The Rogue and the Resort

In 1878, the surest way to get rich in California was to tell people you already were. That winter, prospectors struck gold high in the eastern Sierra, and within months some 1,500 fortune-seekers had clawed up to a raw camp called Mammoth City, perched near 7,600 feet. The money men moved fast: General George Dodge organized the Mammoth Mining Company and built a thundering 20-stamp mill to pulverize ore. To investors in San Francisco, Mammoth looked unstoppable.

The mountain disagreed. Winters buried cabins to the eaves and caved in roofs, and beneath it all sat the secret that doomed everyone: the gold was shallow and thin. The company kept the story glowing until 1880, when the truth surfaced and the financing evaporated. The unpaid miners walked off within weeks, and Mammoth City froze into a ghost town. The lesson seemed permanent: the snow up there takes everything. Stay away in winter.

One man heard that and thought: people would pay to slide down it.

The snow surveyor

Dave McCoy arrived in the 1930s as a hydrographer — a snow surveyor — measuring the very snowpack that had run the miners off. Where everyone saw 40-foot drifts as a death sentence, McCoy saw the best ski terrain in America going to waste. In 1938 he rigged a rope tow on nearby McGee Mountain, powered by a Model A Ford engine. When he needed $85 to make it permanent, a Bishop bank laughed him out — until a young secretary named Roma Carriere argued them into the loan. He got the money. He also got the girl: Roma became his wife and partner, collecting fifty cents a head at the bottom of the rope.

When McGee’s snow grew unreliable, McCoy followed his own survey data to Mammoth Mountain, stringing up a rope tow there in 1942. World War II made spare parts impossible; one blown engine could have ended everything. He and Roma lived rough — a tent, a cabin, sub-zero nights — and he kept the machinery alive through pure mechanical cunning.

Chair 1

Then the war ended, skiing exploded, and the interests who’d dismissed McCoy suddenly wanted his mountain, maneuvering to pry loose his Forest Service permits. He beat them the way he always won: he out-worked them. He secured the permit in 1953, and in 1955 opened Mammoth’s first chairlift — Chair 1 — built through a punishing summer in which his crew muscled the steel tower sections up the slope largely by hand.

The mountain that bankrupted a gold company became a multi-billion-dollar resort drawing millions of skiers and Olympic athletes to the same drifts that buried Mammoth City. And the man they called crazy outlasted all of them, running his mountain for decades and living to 104, dying in 2020 — having outlived every banker and critic who told him the snow always wins.

It does win — against greed. The mining company tried to take the mountain by force and fraud, and the mountain swallowed it. McCoy never tried to beat the snow; he just loved it enough to live in it. Fly into Mammoth, ride a lift out of the trees, and look down: somewhere under that perfect snowpack are the bones of a town that was sure it had the mountain figured out — and the tracks of the one man who actually did.