Time Out / How we play in L.A. : A Summer Surge to the Slopes : Mountain bikers flock to ski areas in off-season, boosting lifts’ revenue.

To skiers, it’s a molehill. But to the mountain bikers, it’s, well, a real mountain.

When the slopes are white with snow, Snow Summit in the San Bernardino Mountains is just another local ski area--friendly, accessible and small by national standards.

But when the snow melts, the modest ski facility near Big Bear Lake blossoms into one of the nation’s preeminent venues in the fast-growing sport of mountain biking, hauling bikes up the chairlift, hosting stops on the national and international race circuits and drawing tens of thousands of riders and spectators to its snowless slopes.

“How do you beat this,” said biker Steve Flick, who got up at 2 a.m. on a recent weekend to drive down from Santa Cruz and try out the Southern California slopes. “You take the lift up and ride down. . . . This is mountain bike heaven.”

Just two weeks after hauling its last skier up the chairlift on April 22, Snow Summit began ferrying mountain bikers and their expensive, high-tech vehicles to the top of the 8,200-foot mountain. And if the trend established over the past decade continues, the area will carry a record number of bikers before the snows return in the late fall.

“It’s amazing, the growth we’ve seen,” said Tom Spiegel, a partner in Team Big Bear, which rents equipment and sponsors races at Snow Summit. “And it’s here to stay.”

Snow Summit was one of the first California ski areas to haul bikes and their riders on a ski chairlift eight years ago. Since then, the idea has spread like an avalanche.

According to a recent Bicycling magazine survey, more than 120 ski areas nationally offer mountain biking on their slopes in the off-season. That’s up from fewer than 20 just four years ago.

“Soon there won’t be many [ski areas] that don’t offer mountain biking,” said Ed Pavelka, executive editor of the magazine.

It makes sense to riders and area operators alike.

The same sort of mountain terrain preferred by skiers is also sought after by mountain bikers. And the sport gives ski areas another way to make money on their lifts, which would otherwise remain shut down or be used sparsely by sightseers in the off-season.

“I come up just about every weekend,” said Terry Hummer of La Habra. “I come here because I can take the lift up to the top and come down as fast as I want, or at least as fast as I can.”

Some mountain bike riders are visiting these bike parks because of the ease of traveling uphill on the chairlift, rather than under pedal power. Others say the access and camaraderie enjoyed at the bike parks is preferred to some state and national parks that have closed many trails to two-wheelers.

“It’s a hassle with the horses and the hikers” in state parks, said Thad Sparrow of San Diego. “They say we are too fast and we say they are too slow. . . . It’s worth the three-hour drive” to the ski slopes reserved for bikers, he said.

Among California ski areas, Snow Summit and Mammoth Mountain, in the eastern Sierra, have the oldest and most prominent mountain biking programs. But others also offer chairlift access to bikers, including Mt. Baldy in the San Gabriel Mountains, Snow Valley in the Big Bear area and Squaw Valley and Northstar at Lake Tahoe.

This year, Snow Summit was the first to open with a seven-day-a-week schedule, and it may have a peculiar edge over rival Mammoth, where much of the mountain is still under several feet of snow.

“We’re clearing off trail with snow blowers to make room for the bikes,” said Jennifer Renner, summer marketing manager at Mammoth Mountain. Renner said enough trails were cleared by July 8 to host the annual Kamikaze Day races, one of the largest mountain bike racing events in the nation, with an estimated 3,000 competitors and 50,000 spectators.

That’s a big change from just a few years ago, when Mammoth and Snow Summit were lucky to get a few hundred mountain bike riders or spectators.

Greg Ralph, vice president of marketing at Snow Summit, says the volume of riders has doubled every year, and now tops 500 a day on weekends. Snow Summit sells 25,000 lift tickets to mountain bikers during the summer, compared to 500,000 that skiers buy during the winter.

On a recent weekend, Snow Summit had nearly 400 mountain bikers entered in the first leg of its Amateur Cup slalom race and more than 1,200 riders in its cross-country race. Still, Ralph said, “one weekend in the winter makes more than the whole season of biking.”

But the total crowd on the mountain at the mountain biking World Cup and National Championships races going on now through Sunday could exceed 10,000. “And that’s bigger than any one-day ski crowd,” he said.

“This really is a world class race course,” said a smiling Carmen Bastek, who drove in from Phoenix for the Amateur Cup races. “I’ll come back again next year.”