Mammoth : High, White and Handsome : The Rumblings Have Quieted, the Snow and Sun Are Out in Full Force

No sweat. A volcano hasn’t erupted here for, oh, at least 500 years. And the people of Mammoth Lakes want it known that no new volcanoes are expected soon.

A few seasons ago, word spread from this High Sierra resort that magma, the molten rock that percolates about four or five miles below the surface, had worked its way up to a two-mile depth. Rugged old Mammoth Mountain is itself an extinct volcano, but if you let yourself go, you could imagine the mountain blowing its top again and giving 20,000 skiers the final hot foot.

Another dreaded word was swarms . It did not describe killer bees; it labeled the shivery earthquakes that rolled through regularly between 1980 and 1982. These helped make the winter of 1982-83 a memorable one in Mammoth Lakes. Fears concerning volcano activity--combined with the national recession and a relentless, 600-inch snowfall--hit the resort with a devastating triple punch. People lost control. Property values plummeted. Cabin fever was epidemic.

You wouldn’t guess today, however, that not long ago the region had been flirting with the apocalypse. I drove up recently on a Sunday evening, and the line of weekenders going the other direction--silver sports cars returning to the Southland with skis clamped to the trunk--resembled a 300-mile-long freight train. The earthquakes do not swarm so much now; that infamous layer of magma has cooled down and solidified, and Mammoth Lakes is once again in the Alpine-glow pink.

But Mother Earth is still something to consider. I got all the proof I needed one evening at Casa Diablo--the aptly named “devil’s house.”

Visible from U.S. 395, just at the Mammoth exit, is a wispy, white column of steam arising over the snowy landscape. These steam plumes can be spotted in a number of places in the valley, at the edge of a lake, perhaps, or, like Casa Diablo, in the middle of no place, belching a long, white cloud into the air as if from a phantom, subterranean factory.

Casa Diablo is a circle of bare earth, perhaps 100 feet across. Around the steam pit in the center, the icy snow was melted into a thick blanket of mud. Closer to the gaping fissure, the rocks were dried and gray. I could hear it bubbling madly. As I stepped closer, the breeze shifted and the plume passed over me. It was mild, briny steam, rank and sulfurous, carrying traces of boron and arsenic. The experience was like having the earth breathe in your face.

The main pit was no bigger than the kitchen sink, and it boiled violently with brackish gray water. Sizzling arcs of water shot through the effluvium. Surrounding the pit were little folds in the earth where tissues of steam seeped soundlessly from the red-green mucilage of clay.

It was a dark and mesmerizing place to stop and take stock. Not too cheerful, either. But this little opening in the earth seemed to represent the sensational, larger-than-life geologic variety of this High Sierra region. Just driving along 395 through the Owens Valley, you have to be humbled by the sight of the mountain range towering like a hundred miles of white, craggy giants. The 8,400-foot Owens Peak in the south leads to that row of 14,000-foot behemoths around Mt. Whitney. Such a gray, looming majesty. It’s as if you could drive through the desert and have all the great cathedrals of Europe built next to each other along one side of the street--Chartres, St. Paul’s, Cologne and, well hello, there’s Notre Dame.

Directly west over the snowfields of Mammoth lies Yosemite National Park. To the east, heading for the red hills of Nevada, is Inyo National Forest and one of the largest gatherings of Jeffrey pines in the West. A dozen lakes are lively with trout. Cross-country skiers are gliding through the woods toward Hot Creek Gorge, where they can take a dip in the heated waters. And for contrast, just a few hundred feet from Casa Diablo is the Mammoth Pacific Geothermal Plant--a discreet operation that pulls hot water (about 340-degrees-Fahrenheit worth) from the ground, drives the turbines, fires up the electricity for Mammoth and returns the water to the ground. There are loads of valuables beneath the surface, too--pumice, clay, kaolinite. But the piece of Earth that first drew attention to this region was, of course, its heart of gold.

