Dave McCoy's Rope Tow: The Water Man Who Built Mammoth

In the early nineteen forties, a young man named Dave McCoy hauled a gas engine up Mammoth Mountain and hooked it to a rope tow he had rigged himself. This was how the largest ski resort in the continental United States began: one man, one engine, and a rope.

McCoy worked as a hydrographer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. His job was to measure the snowpack in the Owens Valley, the same snowpack that fed the aqueduct that had drained the valley below. He spent his weeks recording the water that the city of Los Angeles needed. He spent his weekends on the mountain above it.

He got a special use permit from the United States Forest Service and spent the next decade building his operation largely through his own labor, reinvesting what little revenue the rope tow generated into new infrastructure. Mammoth Mountain Ski Area opened as a formal commercial operation in nineteen fifty-five. McCoy ran it until he was past ninety years old. He is credited with training several United States Olympic ski team members. He died in twenty twenty-one at one hundred and four years old.

The irony in his story is not incidental. The city of Los Angeles destroyed the agricultural economy of the Owens Valley through its water system. The same water system employed the man who turned the mountains above that valley into one of California's defining institutions. Dave McCoy measured the water going south and skied the mountain it left behind.

Nobody involved in the promotional history of Mammoth Mountain has made much of that.