Mammoth has characters

(Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the April 2006 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine.)

The scene is Mammoth Mountain. The time is the middle of the night. The season is dead of winter, the altitude is 9,000 feet and outside, snow is coming down in great, heavy loads, whipped by swirling, 90-mile-an-hour winds.

The assignment is straightforward: Keep the roads to the ski area open, keep the snow groomed and help get the ski lifts running as fast as possible in the morning.

This is a Clifford Mann kind of night, and the odds are not in the storm's favor.

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Mann, 54, the director of snow operations, is as much a fixture on Mammoth Mountain as the rocks of Huevos Grande. He is a big man, over six feet tall, with a big voice, and he's prone to outyelling a Sierra tempest.

He is so strong a racer that in the '70s and '80s his bindings kept ripping out of his skis, a problem that was solved only when somebody figured out how to bolt the bindings onto the skis from the bottom.

He drives big equipment with the aplomb of someone handling a sports car and can keep a half-dozen conversations going at once on radio, telephone, cell phone and face-to-face.

He is, in other words, an outsized, exaggerated character, and without him, it's hard for many people to imagine how Mammoth Mountain Ski Area would work at all.

"He's got a consuming, bullish energy that goes on and on and on," said his longtime friend and colleague John Armstrong, "and he expects everyone else can do the same thing. Sometimes his energy field is so strong that he's hard to be around."

And yet it is that same energy that made Mann a National Junior Downhill champion in his youth. His skill at moving snow rescued four Women's World Cup races from weather conditions on Mammoth Mountain, and last year Mann and his crew saved one run of the downhill and the entire slalom race during the National Alpine Championships.

It would be impossible to count how many days of recreational skiing by ordinary people he and his crew have rescued.

The number of hours it takes doesn't seem to figure in his equations.

"The long days were part of life in Mammoth," Mann said recently. "In some respects it still is. New equipment and technology have made our lives easier, but Mother Nature always shows you where you stand."

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Mother Nature threw one of her hardest punches at Mammoth over a Presidents' Day Holiday weekend in 1986, and were it not for Mann, Mammoth would probably have a different chief executive officer today.

"It was an unbelievable storm," said Mammoth Mountain Ski Area CEO Rusty Gregory, who at the time was working for Mann. "It was a huge, huge thing -- the biggest Presidents Holiday snowstorm that we've ever had since I've been here. It was hard to exaggerate it.

"Everyone who could drive snow removal equipment was working around the clock. Most of us had worked about 36 hours straight. I'm not really sure what happened, but I'd been moving snow around Chair 2 and somehow I went off across the road and about 50 yards into the woods.

"I was way off to the north of the road and I'd cut through the trees and out into the pumice flats. There was snow all around me and the machine just stopped but was continuing to run.

"The next thing I knew I was smelling diesel and Clifford was shaking me awake and screaming at me in my face, 'Where the hell are you going? June Mountain?'

'He was dragging me out of the vehicle. It's likely that I'd have been overcome by fumes.'

That storm yielded the longest and hardest days ever, Mann said.

The first wave got everyone's attention right away. Snow fell with so little remorse that all he and his crew could do was pack the snow covering the roads into a foot-and-a-half-deep layer that was stable enough to support traffic. This cycle carried on for more than a week, and when the storm retreated, the town was covered in 14 feet of deep, dry snow.

After the first wave of the storm hit, Mann and his crew headed home, but as they slept, a second, warmer storm moved in.

That one dumped rain on the town, and roads turned into swimming pools of thick, frozen slush, effectively rendering them impassable to any vehicles but plows and large snow blowers.

At 10 p.m., Mann departed on his plow, not to return, or sleep, for 35 straight hours. The following day, temperatures dropped and it again began to snow; then by night, more rain. Mann and his crew worked all day keeping the town roads clear, and all night trying to open the roads to Main Lodge and Warming Hut II -- now Canyon Lodge. To compound the problem, the heavy, wet snow and long hours proved to be too cumbersome for some of the blowers, leaving Mann and the crew with a minimal amount of functional equipment.

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The source of Mann's ability to make snow disappear where it is not wanted, and appear where it is (he is also in charge of Mammoth's snowmaking team), are difficult to analyze.

He was raised in Big Bear, but in 1962, Mann's father, Wally, drawn by dreams of deep snow and ski racing success for his five children, relocated the family to Mammoth.

Mammoth Mountain Ski Area founder Dave McCoy gave Wally a job running the now-defunct T-Bar, which secured free lift tickets for his children.

