The ski runs carved into the mountainside above you are June Mountain — the small, stubborn, beloved little sibling of the giant resorts, and the reason this town has a winter at all.
The story is a good one. In nineteen sixty, Bud and Lois Hayward took on the mountain, and it took their crews nine months of hard labor to build the first chairlift and the chalet — a building that is still standing and still in use. June Mountain opened on Presidents' weekend, nineteen sixty-one, with a foot of fresh powder on the ground, which as omens go is about as good as a ski area gets.
It has stayed defiantly family-scale ever since — kids ski free, lift lines are short, and on a powder morning the locals from Mammoth quietly drive over here where the snow is just as deep and the crowds never came. That's a June Lake theme you'll keep meeting today: everything here is the smaller, quieter version of something famous, and better for it.
In winter, this is also roughly where the plows stop — the gate for the seasonal closure is just beyond the ski area. In summer, keep rolling; the road ahead is about to do something backwards, and I mean that literally.
Photo: mjhbower · CC BY-SA 2.0