Dave McCoy, a pioneer of the ski industry and founder of Mammoth Mountain who believed the key to a successful life was having fun and working hard, has died. He was 104.
“It was a shock,” said Rusty Gregory, who has known McCoy since the early 1970s when Gregory came to work at Mammoth Mountain as a lift operator before rising through the ranks to become its CEO in 1995. “Dave is so present, it’s like he will always be there. There are a lot of us that work there but he really is the mountain. He’s the guy that made it. No one else had the guts to do it.”
Gregory said McCoy died peacefully at 1 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 8 at his home in Bishop.
“It’s quite an emotional day,” he said, adding that it might be serendipity that he died the day after a snow moon.
News of McCoy’s passing first came out with a post on the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area website: “Thank you, Dave McCoy, for everything.”
WATCH: Tribute video on Mammoth Mountain webiste.
In an interview with the OC Register when he turned 100, McCoy called himself a “fun-loving man, not a businessman.”
And that quest for fun and adventure, he said, led to his long and successful life.
“Longevity happens because you do something fun,” McCoy said at the time, while sitting in his office at his rambling ranch home north of Bishop in the foothills of the Sierra.
His office walls were blanketed with family photos documenting decades of Mammoth Mountain, a vision he made a reality in 1948 when he got a special-use permit for a permanent ski location on the remote – still volcanic – mountain. That permit allowed McCoy to bring alpine skiing to Southern Californians.
Today, Mammoth Mountain is a sprawling resort that draws more than 1.3 million skiers and snowboarders annually.
The vision
As a young hydrographer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, McCoy spent his early years in the Sierra skiing the backcountry, measuring snowpack to predict the following year’s water supply.
In 1935, he and some buddies built his first rope tow out of an old truck frame and engine to haul skiers uphill in Gray Meadows near Independence – a mining town along Highway 395. They built it for themselves for weekend play. But word spread and others came to see what all the ruckus was about skiing.
In the U.S., at that point, the sport had not scratched the surface of the popularity it would generate after the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley. But McCoy, proficient in other sports, fell in love.
“I don’t know why I liked it so much,” he to the Register. “I just did. I just loved having slippery boards under my feet.”
At 21, McCoy began working with fellow hydrographers measuring snowpack on Mammoth Mountain. Despite it being lonely backcountry at the time, he saw an opportunity as he skied Mammoth’s steep canyons and wide bowls. He also saw abundant snow. Thus began his dream.
McCoy recalled many people saying his plan to create a ski mountain there couldn’t be done. They said the slopes were too isolated, too windy and too high. They said there was too much snow.
“I knew better,” he told the Register. “I knew the runs there were perfect, and I knew we’d never have to worry about snow. All we had to worry about were material things like lifts.”
By the early 1950s, thousands came to the Eastern Sierra to ski. McCoy installed diesel engines in rope tows to make them faster. By 1952, the U.S. Forest Service began looking at plans to make Mammoth Mountain a full-service ski area. They built paved roads to Mammoth’s north side and put out a prospectus seeking $250,000 to put together a European-style ski area with a chairlift and lodge.
When no investor surfaced, the service went back to McCoy. He was given a 25-year lease, and he agreed to build a chairlift on the north side of the mountain.
In 1953, he began running a free rope tow for friends. It was so much fun, he said, his friends offered to help. Others heard, and came offering various skills.
“We built that mountain with people who loved to do what they wanted to do there,” he said. “I didn’t know I could do it. I knew it had to be done.”
On Thanksgiving 1955, McCoy opened Mammoth Mountain’s first lift. Every lodge and motel along the 395 was packed. Roma McCoy, Dave’s wife, rode the inaugural chair.
McCoy continued expanding the mountain and started a ski team. By the 1960s, Mammoth had become a racing mecca. In one year, McCoy had 14 Olympic racers on his team.
“I was crazy enough to make them think they were better people,” McCoy told the Register.
Gary McCoy is the eldest of Dave and Roma’s six children.
“Whatever he was doing, I was always alongside him,” Gary McCoy said of his father four years ago. “When we started building up the lifts, I’d dig ditches and run heavy machinery. I don’t think any of us ever realized how big it would get.”
Fueled by enthusiasm
By 1972, six more chairlifts had opened. In 1978, Gregory got a job working there.
Gregory went to Mammoth Mountain to learn to ski and live the mountain lifestyle for a season. He now is the chief executive of Alterra Mountain Co., the Denver-based company that operates Mammoth Mountain now.
Gregory previously recalled for the Register the first time he met Dave and Roma McCoy. He was working at Chair 16 and held it for the couple to get on.
“Everybody knew Dave and Roma,” he said. “They were this incredibly athletic, good-looking couple.”
Gregory got to know McCoy more when he was promoted to the mountain’s chairlift maintenance and construction department.
“He was a real innovator in mountain operations,” Gregory said of McCoy. “Dave always shared his discoveries and new ideas with people at other resorts. That was part of his unbridled enthusiasm.”
In 1986, McCoy bought June Mountain. His plan was to link it with Mammoth Mountain and turn the area into a large European-style resort. The politics of keeping the wilderness undeveloped altered the path.
Over the years, McCoy said, he received offers to work on other resorts for big money, but he wasn’t interested.
“I was working to make things good at Mammoth Mountain,” he said. “I always looked at how tomorrow would be better. I never worried about money.”
In the 1980s, when snowboarding started to evolve, some thrill-seekers came up to Mammoth Mountain. McCoy remembers pulling boarders up the mountain on snowcats after hours and watching them try out tricks.
It was also in the 1980s that McCoy developed another of his passions for others to enjoy. When the snow melted, McCoy realized the opportunity the mountain offered for mountain biking and motorcycle racing.
Vancouver-based Intrawest bought a significant share of the mountain in 1996, but McCoy and his wife kept a controlling share.
“That was our mountain,” McCoy said. “It was our area. There were plenty of people who wanted to enjoy it. Money wasn’t in the way, it was (too little) time. We had such a little amount of time between seasons to make it better.”
But he kept at it – always looking for faster lifts and making better terrain.
And despite Mammoth’s generally abundant snowfall, McCoy made sure the mountain could make its own during the drought years.
“I knew good things were happening and if there were bad things, I just dug a little deeper,” he said.
Building the town
McCoy last put on his Salomon skis nearly two decades ago and he hadn’t been back to the mountain since selling it in 2006. But what he did do was help grow the town around the mountain through his Mammoth Lakes Foundation, which he started in 1989.
In addition to the ski area, McCoy launched the town’s first water district, fire department, high school and college. When McCoy started the foundation, there were no college students in Mammoth Lakes. Now there are 500 attending the town’s campus of Cerro Coso Community College.
The foundation owns and operates the 100-seat Edison Theatre and the 59-bed South Gateway Student Apartments. It owns 40 acres of land around the campus, which are being held for future expansion and community benefit.
“Dave is the greatest educator and motivator I have ever known,” Evan Russell, who worked on the mountain for McCoy for decades and now runs the foundation, told the Register. “I feel we have been the luckiest people in the world getting to work for Dave.”
To those like Gregory, who now spends much of his time in Dever and at Alterra’s other ski resorts worldwide, Mammoth Mountain will always represent McCoy.
“Dave is skiing and California,” he said. “He’s the last of those pioneers that came after World War II and created the ski industry. Dave did it for fun. He skied with his wife, his kids, and his friends. It was never a business for him. He even sent Roma out to collect money for the rope tow. That why Mammoth is such a special place. It still feels like Dave when you go there. It’s got a fun, personal vibe you don’t get in other ski areas of its size. Mammoth is Dave McCoy.