Kaboom club

They’ve brought out the big guns at Mammoth.

“Locked and loaded, ready to fire,” barks the ordnance specialist as he shoves a 40-pound explosive shell into the barrel of the howitzer and slams the chamber. The gunner, taking aim at one of California’s prime winter resort playgrounds, yells back, “Ready to fire!” then “Fire!”

The artillery unloads. The shock wave lifts the gun off the ground. Knees all around turn to gelatin.

Ah, nothing like a blast from a 105-millimeter howitzer to rouse the morning pulse, one thinks as the missile tears for enemy lines -- in this case, the telltale buildup of fresh snow on a Mammoth Mountain slope that could come crashing down on skiers in an avalanche.

For these slide gunners, the battle pits precaution against potential disaster and death, and the opponent is a big one.

“People have no idea what it takes to open a mountain of this size,” says Nat Heit, a ski patrol manager who has become a cannon expert at Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort. “The gun I started with was a 75-millimeter recoilless rifle,” he says. “The ammo was pretty old

Heit and his crew spring into action after a big snowfall or high winds. Those are the forces that pile powder into the dangerous, unstable clumps that set off avalanches. And that’s why there are two pieces of artillery trained on Mammoth Mountain all winter, positioned to hit the target every time, even firing blind in a raging snowstorm.

At dawn, the crews are already on gun duty. Heit and his loader, Chris Engelhardt, have made their way in the frigid darkness to gun mount No. 1 to launch 30 rounds into the mountain. Their firing base is a small concrete building with a metal roof and two garage-style doors on either end.

Heit and Engelhardt clean the barrel, check the sights and prepare the ammo -- just what their military counterparts would do. Then Engelhardt moves to the magazine where the ammo is stored. “Welcome to the wine rack,” he says.

It’s a dark, narrow space with concrete walls on either side fitted with holes to store ammo. Pulling large tubes out of the wall, Engelhardt hands each up through the hatch to Heit. Together they assemble the shells and screw in the detonator caps.

Then it’s time to fire the weapon, triggering the blast that wobbles the legs of everyone in the bunker. The shells continue to slam through the crisp morning air. In the distance the white slope explodes in puffs of black smoke. A few of the hits trigger small avalanches but nothing huge or devastating. “It’s about making a lot of little ones so we don’t get a big one,” says Heit.

That’s when the mountain shoots back with a slide salvo.