Playing in the Cat Box

Heading up to Mammoth this weekend for the NORBA Nationals? If so, you might want to think about toting a really big bike along with those cowbells. The mountain has quietly been improving its bike park this summer, adding a handful of new downhill and freeride trails, along with some stunts, jumps and even a small terrain park.

Many of the new trails are easily accessible from the Gondola's mid-mountain stop, which means you can poach a trail and be back to the pits in less than 20 minutes, never missing a beat of the action. Or, screw the races and just spend the day on the mountain. There are now more than 80 miles of singletrack and downhill trails, enough to spend the entire weekend riding, without hitting the same trail once.

So, you must be thinking, Mammoth is the new Whistler. Not quite. Mark Hendrickson, the mountain's bike park supervisor sums up the Mammoth's philosophy by relaying a recent conversation he had with a rider who approached Hendrickson after riding all day. The rider asks where all the North Shore stunts are. Hendrickson's reply? "They're in the North Shore."

"There's no need to be another Whistler, or mimic the North Shore," Hendrickson explains. "We have our own terrain that is entirely different. Our challenge is to build trails that are right for our terrain. And for the most part, our mountain is like a giant cat box."

Steep and loose and rocky with few trees-that's Mammoth's terrain. The summit rises to nearly 11,000 feet, a massive ridge that falls steeply to either side. A harsh moonscape of loose dusty soil, softball-size rocks and shear cliffs. The air is thin and cool and dry. Up here most trails are straight and fast over loose soil, with a few hairpins thrown in for good measure. Trails like Kamikaze that rip straight down the mountain's shoulder, or Skid Marks, which zigzags from the summit in straight lines and steep corners twisting around and endless fall line.

This is the terrain that made Mammoth famous. It's the terrain where downhill mountain biking blossomed. On the Kamikaze. In speedsuits. At 60 miles per hour. These are Mammoth's roots. And for years, it guided how trailbuilders went about constructing trails. If you look at all the old trails from the gondola, you can see how they were built. They cut across the mountain at 4-degree angles until they ran into something. Then they turned around and descended in a new direction.

Things are changing though. The mountain is keeping to its gravity-fed downhill roots, but the new trails flow through and around the terrain. Most of the new trails, like Flow and Bullet and DC-10 are lower on the mountain, where it spreads out like an apron across the forest. In spots, they are tight and technical and flow through the trees, up and over ladder bridges and fallen logs. Also new are X Zones-a few scattered sections that test riders with a series of technical lines or freeride stunts.

Still, even with the new trails and the X Zones and the log bridges, Mammoth has a ways to go before it enters the same league as Whistler. It lacks the number of trails, the diversity, the stunts, the jumps, the infrastructure and maybe most importantly, the community of riders. On our visit in late August, only about 100 riders were on the mountain and not many more in town. On a good weekend, Hendrickson claims, Mammoth attracts several hundred riders, but that's still just a fraction of what Whistler sees.

"Right now we're really just getting started," Hendrickson says. His comments reveal the prevailing optimism of those working on Mammoth's Bike Park-things are only going to get better. Hendrickson talks in phases, as in "the next phase is going to be over there" and "for the fourth phase we'll build there." He already has mapped the whole mountain in his head, it seems.

And with the forest service recently giving the mountain a green light to keep building, and with the management giving a cautious thumbs up, there's no reason not to be optimistic about Mammoth's future.

For a full trail map or to see a schedule of events at this year's NORBA Nationals, which run through the weekend, check out www.mammothmountain.com