We took the skis out of the rental car and laid them along with the ski bags on the sidewalk a block from the sand at Venice Beach, which is just 10 minutes or so from LAX. The idea was to repack before our flight while stealing an hour in the soft salt air.
A pulled-together woman in a baby-blue jogging suit stopped to ask where we might be headed skiing on this fine February day.
“As a matter of fact,” I stammered, “we’ve just been skiing, and now we’re headed home. To Colorado.”
“You’ve come from Colorado to ski here?” she said with incredulity and a tinge of pity. “Where in the world?”
My friend Jimmy and I turned to the east and were pleased to see the snow-white dome of Mount San Antonio, “Old Baldy,” floating up beyond the power lines and palm fronds.
“There,” I said, giddy at the contrast. “Mount Baldy.”
Powder and desert views
Millions of Southern Californians survive all right without a clue that the basin they inhabit is surrounded by very tall and skiable mountains. Old Baldy, at 10,064 feet, is the third-tallest in the ring and the closest to downtown Los Angeles. But you could spend years in college in Claremont, right at Baldy’s base, as I did, and never actually see the peak for the smog.
You might get a rise if you mentioned Mount Wilson, specifically the Mount Wilson Observatory. This is the home of the famous 100-inch telescope used by Edwin Hubble to prove that the universe is expanding and to advance the theory of the Big Bang.
In the 1920s, physicist Albert Michelson accurately measured the speed of light for the first time by bouncing a beam of light from Mount Wilson off a mirror on Mount Baldy and measuring the time it took to return.
The motto for Mount Baldy Ski Lifts is “Real Skiing Real Close.” The base parking lot is a 45-minute drive from Los Angeles. Negotiate the twisting, two-lane road above Mount Baldy Village, and you’ve entered an alpine haven divorced from the freeways below.
From the top of Lift 3 at 8,600 feet, you can see 100 miles into the Mojave Desert and, the other way, 75 miles over the top of the smog to Catalina Island shimmering off the coast.
Angelinos were pooling their gas ration coupons and skiing here as early as 1942. A caption on a black-and-
white photo at The Notch midmountain restaurant reads, “Jane Mansfield, while still a starlet, tries her luck on skis at Mount Baldy. What a view!”
And it happened to snow
I first skied Baldy in 1957 with my parents and younger sister. I remember an achingly blue sky, and that I rode a rope tow over and over. After I skidded to a stop each time – there never seemed to be anyone in line – the operator stood up from his stool and said, “Back again, Tiger?”
My three-day trip had a business component. Jimmy and I were scheduled to put on an adventure and environmental film program for Upland High School in the San Gabriel Valley, 20 minutes from Baldy’s parking lot. The shows were in the evening – we had our days free – so we took a chance and brought the skis along.
What luck! The mountain had received one of its legendary dumps. While inches of rain soaked the lower elevations, precipitating the odd mansion-into-the-canyon slide, above 5,000 feet it was all snow – 7 feet in two days. Snow buried the lift shacks and coated the area’s sugar pines until they looked like solid confectionery.
Baldy’s on-hill crew needed a full day to dig out, but when lifts opened the next morning, Jimmy and I were first in line for Chair 1.
A superlative day of skiing
This was the same double chair (installed in 1952, rebuilt in 1978) that I had ridden with my parents. It features Erector Set towers, a top speed well below that of the modern quad chair, and air-conditioned, wood-slat seats.
The skiing was frighteningly easy, like carving a bar of soap with two sharp blades on your feet.
The deluge had smoothed out every bump and dip in the terrain. You could go anywhere: in and out of the Popsicle trees, spaced perfectly as if skiing had been the idea all along; out the ridge to the soft porcelain sides of South Bowl; and down all the way to the base on Bentley’s Dream, a natural half-pipe so steep it should have avalanched. But the marshmallow snow let us down easy, and we were thrilled with the swooping lines we had drawn, feeling as if we were dreaming.
We shared all this with 150-200 other skiers and snowboarders. It was like empty seats at a Beatles concert – pick your metaphor. It was simply one of the finest days of skiing we had experienced, and there was almost nobody there.
I called Pete Olson, Mount Baldy’s genial president and general manager, to ask about the discrepancy. It’s true, he said. Despite great snow in 2004-05 (331 inches fell on the mountain, 237 inches at The Notch) and a season that ran from October to May, Baldy still sold only 40,000 lift tickets. And that was good compared with the 10,000 the year before, and 6,000 the year before that.
Other Southern California ski areas, particularly the ones around Big Bear Lake (Snow Summit, Snow Valley, Bear Mountain, Green Valley) grew bigger and faster than did Mount Baldy, though they have arguably fewer natural gifts. What they have is snowmaking, which let them guarantee top-to-bottom skiing by Thanksgiving, while Baldy, with limited artificial snow, must depend on the vagaries of Southern California winters.
Disneyland with snow
And sometimes when you have a great snow year, people can’t get there. This last season, Baldy lost nearly a month to storm days when wind or too much snow kept the lifts from running. They lost a week in January when one of Southern California’s biblical rainstorms washed out the access road.
Snow Summit, while it’s another 75 miles farther east, saw more than 500,000 skier days last year. In part, it’s the snowmaking. And partly, it’s the Disneyesque personas the “guaranteed-snow” areas have built for themselves. They are unabashedly youth-culture, surf/skate/board-riding hip, with high-speed lifts, night skiing, electronic ticketing and all the bling.
Summit’s neighbor and financial partner Bear Mountain, for example, boasts of man-made “features” (jumps, rails, pipes) on every trail.
Beauty over progress
Baldy, by contrast, is pleasurably stuck in time. The only thing it sells is downhill skiing on natural terrain taller (2,100 vertical feet), broader (400-800 acres) and steeper than anything in Big Bear. Olson, an L.A. native who got shares in Mount Baldy Ski Lifts in lieu of years of back pay, and Ellingson, who “always dreamed of owning a ski area,” freely admit their hill hasn’t evolved much past the 1950s.
But they’ve just received permission from the U.S. Forest Service to take water from San Antonio Falls near the base area, which will allow them to extend their snowmaking coverage. And they are moving ahead with plans to expand onto the north side of the ridge, which would double the acreage and give them a second base. Perhaps most important, this north-facing basin catches and holds snow better than just about any place on the massif – insurance against the sudden false springs and beach-weather meltdowns that inevitably plague SoCal skiing.
Near the end of our second and last day, we were still finding lines through the trees – whole sections of the hill – that had not felt the mark of another skier. (This never happens in Colorado.)
A few more Southern Californians had gotten the message and were plying the groomed trails, but the place still felt like a private ski area.
We traversed out the high line toward Bentley’s. The snow had a Styrofoam springiness to it; push down on it and it bounced you back. We stopped at the top, 1,000 feet of virgin Styrofoam below our ski tips, snow that was going from white to orange to plum as the sun dipped into the sea of smog.
“Big town down there,” Jimmy deadpanned, estimating a population of 17 million, more or less, at our feet. If only they would look up.
