Last month, for the start of my birthday month I finally planned a trip to Mammoth. The spectacular mountain that snows for almost most of the year and gets great natural snowfall. It has much cooler temperatures than mountains like Mt. High and Big Bear so it seems snow tends to stick around longer. The town of Mammoth Lakes is about 5.5 hour drive from Los Angeles county, so it’s definitely a trek and somewhat of a road trip. It’s going to take some planning and research. I’d love to help future goers for those that plan on traveling to that area for some snowboarding fun!

Before everything, I ALWAYS get and make deadlines for RSVP dates to get firm headcount with the note that they cannot back out unless it’s a family emergency because it’s very inefficient with willy nilly “going” then “not going” then “going” again. After the headcount deadline is in I made a secondary deadline for cabin payments. I also started setting up polls for meal plans (also set a deadline date for this to get a firm confirmation) to see if people want to save money and eat in (bring your own food) or not mind spending money and eating out all weekend. it totaled to eating in on Friday (to which we did tacos and hot pot) and eating out Saturday. Then proceeding after the meal plans, I needed to plan activities to do. For most of our group, they went snowboarding. For myself and following doctor’s instructions of not doing leg heavy activities due to my broken leg accident last year, I booked myself and my boyfriend a snowmobiling tour with Snowmobiling Adventures ($99 a person for 1 hour tour) as well as a gondola ride up ($27-$35 per person) and down Mammoth Mountain. Always look on their website for activities to do if snowboarding isn’t an option! Our groups also made plans for game night, night traversing, breakfast and going to the hot springs: Hot Springs Creek and Wild Willy’s Hot Springs.

For our stay, I usually look for places on Airbnb rather than look straight for hotels and resort pages because Airbnb tends to be on the more affordable side with homes and owned places being listed for rent. I started researching for places roughly 3.5 months before the date we were planning to go to. I wanted to look for an off season time so that the lodging wouldn’t be sky high (example: towards holidays like Christmas or New Years) and it just so happened that dates landed in February. Research takes a few hours (4-5 hours) to scour through all the listing available and finding one that suits your needs. Personally, I tend to enjoy the more luxurious amenities when it comes to homes. “Luxurious” in a sense meaning the house is spacious, in really good shape, relativity new, and well taken care of. I don’t really do older homes just because my OCP needs of needing things to be clean.

I found a townhouse that was very nice and fun with plenty of space available. It came out to only $50 a person for a night, $100 for the weekend. We also got hookups for lift tickets from another friend that came out to only $87 or so. The only unfortunate downside the townhouse I found was that it was in a community that only allowed two parked vehicles and had to have permits to park in their area (which was given when you go pick up keys). We had three because another friend that had to leave later because he couldn’t get work off and so had to go on his own. For situations like that, there is a solution– Mammoth Lakes has a RV parking that also acts as an overflow parking lot that residents can park at. It’s $15.00 a night. Park your car there and have a friend come and pick you up. Best and most efficient solution. But perhaps hotel and resort lodging would be more suitable if you have more than 2 cars. I definitely recommend you looking more into that when planning for a vacation getaway stay.

A week before the trip, I listed out the general timeline and schedule for the weekend. From carpool meets (must be on time!) to the list of places we plan on seeing and doing were all listed on our Facebook event’s page so that everyone knew where we ought to be if end up losing each other or getting lost.

For our trip to the destination, we decided to rent a big suv (Big Bertha LOL) since there was 6 of us and a plethora of boarding gear, luggage and coolers. We packed plenty of water, snacks, blankets and neck pillows to ensure that everything was comfortable for our long ride there. We originally planned on taking turns driving, but another friend volunteered for tribute of driving all the way there so everyone else can sleep and have energy to go boarding, bless his black soul. LOL. We left at 4:30AM in the morning, got lost for a little bit before finding the correct path again (construction is a bitch sometimes). We made two pit stops for restroom breaks one of them being a McDonald’s where we grabbed a quick early breakfast in a small town right before Mammoth.

Safe to say we successfully made it there around 10:30AM! Mammoth is a beautiful place with gorgeous trees and dazzling white snow capped mountains and definitely worth a trip to see for yourself! I’ll be elaborating on our hot springs adventure in another post next week! Don’t forget to follow for more traveling and food adventures!

Video: Fast & Furious Snowmobiling