Blog of Bermanism

That’s right sports fans, summer skiing. Apparently, California always has all types of weather conditions, no matter what. This last weekend myself and two friends drove up to Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort to meet my brother-in-law. Mammoth is just on the SE side of Yosemite National Park. I was a little skeptical, but they claimed to still have 11ft of snow! So, we drove up on Saturday from San Francisco, crashed for the night in the condo that they had rented, woke up at 6:30am and hit the slopes by 7:30am. The mountain is beautiful and the terrain is really diverse. Mammoth has got to be one of the highest ski resports in California, topping out at 11,000ft with over 3,000 verticle feet of skiing goodness. Once we were up there and had made it to the top of the mountain, we were a little surprised by the snow conditions. Being from Colorado, I was used to very dry, hard packed snow that is fine and light. This stuff was like skiing on a snow cone that had been left in the freezer. The snow cover was made up of little ice chunks that had been broken up that morning by the snow cats. It took some getting used to, but it was evenutally a joy to ski on. We ended up skiing nearly 20 runs that day and, aside from a minor knee sprain for one of my friends, it was a really successful ski outing. Sadly, it took us nearly six hours to get home due to some bozos that thought that it would be fun to go 40 MPH for 80 miles over Sonora pass. But, it was still awesome. Thanks to Dave for including us on that trip. Maybe we’ll head up again early this summer, since the mountain is open until July 4th!