In March 2003, we headed off to Mammoth Lakes in California for the first leg of our USA adventure.
After spending the night in a hotel, we departed Heathrow on a United Airlines flight to San Francisco. Once we'd had a brief stop in San Francisco, we changed planes and shortly arrived in Reno, Nevada.
Once we'd picked up our hire car, it was an extremely tiring three hour trip through some pretty amazing mountain scenery (if only it had been light enough to see it!!) to Mammoth Lakes. After 24 hours of travelling, we finally made it, exhausted, but in one piece!
We were staying at the Jagerhof Lodge in the town of Mammoth Lakes, which was run by very friendly and welcoming owners. We were lucky enough to get an upgrade on our room to one with a small living room and kitchen area. The room had the most amazing alpine scenery visible from the window!
One of the benefits of the jet lag is that we were both up bright and early in the morning of the first day, ready to hit the slopes! (Luckily our Crystal rep was around just as early!)
We were picked up by the free ski bus (Red Liiiiine at the Red Siiiign!) just outside our hotel and 10 minutes later we were at Main Lodge.
Our first impressions of Mammoth Mountain were extremely good. Luckily for us, a huge amount of snow had fallen during the past week and it had done a great job at topping up what was already an established deep base of snow on the mountain!
The mountain was huuuggee and all the lifts queues were small and pretty friendly (compared with European resorts!) There was a great variety of runs available from the very basic green right through to the scary double black, and over the ten days we were there, we gradually made our way through everything the mountain had to offer!
The scenery visible from the mountain was simply breathtaking! It was possible to see for miles with unbelievable sudden changes from snow to desert with many lakes interdispersed
One of the main differences we noticed was generally how quiet the slopes were. It was often possible to share a piste just between the two of us. As well as being extremely relaxing, this also gavve us the opportunity to practice our skiing technique without worrying about the presence of other skiers!
Another great point of the mountain was that it was all skiable terrain. There was plenty of opportunity to have a go at off-piste skiing, sometimes on very demanding slopes (as the pictures show!) We tried everything, including tree skiing (that is, skiing around them .. NOT straight into them!) and even tried our hand at skiing down between the ski-lift pylons!
One of the other cool things was that there was a great selection of half-pipes and jumps available. We mainly got involved with these by watching other skiers and boarders whilst riding on the Thunderbound Express lift (although we did experiment on some of the smaller jumps, as the photos show!)
Halfway through the trip, we decided to take a brief break from the skiing and take the chance to have a go at snow-mobiling! We took separate snow-mobiles and after following the guide tentatively along some forest trails for a while, we finally arrived at an open field where we were able to spend about 20 minutes razzing around (although I razzed a bit more than Kirsty!)
On one of the days, we took the chance to visit the nearby June Mountain, which was covered by our Mammoth lift pass. We had been told that it was worthwhile visiting there on a weekend when the Mammoth slopes were busier than normal (although still nowhere near as busy as we are used to!)
On the way back, we decided to take a small detour so that we could visit a local landmark by the name of Mono Lake. This detour also gave us the opportunity to check out the stunning scenery we had missed on our original drive in from Reno!
During our ten days, we had a fantastic introduction to what was our first experience of skiing in the USA.
It was with sadness that we had to pack up the car and set off on our journey to Las Vegas (although as we were setting off for the next leg of our journey, we weren't too sad!)
