Tidbits
- What happens during a 20″ pow day at Mammoth and all the locals are sick of the snow?
- How I went from 10 views on my tweets to 35,169 in 24 hours.
- I got my van stuck in the snow…
March 2023
| Su | M | T | W | Th | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 3/1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 4/1 |
Where In The World Was I?
- Bishop, CA
- ⛷️ Mammoth Mountain
- Mammoth, CA
Entering Mammoth, CA
Sunday night I drove from Bishop up to Mammoth to catch Monday’s pow day. Unfortunately in hindsight I left a bit later than I should’ve. That night turned out to be hectic and stressful, but more on that later.
⛷️ Skiing Mammoth Mountain
This week was Mammoth, Mammoth, Mammoth! I skied 4 days.
The first day was awesome! I got ~3rd chair and there was absolutely no one there! I’ve heard multiple local start getting sick of how much snow there is which is probably why no one showed up for a 20″ pow day 😅
☝️ That’s Chair 20 down there. I don’t think anyone’s getting on that anytime soon 😅
Oh it was so good. Soft creamy turns. I noticed the snow is denser out here so you ski more on top of the snow rather than through it like Utah.
My second day I came back for another pow day. However, this morning the lifts were on wind hold and ski patrol was responding to a propane explosion due to a building collapse in town… yeesh. That said, they opened around 11:30am and I was able to get some turns in.
Due to all the wind, the snow was a bit “harder” and way more variable than the first day. It made it much harder to turn. Windblown hard patch to soft patch back to hard crusty. It was a trip haha.
This day I almost exclusively lapped Roger’s Ridge, that cliff face off of Chair 2. Great snow and a nice pitch = lots of fun.
That was the last of the storm, so the next day that I skied, I went up in the afternoon after a morning coffee shop sesh. I’ve done these types of days a couple times (Winter Park, Steamboat, Park City) and they are absolutely fantastic. Such a best-of-both-worlds type of day.
This third day was a gorgeous bluebird day! They opened up the very top right at the end of the day around 3pm. I had enough time to score one run from the top!
☝️ Check out how close the chairs are to the snow!
And look at all those vans in the parking lot! There were always toooons of vans and campers.
My fourth day I did another afternoon sesh and what a day to close it out on!
They finally opened up the top (gondola, Chair 23, Chair 9) which was closed for probably a week. I lapped Chair 23 twice down Wipeout Chutes and holy cow the snow was fantastic!
This was the day where after Chair 23, I took the gondola up to the top. By the time I got there, clouds and whipping wind had rolled in, making the vis essentially nonexistent. I traversed my way to ski down Dave’s but decided to turn around…
I had been in that situation once before at Snowbird and I was like “nope, not doing that again.”
Mammoth turned out to be an awesome mountain. I’ve heard so from others online and it lived up to the expectations.
There’s tons of area to ski and multiple different steep areas to explore (Chair 22, Roger’s Ridge, the whole top section off the gondola, Chair 23, and the backside). Some mountains have only one particular area/section, but it’s spread out at Mammoth which I like a lot.
In terms of snowfall, the Main Lodge has gotten 667″ this season and I heard the top of the mountain was at some 800″+… For context, Vail gets an average of 247″ each season and is at 317″ this season.
The other mountains up there are Alta & Snowbird at 753″ and 692″.
This season has been incredible.
Life In Mammoth
The amount of snow here is just insane. I’ve never seen so much snow in my life!
I worked at 2 coffee shops this week – Mammoth Coffee Roasting, Co. and Black Velvet Coffee | Espresso Bar. This week was lots of just tweets and continuing work on the content strategy offer and content.
More on the craziness that occurred this week in a bit.
Building Up My Karma Points
My second ski day as I was headed up to the mountain, I saw a Mercedes Sprinter van plowed in on the side of the road. The guy was outside looking at cars for help and pointed at me making some hand signals. I decided to slow down and see what was up.
He goes “I have a 12,000 lb winch I just need someone to hook on to and I’ll pull myself out”
I was like, “Alright, sure” and decided so pull over and help him out.
It took us a couple tries of winching and digging.
As I was standing there, a CAT plow drives by and gives one of these 🤷♂️ and shakes his head. He slows down to me and goes “that’s why you can’t do overnight parking” then drives off 😅
After some conversation, he was saying how he had a couple too many cocktails at the bar across the street and decided to not drive the previous night and just hunker down. That said, I think he made the right call, but paid for it with some embarrassment and effort getting himself out the next morning.