"His father was also a very hard-driving, blue-collar kind of a guy," said Gregory, "and really pushed Clifford hard. I think a lot of it came from him, at least from the stories I hear about his dad."

That first winter, there wasn't a significant storm until February, and McCoy wasn't able to keep on the majority of his employees. He decided that Wally would be an asset to the mountain, so he kept him on to help with construction of Chair 4.

When the snow finally came, the 12-year-old Mann engaged himself full-throttle in ski racing, where he excelled. According to Dennis Agee, Mann's former coach and founder of the Mammoth Race Department, Mann's dedication to every task he undertook made him stand out.

"I remember when all the Mann kids showed up, I really didn't distinguish Clifford from the others," Agee says. "When I started skiing with them, I became aware of Clifford because he was so assertive and always trying to get my attention, but not in a bad way.

"The whole family was so tall and thin and Clifford was so disjointed I never thought he would get it all together to ski well. Frankly, as he grew older and he refined his technique and grew into his body, I could tell that he would actually develop into a great racer."

If he wasn't at school, he was at the mountain, training. When the lifts closed for the season, Mann and other members of the team would make early morning trips in the back of the mountain's maintenance trucks to West Bowl, near Chair 3/Facelift, and set courses for post-season training. When the snow was gone, along with fellow racer Randy McCoy, Mann would pick up trash from the runs and change oil in the company cars as a way to pay back Dave for all that he had done.

"If I wasn't at school in those days, I was at the mountain with my dad," Mann said. "People would ask, 'Why don't you ever go home?' But that was home for me. It's where I spent all my time."

The following summer, as the foundations were being set to build Mid-Chalet (now McCoy Station), Dave let Mann and Randy ride along on a bulldozer as he pushed dirt into the foundation. The boys took a fascination to the job, and within a few days bulldozing became their duty.

"I was always curious about big equipment," Mann said. "This was the best job we could have asked for. Lots of kids had Tonka Trucks to play with. We had the real deal."

Years later, after a particularly nifty bit of driving helped pull a jackknifed 18-wheeler off Rte. 203, John Armstrong shook his head and marveled:

"If he'd grown up in Chicago in the '30s, he'd have driven for Al Capone."

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Mann was offered his first paid job at the mountain when he was 15, hauling equipment around in a truck for the crews building Chair 6 and the Gondola. In 1969, McCoy took on the construction of Chairs 7, 8 and 9. Mann, then 18, drove cement trucks from early morning until 9 o'clock, sometimes seven days a week. Unbeknownst to Mann, his schedule wasn't going to change a whole lot for the next 25 years.

He gave college a shot, and the World Pro Skiing tour, too, but Mann came back to work with the race department. Forty feet of snow fell on Mammoth during the 1977-1978 winter, and since Mann was skilled with heavy equipment, he was asked to help out the snow removal department for much of the season.

In the late '70s, well before "global warming"" became a catch phrase, ski resorts around the country -- primarily on the East Coast and in Colorado -- were combating drought years with snowmaking systems.

Mann, whose son, Eric, is a pro ski racer, already had had his crew install irrigation piping at Chairs 1 and 2 to deal with erosion, so McCoy suggested to Mann that they put the pipes to use during the early ski season for snowmaking.

Mann was given a $5 million budget, and instructed to visit resorts in the U.S. and Europe that were already equipped with snowmaking systems. At the end of the year, Mann had seen the best systems in the world, and was prepared to customize a system that would handle Mammoth's needs.
In the years that followed, with the help of snowmaking engineering firm Snowmatic, Mammoth was making snow on Chairs 1 and 2. McCoy liked what he saw, and decided to invest more money into the system. Now, just more than 10 years later, the Mammoth snowmaking system is known as one of the country's best.

"The fact that we had so much open this Thanksgiving shows how good our system is," Mann said at the beginning of the current season. "The dry humidity here sure makes it favorable, but we have already done better than Tahoe and other West Coast resorts."

To a large degree, the kind of drive that lies at the core of Mann's persona is a reflection of McCoy, but if McCoy instilled it, then Mann has perfected it, Gregory said.

"When people talk about Mammoth and this sort of 'can-do' attitude," Gregory said, "they almost invariably use Clifford's name to evoke the human image of it all."

Gregory paused, grinned, then added:

"Some of those who work for him don't think of him as too human sometimes."
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Brandon Russell is a lifelong Mammoth resident. He has been a freelance writer since graduating from the University of Nevada in journalism. Additional reporting for this article was by George Shirk, editor of Mammoth Monthly.