Bodie was the roughest, rottenest gold camp in the Sierra. It probably deserved to die a lonely death. My only hope, as I tried to find it, was that it wouldn’t kill me, too.

The epicenter of the Gold Rush of ‘49, Sutter’s Creek, was on the western side of the mountains. But after 10 years of ferocious digging and sifting, that area was pretty well reamed out, and the miners moved east, into the land of the Mono Paiute Indians. Prospectors including Lee Vining and Cord Norst had found gold in the mountains north of Mono Lake, and in 1859 the trackless land was sprawling with camps such as Dogtown, Mono Diggings, Benton Hot Springs and, most notorious, Bodie.

The paved road that leads two miles outside of Bodie was closed for the winter. But I had chains for my tires and no shortage of confidence in my driving skills. At first the road didn’t seem to be in that bad shape. A little frost here and there. Thirteen miles of it couldn’t be so tough. Then it got icy, and I put on the chains. But not much past a sign announcing that the altitude was 8,000 feet, the snowdrifts crossed the road, the tracks disappeared, the car struggled wanly and slowed to a crawl, and I had teeth marks all over my once-brave heart.

I stopped. I appeared to be on top of the world, in a wide bowl of snow. It looked like the moon, but at least it was the bright side of the moon. The smooth, rolling landscape was saturated in a fierce, bluish glare.

Slinking slowly back down the mountainside to the highway, I had to wonder how those prospectors managed it in the hardscrabble boom years. You live in Los Angeles too long, you forget that a survival trek across frozen wastelands may once have been a commonplace event.

The next day I tried the southern approach, up from Mono Lake through Cottonwood Canyon. This actually is the recommended route. The road was dirt, rocks and snow, but this time I had arranged with a state park ranger to meet me at the summit. After 10 miles of slewing and straining, I pulled into a small clearing. Ranger Brad Sturdivant waited there with his orange Thiokol, a tank-like snow truck. He had a rugged face and wore a beard and sunglasses.

“Nasty road,” I said.

He grinned and pointed down into the snowy valley where, perhaps a mile away, was spread the ghost town of Bodie. The tank tracks provided a corrugated path. “My wife drove all the way in at 11 last night,” he said.

“In what? That snow cat?”

“No, in a Subaru station wagon. With no chains, either.”

“The kid’s got guts,” I said. (Later, I’d find from Suzanne Sturdivant that she made the trip with her 3-week-old baby in the back seat and not so much as a CB radio for company.)

Sturdivant and I climbed into the Thiokol and chugged into the ghost town. A flawless mantle of snow smoothed every surface. The sun was hard and bright. The old pine buildings were weathered into beautiful grays and golds. In summer, the ghosts have a lot of company, as the park draws something like 100,000 day visitors a year; no overnight guests are accepted. But in the dead of winter, only cross-country skiers and the occasional snowmobiler make the journey, and it truly looks to be the frosty isle of ghosts.

During the boom of 1879-81, the town, complete with a sprawling red-light district and a huge Chinatown, ran to a population of 5,000 to 10,000--larger than the present-day boom town of Mammoth Lakes. The odd thing is that so much of it is still here. Even though two major fires knocked down 95% of the town, 170 buildings still stand, scattered up hill and down dale. It almost deserves to be called a ghost metropolis.

A narrow-gauge rail line once ran from the Mono Mills, but that was only to carry wood to the steam-powered stamp mills, which consumed 60 cords a day. In 1893, one of the first hydroelectric projects in the country ran power into Bodie. But when the power lines were strung over the mountains, engineers ran them in a straight line, figuring that electricity would leap off the poles if the lines rounded a corner.

I wondered how the pioneers traveled in and out of Bodie in winter.

“There were sleighs,” Sturdivant said. “And over in the museum, we’ve got snowshoes that were fit onto horses. Don’t ask me if they actually worked or not.”

Anyway, if a prospector actually got over the pass, where would he go? Carson City? That would be another 100 miles or so to the north. Bodie was the biggest noise around. No wonder boozing and fighting were such big sports.

