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(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the February 2003 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine. Subscribe here.)

True story: A couple of older guys are standing on their skis up on the knoll at the top of Chair 1/Broadway Express, and it's one of those off-the-scale, bluebird kind of Mammoth days. The sight lines in every direction are superb. The sun is warm and, at midweek, there's hardly anyone around.

So the one guy turns to the other guy and starts apologizing … about the weather, of all things.

"No, really," he said. "The wind up here can get so bad it'll blow you off the mountain. No kidding. I was up here once …"

As he spoke, he became more and more crestfallen and depressed. He'd hyped the famous Mammoth Mountain wind - infamous in some circles - and it simply had failed to materialize that day. Unfulfilled promise. Ruined day.

Another true story: Three guys are riding in the upper Panorama Gondola one November after an early snowfall. Two of them are ski patrolmen. The other one is a local, on free-heel skis, headed for Climax, skiing laps off the top in the late afternoon. The two ski patrolmen were headed to Dave's Run. Below the gondola car, the wind was kicking up, and all three of them were scoping the face of the mountain, looking this way and that, the way people do when they're nearing the summit.

"When I lived in Tahoe," said the free-heeler, "the word on Mammoth was that it was too windy. People'd say, 'Mammoth? I like it OK, but the wind. …'"

The two ski patrol guys smiled in unison, nodded in unison and said, together, "What they don't know won't hurt them."

Then all three of them grinned as only insiders do - a knowing, "wink-wink" kind of grin. "Our wind," said one of the three, as the gondola pulled into the station, "is what makes this mountain so awesome." And then they grinned again, got off the gondola, and off they went, onto the buffed slopes that, because of the wind, will hold excellent snow for the rest of the season.

Mammoth's wind can, in fact, blow anybody right off the face of the mountain, and there's a reason for that.

Imagine yourself in a city's downtown, surrounded by tall buildings on a windy day. Step out into the intersection and you are in a wind tunnel created by the buildings. You can almost get lifted right off your feet. It's why San Franciscans do a little bit better up here: They're used to it.

Of course, Mammoth has no tall buildings. But according to local weatherman Howard Sheckter, Mammoth has something even bigger.

"Our particular area is in a low spot in the Sierra," Sheckter said, "and it's less protective. The wind tends to funnel up through the San Joaquin drainage system, and Mammoth is at the end of the tunnel, so the winds really whip through."

Sheckter said the velocity of the wind here isn't really noticeably greater than at, say, Lake Tahoe. But the fact that Mammoth Mountain has few trees, compared to other mountains, makes a big difference.

"If you compare the wind on top of Mammoth Mountain to the winds on Squaw Peak (at Squaw Valley), I would say that they're comparable in terms of sheer wind speed," he said.

The relative paucity of trees combines with the fact that Mammoth Mountain just kind of sits out there in the middle of the range all by itself - a fact that you can plainly see from just about any nearby perch in the White Mountains, across the Owens Valley.

The skiers and snowboarders, of course, just love this.

The Mammoth wind packs the snow into the cracks and crevices, chutes and slopes. After that single November storm, another local - a snowboarder, this time - said, flatly, "We're good 'til spring." The wind buffs and polishes the mountain, and when that happens, the snow can't blow away. On top of that, in cold weather, buffed snow is a sort of natural groomer. And finally, blowing snow from the backside of the mountain finds its way to the front side, creating powder pillows all over the place.

Here's another true story: Whenever you hear someone complaining about the wind on Mammoth Mountain, you can almost bet the ranch that it's not a local skier or snowboarder.

Wind? Bring it on.