This past weekend I went up to Mammoth Mountain, CA with Suzanne and Val. It was an amazing trip – we got an insane amount of good snow to play around in.
Basically Mammoth is a bit of a drive…it takes about 7 hours to get there. Since Suzanne had class until around 6:45 we couldn’t leave until later in the evening. By the time everyone was at my apartment and we had the car packed it was 8:00pm. That is a bit late to start. On the way there we missed the turnoff to 395 and ended up staying on the 15 towards Las Vegas. Luckily we caught ourselves in time and were able to cut back on the 58, but it still cost us almost 40 minutes! It was kind of a bummer. We were joking that we might have kept driving till we saw the lights of Las Vegas. That would have been interesting.
Towards the end of the drive we hit some snow and the road was completely covered. Add that to the fact that it was pitch black and the light reflecting off the falling snowflakes reduced visibility to about 30 ft. We were exhausted, and I drove the last leg since it was my car and I was most familiar with driving it in bad conditions. We had to put chains on the tires so we stopped in front of a few other cars and used the light from their headlights to help us see. We finally rolled into the driveway of the Sierra Lodge at 5 in the morning. Yes. 5:00 am. It was pretty brutal.
We woke up at around 11am and snowboarded for half a day. By then it had snowed almost a foot of fresh snow, and the conditions were amazing. Even though we were really, really tired we were invigorated by the sheer joy of sliding down pillowy runs of fresh powder.
The next day we headed over to Chair 25 where there were lots of intermediate difficulty tree runs. Snowboarding through the trees when there is fresh snow is such an amazing experience. The trees force you to pick a path and dodge branches and trunks, which adds an exhilarating challenge. The fresh powder adds a feeling of weightlessness, and you dodge and swerve the trees, sometimes ducking through a narrow keyhole of branches.
It snowed all day, and by the end there was even more snow. Val’s friend lent her a tiny handheld video camera device. We took some first person video of ourselves riding around, and I had a super fun time following Val and Suzanne through the trees with it. I’ll post video when we get it all edited.
Overall this was probably the best snowboarding trip I’ve been on in terms of quality snow. Also, we had a pretty awesome time together too – lots of funny one liners and silly moments causing uncontrollable laughter. Looking forward to doing this again soon!