I looked at the lonely shacks scattered over the hills and imagined some fellow eating beans all winter long and finally trading off his whole claim for a single can of peaches. But perhaps hunger and the altitude were getting to my imagination.

In its few thriving years, more than $100 million in gold (based on the old $16-an-ounce price) was taken out of the earth. And as quickly as they had arrived, the miners and all their confederates departed. By 1912 it was down to just a few. But two good houses, belonging to the town’s bankers, the Cain brothers, were left standing and kept in good repair by the heirs until the 1960s, when the state took over the town. David Victor Cain’s white frame house is now the home of the Sturdivant family. Another ranger and his family live in the house of James S. Cain, who once owned most of the town.

“With the birth of Jordan three weeks ago,” Sturdivant said as we went in for coffee, “that brings the population now to 10 people.”

The Sturdivant family has been there for two years, which means they missed the hellish winter of 1982. “We plan to stay here for a few more years. Winter is what we wait for.” And they wait without TV or VCR. They do, however, have a snowmobile and a big bunch of books.

Sturdivant had grown up in the quite different surroundings of San Diego. I asked if he was always so in need of privacy.

“Yes,” he nodded, “my family was always very private, too. Luckily I was able to find a wife who’s just as private. Well, she’s a bit more outgoing than me.”

But in summertime this place is crawling with people.

“Sure,” he said. “But in private hours you can have real seclusion.” If there is one thing the lunar landscape of Bodie provides a lot of in wintertime, it is private hours.

The mining camp of old Mammoth had a short life about the same period as Bodie’s heyday, but Mammoth produced neither the wealth nor the heavy dramatics. Fires and avalanches helped destroy most of it, and today only a few foundations remain of the old camp.

Mammoth began a second life as a resort area not long after the turn of the century. Cattleman Charlie Summers built a lodge there in 1917. Twenty years later, a new highway was put through and a new village built around it. Throughout the ‘30s, the mountains served as backdrop in numberless adventure movies, and it followed that the Sierra became a retreat for many of the more rugged Hollywood film folks. A popular diversion was to fly up in a seaplane and land on June Lake.

While the base population of Mammoth Lakes today is about 4,500, the winter weekend traffic swells that number to more than 45,000. It is not readily apparent, but in summertime the area gets more than twice as many visitors than it does in ski season. The backpackers are just not as noticeable. As soon as they arrive, they slip into the folds of the mountains and are gone to the glacial lakes.

Incorporation as a town only came about in August, 1984, and it was a badly needed shot in the arm, given the beating that the village took in the recession. Community groups were started, and battles were successfully waged against high-rise condominiums and the like. It is generally accepted now that any present development must be designed around the area’s profitable position as a natural wonderland. In other words, don’t lay any pipes where they might inconvenience a cross-country skier.

What we see today, spreading in all directions from the main drag, is a tasteful combination of Late American West (Earthshoes Division) and Alpine Kitsch. Even the fast-food joints and the supermarkets have been given a natural-wood veneer. The alpine image is not entirely a false front; a large number of Europeans have settled in Mammoth. One Swiss woman told me that in two years here she’s met at least 14 other Swiss. And what brought them to Mammoth? “Because there is no fog here,” she said. “Only snow and sun.”

A life of only snow and sun can, however, get a little old. After shoveling snow and scraping windshields for 20 or 30 years, many citizens just have to hang it up and move south to the milder, high-desert town of Bishop. It is a frequently told story in Mammoth, land of the high, white and beautiful.

Behind the misted windows of the saloons, yes, you can find Continental cuisine and something they sell called atmosphere. But if you have set foot in Mammoth, you cannot for a moment forget that you are on the edge of something overpowering. Walk out into that clear breathless night and you can sense the cathedral walls looming. Your next step will not be a casual one; it will be made with respect. Perhaps you will shiver before the silvery snowcapped Minarets; perhaps you will see a fountain of steam shooting up from a river of ice. You will be assured then that the giants are slumbering . . . only slumbering.