car that bears could spot, and backed up the warning with a photo of a medium-size black bear that had crawled through the open window of a truck to get a bottle of ketchup. I reconnected with my past by hiking along McGee Creek seven miles outside town. The trail starts at a tangle of scrub plants and boulders and rises along a grove of quaking aspen toward pyramid mountains. Belding’s ground squirrels scampered as I walked along the creek and into a valley of burnished red rock. Up ahead was a row of blinding white glaciers. Then I headed back to town. Unlike the Mammoth Lakes establishments of my childhood, I found, the bars and restaurants in the Village are open late. At 10:30 p.m. at the Side Door Cafe, three young Los Angeles film-industry types were talking about ways to “generate buzz,” while a mostly young crowd stood elbow-to-elbow at the wine bar. The condos in the Village will soon be joined by more projects aimed at second-home owners. Westin Monache, a hotel and condominium, is set to open in early winter on a nearby hillside and will take advantage of the same high-speed gondola used by Village residents to get to Canyon Lodge at the base of Mammoth Mountain. All 230 of its condo units, priced from $405,000 to $1.3 million, sold out in less than four hours when they went on sale two years ago. The Starwood Capital Group plans to open yet another hybrid, the 1 Hotel, two years from now. All of the new developments feature amenities like concierge service, gyms and heated pools. Richard Landry, 50, an architect who lives in Malibu, designed his own home in Mammoth Lakes, a 6,000-square-foot ski-in, ski-out house completed in 2004. He spends up to 15 weekends a year there, often with his partner, their 7-yearold daughter and friends. His contemporary mountain chalet has large glass windows and sweeping mountain views. Mr. Landry, who commutes there by charter plane, saw Mammoth as a “sleeper city,” still on its way to reaching its potential, and was intrigued by the presence of Intrawest, which had developed the high-end Whistler Blackcomb resort in British Columbia in the 1990s. “They did an unbelievable job,” he said. “When I saw they were getting into town, I saw real potential.” The Mammoth name comes not from the extinct hairy elephant but from a mining company formed in the 1870s and soon disbanded. The Mammoth Mountain Ski Area was founded by Dave McCoy, who began about 60 years ago with little more than a portable rope tow powered by a Model A Ford engine. Now 92, he still lives nearby. In the mid-1980’s Mammoth Mountain attracted more than a million winter visitors, but in the 1990s the number was down by half as skiers were drawn to slicker, high-end resorts in the Rockies. Mr. McCoy entered into a partnership in 1996 with Intrawest, and in 2005, Starwood Capital paid $365 million for a majority interest, with Mr. McCoy selling out as part of the deal. Intrawest is still a partial owner. During my second morning in town, I visited another old standby, Shea Schat’s Bakery on Main Street, which churns out a gooey pecan and brown-sugar pullaway bread that can turn family breakfasts into tug-o-wars. Mountain bikers at the bakery were boasting about taking a gondola up Mammoth Mountain and plunging down a steep route called the Kamikaze. I opted to explore on foot, on a trail to Shadow Lake outside town, down to the San Joaquin River Valley. I set off at Agnew Meadows, an expanse of high grass and lingering snow patches with a stream worming through it, and then crossed a makeshift bridge and followed the path down the San Joaquin River gorge beneath a beehive-shaped rock formation. Dusty crickets leapt over my feet. Behind me was the hunchbacked form of Mammoth Mountain, four miles wide, 11,053 feet above sea level. The path turned into a rock staircase, which rose to a waterfall, an outlet stream, and, at last, the lake itself, dark blue and deserted, with white granite rising from the far shores. Despite all the changes, from that vantage point, Mammoth Lakes and the country around it still seem timeless. winter coastaltraveler 43 Photo by Max Whittaker, which first appeared, along with the story, in the New York Times

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Coastal Traveler - Winter 2008

Coastal Traveler - Winter 2008 Contents Coastal Hotel Coastal Adventure Coastal Gambler Coastal Rider Coastal Skier Coastal Art Santa Barbara Pismop & Avila San Luis Obispo Big Sur Carmel Monterey Santa Cruz San Francisco Sausalito Mill Valley Stinson Beach Bolinas Olema Point Reyes Station San Geronimo Fairfax Iverness Marshall, Tomales Sebastopol Petaluma Sonoma Coast Redwood Coast Napa Map

Coastal Traveler - Winter 2008

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