Man Meets Mountain: Mammoth Success Story : Dave McCoy, 70, Is Monarch of the Busiest Ski Area in the United States

The mountain right outside Dave McCoy’s office window was bound and pinned with cables and towers. Skiers sliced every which way across its artificially sculpted belly.

An environmental purist might imagine the hill writhing in indignation from this treatment--like Gulliver hogtied by pesky Lilliputians.

Not McCoy.

Monarch of the busiest ski area in the United States, 70-year-old McCoy is sure that Mammoth Mountain doesn’t mind the human traffic, the lift hardware or the fleet of 30 snow-grooming machines that tickle its hide every evening. “Fun comes from giving. And if the mountain can give this many people this much pleasure. . . .

‘Nearly Perfect for Skiing’

“When I look at Mammoth, I think it was designed and built for what it’s used for today,” he added, turning a kindly smile on the mountainside as the shadow of a rising gondola flicked across his face on a recent Monday morning. “I’ve never seen anything so nearly perfect for skiing.”

McCoy didn’t get to be the success he is today through negative thinking. His conviction that his mountain is happy is just an example. McCoy could, in fact, serve as a case study for Terry (How-to-Have-More-in-a-Have-Not-World) Cole-Whittaker or any of the new glut of prosperity preachers.

As if it weren’t enough that he’s one of only two solo developers and operators of a major ski area in the country (Ernie Blake of Taos still operates the ski area he raised from infancy; most of the others are run by large corporations), McCoy also has what seems to be a blessed marriage. His wife, Roma, has been with him since before there was a single lift on the mountain. Their home in Bishop has an indoor gym, a studio for Roma’s stained-glass work and an indoor pool--a “homey home,” as McCoy described it, with motorcycles and horses in the yard.

A Couple Rarely Apart

“If we can be outside doing something, we’ll be outside,” McCoy said, explaining how he and Roma prefer to spend their time. “We could care less about staying in.” They ski and backpack together, and are rarely apart.

Each of their six children is a great skier; but Penny, Pancho and Carl, in particular, have accomplished enough in the arena of world-class and Olympic ski racing to stoke the pride of six fathers. And McCoy has kept his grip on that quality that can elude even a lucky man: his health.

Heads still turn to check out his technique when Dave McCoy enters a ski race. He often bicycles the 55 miles--a 5,000-foot climb--from his Bishop home to the ski area. And he races motocross--motorcycles, not bicycles.

He relegates credit for the fortune that has come his way to Roma, to the people whose input helped shape Mammoth, and to an unnamed higher partner: “I’ve always felt I’ve been guided, dangled on a string. . . .”

When the young Dave McCoy first skied into town while working as a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power hydrographer in the winter of 1935-36, only six people lived in Mammoth. After that, whenever he had a day off in the vicinity of Mammoth, McCoy would get up at 3 a.m., hike to the top of the mountain and ski down, repeating the process three or four times during the day. (“I’ll still do that now in the evenings sometimes, after the lifts shut down,” he said. He and his German shepherd, Rebel, climb to the top of lift 13. Then, since Rebel doesn’t ski, they walk back down again.)

In the early days, McCoy and maybe a buddy or two would have the hill to themselves. Now the area is famous for its Sunday evening traffic jams. The Porsches and buses duke it out for a couple of hundred miles south to Mojave on Highway 395.

McCoy’s success has made Mammoth the most urbanized spot in the eastern Sierra.

McCoy regrets nothing. He prefers it this way: “It’s really more fun and more enjoyable now than it used to be.”

Ski area public-relations manager Pam Murphy said that while others may get nostalgic for the old days--when Dave and Roma could practically live off the wild trout and duck they took from the land--McCoy himself will have none of that.

“Dave won’t ever say ‘the good old days,’ ” Murphy said. “You ask him, ‘When are the good old days?’ and he says, ‘Tomorrow.’ ”

There have been a lot of celebrations on the mountain recently. McCoy turned 70 Aug. 24 (his wife is 65). Chair 1, the first chair installed on the hill, had its 30th birthday at Thanksgiving. McCoy just marked his 50th year of “being close to Mammoth”; and 1986 has been the ski area’s biggest visitor year, with 600,000 lift tickets sold to date, not including season passes and other special admissions.

All this delights McCoy because there was a time when no one thought Mammoth had a chance of becoming the outdoor entertainment mecca it is today. In fact, when the U.S. Forest Service originally issued an invitation for developers of a proposed ski area in 1953, McCoy was the only one to submit a bid. And, according to local lore, he had to be coaxed into it.

McCoy began on the road to good fortune at age 13. That was when his father--who worked for Standard Oil in El Segundo, then switched to highway construction--and his mother split up.

There were grandparents McCoy could go live with, “But they lived in Washington, and I liked California, so it made it difficult,” he said.

‘It Turned Me Loose’

He was on his own, then. “It was the greatest thing in the world that happened,” McCoy said in his typical fashion, seeing the good in a sad scene. “It turned me loose in the world to see what it was all about.”

Aside from learning that there were good and bad people out there and that a man had to learn to judge them on the basis of pretty scant data sometimes, McCoy discovered that you could affix logging boots to a pair of ash boards--and ski.

McCoy gravitated to the eastern Sierra, where he roared around with his skis jutting like flags from his motorcycle. Roma Carriere met him in a restaurant in Independence. She saw that this man had style. They were married in 1941.

Because he was good at getting around on skis, McCoy got a job with the DWP measuring snow levels in remote parts of the Sierra. When he wasn’t working, he was still on skis. He became a major figure on the downhill race circuit.

