California Official Visitor's Guide 2009 - (Page 24) discover » winter recreation » mammoth mammoth For a peak experience in California, head to Mammoth Mountain this winter majestic J ohn Muir said of the High Sierra, “What wonders lie in every mountain day!” The quotation seems merely poetic until you stand atop the 11,053-foot summit of Mammoth Mountain on a crisp winter day beneath a bluebird sky and try to apprehend the vastness before you. You lose all sense of scale. Words fail. Immediately northwest, the 12,000foot-high Minarets bite at the sky, sawtooth remnants of an ancient volcano. To the west, the San Joaquin River gorge cuts visitcalifornia.com a serpentine path between granite domes that look remarkably like those in nearby Yosemite National Park. Look one way and you see clear across the entire state to the Coast Range, marking the continent’s western edge. Look the other way and you spot Nevada’s highest peaks, towering two miles above the gargantuan Great Basin. It takes time to get your bearings, looking down from the roof of California. Skiing at Mammoth Mountain is an experience unto itself: The mountain is actually a volcano. Though technically dormant, it doesn’t seem to be entirely asleep, as evidenced by the fumarole on the Christmas Bowl run, a geothermal vent marked by Flying fast down powdery slopes orange netting and is the norm at warning poles prothis Sierra resort. truding from the snow. You know you’re nearing it when you suddenly smell sulfur in the cold alpine air. There’s something deliciously dangerous about peering over the edge, down through several meters of melted snow, as if you’re looking into a hobbit hole leading to the core of the earth. Kids go nuts here—it’s a stellar place to play make-believe—but nothing thrills them so much as a ride up the Scenic Panorama Gondola, which zips 3,000 vertical feet up to the mountain’s summit. When 24 CHRISTIAN PONDELLA http://www.visitcalifornia.com
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