I thought I’d also throw in: earlier as I was standing there, a pickup drives by (not as slowly) with its window down and I hear “go home!” out the window… 🤷♂️ It sounded like it was for both of us more than one or the other… (What he doesn’t understand is that this IS my home 😅)
After a couple tries we finally got him out.
He awarded me 10 “karma points” haha. We exchanged some pleasantries and went on our ways.
BUT the karma points don’t end there!
About halfway through my ski day, I was traversing my way over to an area before lunch and saw a gentleman sitting on the snow with both his skis unclipped.
I stopped and asked “you okay?” and he said “yeah I just need some help getting my skis back on”
I helped him up and quickly realized he was very shaky and his legs were very weak.
We struggled a bit and failed to get his skis back on. After a minute or two, he gave up and asked if I could call ski patrol to get him a ride back down the mountain.
He must’ve been in his mid to late 70s and was explaining how he just got hip surgery and his legs were a lot weaker than he expected.
I did so, waited for ski patrol, then headed on my way.
It was a nice karma-combo day. I started to get worried if I would have to “spend” all my karma points soon, but so far we’re good!
Van Life Stress & Craziness
There are moments in van life like a couple weeks ago, where I had a routine, I knew a bunch of places to camp. Van life was easy. Camping was not an issue.
And theeeeeen there are moments like this week, when van life slaps you in the face.
I did a good bit of research before coming to Mammoth on places to camp. I was even here back in fall so I even knew the general area.
That said, the snow throws a big variable into the mix.
On my way up Sunday night, I had multiple spots I went to visit. I had a plan B, C, D, and E all if plan A didn’t work out.
But after driving around, plans A, B, C, D, and E ALL fell through.
Suddenly it was 8:30pm and I was essentially driving blind. I no longer had any spots that I knew in advance might work.
I quickly scrambled searching for spots and drove around the town until around 10pm when I stumbled across a parking lot that had 2 other campers. My head was throbbing (I’m asleep at 9:30pm every night) and just put it up to chance that it’d work out.
Fortunately it did.
I was awoken by a plow clearing the parking lot at 4:30am but… nothing.
But it didn’t end there.
The next night I decided alright I’m not doing that again and left earlier to search for spots. I ended up going up 395 north a bit and AGAIN plans A, B, C, and D all fell through.
Everything was either snowed in or closed.
I ended up turning down this side road which very quickly turned into not a fun time.
There was no place to turn around. Like literally. I started to legitimately feel claustrophobic.
I just envisioned trying to fit and ending up like Austin Powers 😂 (except it wasn’t funny in the moment)
I thought I found a spot to turn around finally, then tried, and realized, nope I don’t fit.
I drove for 3 MILES.
3 MILES down this road before there was a singular place to turn around… Yeesh.
All while it’s 8pm and dark. Not a fun time.
To cap everything off. As I was driving down 395, I happened to look over to the right at an intersection and saw a parking lot with a van in it.
Doing that literally saved my a** that night…
And then! The very next night after a storm, that same lot got plowed in so I couldn’t access it 🤦♂️ so I had to go back into town and stealth somewhere.
But the night after that, there were just enough tracks that I went for it.
I had enough speed going in that I was fine, but the next morning?
Nope.
Gosh, for once I’ve been thankful it HASN’T snowed in a couple days…
Twitter Craziness
Okay one last thing for this week.
As we’ve been lasering in on Twitter content strategy, I’ve started putting out some more content around that to gather interest.
After many hours of coding and spreadsheet’ing, I put together this tweet.
After 24 hours, I had a singular commenter.
That is, until Dan Koe (who has 300k followers) retweeted my tweet.
It immediately blew up. People started swarming in, liking it and commenting asking for their own percentages.
I spend a good chunk of the afternoon/evening analyzing peoples’ tweets and replying. It was lots of fun!
As of Sunday afternoon (3/26/23) these are the analytics.
For someone who usually gets 10-25 views and maybe 1 like, just 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯 The true power of leverage at work…
It’s been more or less a stressful scramble (the good stress!) to capitalize on this. Hopefully I’ll have more updates by next week!
✌️
You are AWEsome. What an incredible life you are leading. Excelsior!
❤️❤️❤️