Then he took a fall.

He was doing 60 m.p.h. at Sugar Bowl when the snow caved in under him. His left leg hit something hard and it shattered. The damage was multiplied when McCoy tried to turn to avoid a crowd. The leg was broken in dozens of places and the doctors voted for amputation. Instead, McCoy got around on crutches for five years until the mess of bones finally knitted. Walking was agony, but when he was on skis it was like the accident never happened.

Once a Free Ride

McCoy and several friends began using a Model A Ford truck to power a portable rope tow, which they rigged on prime spots on McGee Mountain. In the mid-’40s, McCoy installed a permanent tow on McGee. Reluctantly, he began to charge skiers 50 cents to cover his expenses. Until then, it had been a free ride.

With an eye for snow conditions, which he had developed on the hydrographer job, McCoy judged Mammoth to be a better ski site than McGee. Mammoth Mountain may have been nearly ideal, but other conditions were less than perfect when McCoy took on the task of creating a commercial ski area there from scratch.

Army Surplus Vehicles

Severe weather and inaccessibility were problems that could have doomed the project. The road to Los Angeles was nothing but a dirt track that disappeared in the Sierra storms. McCoy purchased Army surplus snow vehicles to get skiers in and out, and banked on the belief that many L.A. residents loved skiing as much as he did--enough to take a little time and trouble getting to the snow.

Since the Mammoth empire grew up slowly around the family, the six McCoy children never had an opportunity to get spoiled by their holdings. The family lived right on the mountain--where the lift crew is lodged today--until the oldest boy, Gary (now 42 and general manager of the mountain), was old enough to go to high school, at which time they moved to Bishop.

“We never had much as far as dollars and cents,” Dave McCoy said. “Everything went back into the mountain. We didn’t look at it as a business, but as providing fun for other people.” He said he still looks at it that way, and still funnels profits back into the ski area--more than $35 million in the last five years alone, according to Pam Murphy.

“We figure the mountain belongs to them (the public),” McCoy added (it’s on land leased from the U.S. Forest Service).

All Quiet Sincerity

Although the words may seem overstated, McCoy in person is all quiet sincerity. Dressed in a well-worn green flannel shirt, brown corduroy pants and Saucony tennis shoes, he was obliging but private during a recent interview. It was apparent that he’d be happy when the session was over so he could go out skiing with Roma.

McCoy believes in the sport. To him, it’s much more than a speed-seeker’s palliative. He says he has seen a day or two on the hill smooth the edges of even the most hostile, pent-up city dweller: “I think something like this (skiing) is the greatest medicine that you can have.”

The McCoy legend is so immense along the entire eastern Sierra that Murphy said employees are frequently intimidated to meet the man. It’s not that he’s an overbearing character, but people get the feeling there must be something superhuman about a fellow who leads such an apparently charmed life. A sportswriter who met McCoy recently told Murphy, “I almost feel like I’ve found religion.”

If there’s one thing McCoy does not want to be, it’s intimidating, say those who know him. Above any of his athletic or other achievements, he takes pride in running Mammoth Mountain. That means interacting every day with visitors and his 300 permanent and 1,200 seasonal employees.

So successful is McCoy at making individual staff members feel important that upper management has become something of an old-age club, to hear Murphy tell it. An 11-year employee, Murphy said she is a relative babe on the staff. Some of them started when McCoy himself did, and the average upper-management employee has been here 15 or 20 years.

When McCoy goes out on his daily ski, he purposely rides in four-person gondolas so he can talk to the visitors and see what may be lacking on the hill.

‘Full of Dreams’

McCoy’s mountain includes 25 chair lifts, four surface lifts and two gondolas. Crews work 24 hours a day to maintain the slopes. On the busiest holiday they entertain as many as 21,000 skiers, and they have an approved plan to up that number to 24,000.

“We’re just full of dreams (for expansion),” McCoy said.

Although even insiders think the prediction a little optimistic, McCoy foresees a day when the ski area and support facilities will accommodate 150,000 skiers a day.

Dean McAlister, district ranger for the Mammoth Ranger District of the Inyo National Forest, said that although “Dave has been real good at working with the Forest Service and meeting our needs,” there are substantial environmental questions confronting the proposed growth of the ski area. These include interference with deer migration routes, water availability and transportation headaches due to the limited capacity of Highway 395.

Perhaps most important is the question, “How do you interface (the existing community) with that kind of skiing capacity?” McAlister said. Community leaders in Mammoth Lakes are currently voicing concern over the planned installation of a warming hut and lodge near year-round residences just east of Lake Mary Road.

Ron Thomas, wildlife biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game in Mono County, said that his office is winding up a two-year study to determine the effect on as many as 6,000 deer if a proposed ski development in the Sherwin Bowl area is approved. (It is not Dave McCoy but a private corporation that is interested in developing that area.)

Deer Survival Questioned

“Anytime you put something in the direct path of a migrating herd, you’ve really got a problem,” Thomas said. Deer herds in the area “could not survive” the massive expansion that it would take to accommodate McCoy’s anticipated 150,000 skiers, he said. The area’s grouse, rabbits, eagles, prairie falcons, marten and other animals could also be negatively affected by the growth.

Yet McCoy claims that due to his staff’s efforts at slope stabilization through diligent irrigation, mulching and planting, they now have more wildlife on the mountain than when he came here 50 years ago.

For instance, there’s the deer that has a fawn every year over by Chair 11--proof that at least one animal agrees with Dave McCoy that a downhill skier’s mountain is a good place to raise a family.