Mammoth Mountain/Mountain Hiking

We day tripped from Bishop up to the town of Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the home of the Mammoth Mountain ski area.  This ski area is huge in terms its amount of skiable terrain.  It is the first major ski area north from the population centers of southern California.   It is perfectly situated in the Sierras to receive a ton of snow and it has one of the longest ski seasons of any area in the States.

Mammoth Mountain has 3 half pipes and all kinds of terrain parks for all the extreme skiing enthusiast who are otherwise riding in skate parks on their skate boards.  It hosts many of the crazy events at the Winter X Games.

Of course, we couldn’t visit Mammoth Lakes without stopping in at the tasting room of the Mammoth Brewing Company.  We sampled all 12 brews and one root beer that they had on tap.  Unfortunately, they wouldn’t allow us to fill up either of our two half-gallon ‘growlers” – they only fill growlers purchased from them.

The next day we embarked on a hike that was to traverse a chain of lakes.  But just as there is still a lot of snow on the ski hills, there is still a lot of snow on the alpine trails.  Most of our hike was just up the last part of the road that wasn’t yet open because of the snow to the start of the trailhead.  We had a nice picnic lunch sitting on a rock next to the snow cover.

On the way up, we kept seeing prints in the snow.  I convinced myself that there must have been a mountain lion that had passed through the same snow we were trekking.  I even took a picture of the prints to see if later I could figure out what made them.  But it didn’t take long before we were actually stalked by the beast that made them.  As we were sitting on the rock, enjoying our lunch, back down the trail came a hiker and his trusty Black Lab.  Guess those prints weren’t from a mountain lion after all.