Major Resort Hotel to Rise in Mammoth Lakes

Mammoth Lakes is about to get a different kind of lift.

Developers hoping to turn the homey Eastern Sierra town into an upscale ski resort said Wednesday that construction of the area’s first luxury hotel would begin with the spring snowmelt.

Intrawest Corp., a Canadian developer that has spent the last 15 years working to remake Mammoth, said it would erect a 230-room, $140-million Westin hotel. It is scheduled to open in the spring of 2007.

Dubbed the Westin Monache, the hotel would be the largest in town and the first to bear the nameplate of an upscale hostelry. It is the centerpiece of Intrawest’s planned $1-billion makeover of Mammoth.

“The arrival of the first international hotel brand is a very significant step for Mammoth to be recognized as a world-class destination,” said Peter Cowley, Intrawest’s vice president of lodging development.

Company and city officials in this town of 7,500 hope that the hotel will attract guests who don’t have to rush back to work Monday. On winter weekends, Mammoth gets about 20,000 visitors, most of them from Southern California. But only about 6,000 skiers hit the slopes on the average weekday.

“We are trying to position ourselves as a destination resort that people would come to from longer distances and stay for midweek visits,” said Rob Clark, Mammoth Lakes’ city manager. “Having a hotel with a quality name advances that.”

The Westin will be built in the Village at Mammoth, an upscale collection of lodging, shops and restaurants about a block north of the California 203-Lake Mary Road intersection. Intrawest will manage the hotel as a Westin franchise, but the units will be owned by individual investors as condominiums. Prices for the condos, which can be rented out when their owners aren’t using them, are expected to range from the low $300,000s to more than $1 million.

Mammoth-area hotels have been averaging 50% to 60% occupancy annually in recent years, soaring in the winter but evaporating in the summer months, said Alan Reay, president of lodging industry consultant Atlas Hospitality in Costa Mesa. Most of the town’s rooms are in “smaller mom-and-pop type hotels and cabins,” he said.

The area’s largest hotel and condo complex presently is the Mammoth Mountain Inn, with 217 rooms.

Mammoth is one of California’s oldest ski towns, tracing its beginnings to the early 1940s when Los Angeles Department of Water and Power snow surveyor Dave McCoy set up a rope tow for his friends. He charged 50 cents a person to defray costs and grossed $15 on the first day of operation.

McCoy, a renowned ski racer and coach, returned to the area in 1955 when the U.S. Forest Service failed to receive any bids from developers for a proposed Mammoth lodge and ski area. McCoy took the gamble and quickly became a legend as legions of skiers from as far away as Mojave lined up on Thanksgiving weekend to ride the mountain’s first chairlift for $4 a day.

By the mid 1980s, Mammoth hosted 1.4 million skiers a year, but years of anemic snowfall and increased competition from Western ski areas such as Vail, Colo., and Park City, Utah, pushed visits down to 450,000 by the early 1990s.

Mammoth has long been viewed as the Sears of the ski world, a reliable, unpretentious and not-too-exciting standby, its architectural sensibilities stuck in the 1970s -- A-frames and wood-sided condos spiced up by the odd Swiss chalet knockoff.

In 1991, city officials adopted a plan to encourage resort development and wooed Intrawest to jazz up Mammoth’s image with a European-style, pedestrian-oriented village. In 1996, Intrawest bought more than 300 acres in Mammoth Lakes and a majority interest in Mammoth Mountain Ski Area.

In 2003, Intrawest opened the town center Village at Mammoth with its shops, restaurants and a gondola going up the mountain. The company has built more than 500 condos and townhouses and plans to put up at least 1,000 more, said Douglas Ogilvy, regional vice president.

“Our goal is the renaissance of Mammoth as the premier mountain resort destination in America,” said Ogilvy, a skier and snowboarder whose favorite runs on the mountain are Paranoid Flats and Hangman’s Hollow.

Having airline service also would help. Mammoth Lakes has a general aviation airport but no regular passenger carrier. City officials are working with the Federal Aviation Administration in the hope of getting commercial flights approved, Clark said.

For Westin, Mammoth would be the chain’s first ski property in the U.S. and its first condo hotel. It would be the company’s third franchise with Intrawest, which also has ski projects near Toronto and Montreal. Westin is the four-star brand owned by New York-based Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide.

Mammoth’s improvements have alarmed some residents, neighbors and planners who fear the town’s charms will be diminished by traffic jams, housing shortages, a higher cost of living and even possible water shortages.

The city has limited land for development and with Intrawest’s condo prices heading north of $300,000, middle-income people such as teachers and other professionals fear they soon will be priced out of the area, if they haven’t been already.

City officials and other boosters acknowledge mixed feelings about the changes in Mammoth, but insist that improvements must be made if it is to catch up with other world-class ski resorts in the West.

Shares of Vancouver, Canada-based Intrawest closed down 21 cents Wednesday at $21.77 on the New York Stock Exchange.