Sunday, February 12, 2017

Mammoth Lakes, California

I had just as much fun in Mammoth. The first day we were there we went skiing, and it was amazing. There was even more snow in Mammoth than there was in Whistler, especially the second ski day when it was snowing.
On the first day of skiing we started on the east side of the mountain and worked our way west. On the east side I almost had a heart attack. One of the lifts we rode up
on went up a good third of the mountain, and it had absolutely no safety bar to speak of. There were several of these chairs, but none quite as terrifying. The main reason it was scary was because it took us 30 feet above sharp rocks. Also, in Vermont there are signs on all the lifts saying “State law requires the use of the safety bar” so I’m used to safety bars.  In California, not so much.
There weren’t any more really memorable parts of Mammoth on the east side, but on the west there was a
The sun was really bright.
mogul run that was out of this world. The snow was soft and the moguls were perfect. The run was so good that we ran it three times. On the third run I took a tumble. I caught an edge near the bottom of the run and flipped. I landed right on my neck and got a huge headache. That ended my day and made me sad. The next two days we stayed home and relaxed, which was probably good because in my fall I had strained my sternocleidomastoid, (in technical terms that is a neck muscle). Since I had strained my neck it hurt to move it at all. One thing that I could do with a strained sternocleidomastoid was make chocolate mousse. That was good. Unfortunately I had to whisk the eggs by hand and I messed up on the first batch, so all in all I spent 20 minutes whisking eggs.  We had to get groceries several times, and one time we decided to walk there. We needed things for chocolate mousse, and according to my mom I needed fresh air. Since we had gotten several feet of snow the sidewalks had five foot walls of snow on either side. Other than that the
sidewalks were incredibly icy. We had to get picked up by my dad because we might have hurt ourselves on the way back.
The second day we skied it was snowing like crazy. Huge puffy flakes were all around us when we were going up the lift. On our first run we went to the summit. It wasn’t the best conditions but I’m glad we went. Later that day the lifts to the top were closed because of wind dangers. Even when we were up there the wind was howling. While I was pulling up my hood and putting on another face covering my helmet started blowing away. While I was chasing that, my gloves started moving, so I had to grab those as well. Even worse, when I was almost done putting everything back together my poles started rolling away. Aside from that I had a great time. There was nobody else on the slope, so we had a foot of untracked powder. During lunch we saw something very strange. A guy in a fuzzy mammoth costume was walking around the room like it was perfectly natural. On that note we also saw three guys in matching bear head hats in line at the lift. One guy in the line next to us took about a dozen pictures of them.

And that was our experience in Mammoth. I would definitely recommend going. Our next stop will be in Squaw Valley, California. 

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