Dave McCoy and the Making of Mammoth Mountain
Near Mammoth Lakes, California
Every winter this mountain fills with skiers, and nearly all of it grew from the stubbornness of one man named Dave McCoy. Born in nineteen fifteen, McCoy worked as a hydrographer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which meant he skied the backcountry to measure the snowpack. On those trips he saw how much snow piled onto Mammoth Mountain and understood what it could become.
In nineteen thirty eight he set up a portable rope tow, a length of rope pulled by an engine that dragged skiers uphill, first on nearby McGee Mountain. He got his Forest Service permit in nineteen fifty three, and on Thanksgiving Day of nineteen fifty five he opened Mammoth Mountain's first chairlift. From that single lift he built one of the great ski resorts in North America, rising to a summit of about eleven thousand fifty three feet, with a vertical drop of roughly three thousand one hundred feet.
McCoy ran the mountain for sixty eight years and also owned nearby June Mountain. He lived to be one hundred four years old, dying in twenty twenty, having turned a rope and an engine into an entire mountain town's livelihood.
