It’s just you and endless inventive lines through the trees. Meaning not enough for liftlines, at least once you get up Lift 1. Soaring, glorious, gorgeous, but a relic, as though someone turned the lights on in 1952 and forgot about it. And yet, the closest ski area to Fancy Town is this throwback. Knit the entirety of the mountains above the city together with high-speed lifts, and you would have no issue filling them with skiers. Los Angeles, with its vast wealth and enormous population, could support almost any kind of ski area. The trailmap un-scrolled across the baselodge wall teases the Stockton Flats expansion, which will be new… in 1991 (it’s still not there).
The chairlifts are museum pieces from the pre-digital era of industrial design. At the top, cellphone service blinks out. Foot-loading the lattice-towered double chair is like boarding a slow-motion time machine into the sky. Not just to find a ski area, because there are plenty of those perched along the city walls, but to find this ski area, pinched in a deep ravine at the end of a narrow highway switchbacking up from the flats. It’s still incongruous, to drive up into the sky and find Mt. LA gives you whole different worlds every five freeway exits. Most American cities sprawl outward in concentric rings of Wal-Marts and Applebee’s and Autozones. The monster, pulsing city, its various terras stacked skyward like realms in Tolkein: ocean then beach then jungle then mountain then desert beyond. Which is about as believable as thousands of species of walking, talking animals living in non-murderous harmony until you realize, oh yeah, that’s basically Los Angeles. This city is divided into realms: desert, jungle, arctic, water, etc. If not, imagine this: anthropomorphic animals (it’s Disney), traumatized by eons of predator-eat-prey brutalism, build a city in which they can all coexist after the lions and wolves are given the equivalent of cartoon Beyond burgers or something. If you have children under the age of 15 or so, you have likely seen Zootopia.
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