Little known Mammoth Mountain fact: Their 1-800-MAMMOTH phone number was confiscated from a scammer
Mammoth Mountain may get 5 feet of snow this week, thus making for the first good ski conditions in 2 years.
Mammoth is the biggest ski resort in the California/Nevada area, located in the middle of nowhere in east-central California. The one downside is that it's far from everything (kind of like Las Vegas, though at about 300 miles away, Mammoth is the closest major ski resort to Vegas).
During big snow years, they stay open until August.
Anyway, the phone number for the resort is 800-MAMMOTH. Most people don't know this, but 800-MAMMOTH was a separate, privately-owned condo reservations company in the 1990s. The enterprising owner grabbed that phone number because Mammoth Mountain was too stupid to reserve it for themselves, and they had no claim to it because the town is named Mammoth Lakes (so "Mammoth" can't be trademarked in that way).
The guy's business was blowing up huge because of that easy-to-remember phone number, and this was back before anyone was booking online.
Then it all came crashing down.
Turned out the owner had a problem holding onto money, so he started funding his lifestyle from money earmarked for the condo owners. 800-MAMMOTH would lease out condos for individuals, keep some percentage, and then was supposed to send the bulk of it to the owners. Except here he was just keeping 100%, and making more and more excuses as to why the owners weren't getting checks. Finally it became clear that the guy had stolen the money, so he was arrested.
He ended up negotiating a restitution settlement of both cash and surrendering the coveted 800-MAMMOTH number to Mammoth Mountain, who would then pay the condo owners the rest of what they were owed. He was able to avoid prison by doing this. Were it not for the phone number he had as a bargaining chip, he would have spent time in the slammer.
