Dave McCoy, Mammoth Mountain's 98-year-old founder, sat down for a brief video interview to mark the ski resort's 60th anniversary.
He was a hydrographer with the city of Los Angeles when he made it his life dream to bring alpine skiing to the mountain in the High Sierras, despite there being no roads and way too much snow, as naysayers were quick to point out at the time.
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“That was probably the best thing,” McCoy recalls. “People said you can't do this, Dave, you can't do that, Dave. But, by God, someone came along and said we can do it and, yep, we'll do it.”
There were only six people up at Mammoth with him when his project started, “but it grew like a good weed,” McCoy says.
Mammoth, which boasts one of the longest ski seasons in North America, is the highest resort in California. That becomes evident when you take the gondola up to the top (11,053 feet), pause on the trail that winds around the backside and look straight down.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.