The ski lifts had shut down for the winter and I nervously eased my rented car out onto the noisy freeway. I was headed for a wedding in Palm Springs and it had been two years since I had driven on the Southern California freestyle, high-speed freeway race to see who can get to somewhere in the least amount of time.
I missed three different interchanges before I got on the right traffic-choked racetrack to Palm Springs. Backtracking several times, I somehow finally got on the right freeway and as I nervously looked up to my left, I noticed Mount San Gorgonio was still covered in snow, and it was already the 15th of April. Six feet behind me and traveling at the same 82 mph clip was an 18-wheeler with a gross vehicle weight of 60,000 pounds.
Mount San Jacinto on my right still had snow cover and memories of my 1937 ski trip came into focus. We had to hike 2,000 vertical feet to ski on a patch of snow less than 200 feet long. On the way home our car crashed, rolled over and my left arm got broken.
Mount San Gorgonio on my left is snow covered for more months than any other Southern California mountain, but it is a wilderness area. The entire mountain is reserved for the rare, ambitious tree huggers on their snowshoes who occasionally leave tracks where no one else ever goes.
Route 66 runs right along the base of these mountains and it used to be the main highway out of Los Angeles if you were headed anywhere east of San Bernardino. After the wedding, on the way back to the Ontario airport I paused in front of the world famous Teepee Motel. It has sheltered tens of thousands of travelers since the 1930s.
High above the fake teepees, Mount Baldy is over 10,000 feet high and it too was still snow covered. My memories of it go way back to my toboggan riding days in 1936 and the time I produced a movie to get the ski resort boundary expanded in the 1960s.
The main objection to its expansion was the tree huggers who felt that it would endanger the rare Mount Baldy bighorn sheep. As I was about halfway through the production of the movie a friend of mine said, “Let me tell you the true story of the rare Mount Baldy Bighorn sheep.
“When the gold rush of 1849 in northern California petered out, many of the miners headed south to look for more gold. Mount Baldy soon became riddled with mine shafts and those miners, short of money and food, managed to kill and eat almost every living thing on Mount Baldy, including but not limited to squirrels, porcupines and rats. Do you think that even one bighorn sheep could have escaped being a Saturday afternoon barbecue in the miners’ camps?
“In 1919, after World War One, a soldier on his way home from France on a troop ship won a lot of money playing poker. Two years later he got married and settled down in Pasadena with his new wife. He had hiked, camped and explored Mount Baldy before the war and so he and his wife decided to restock the mountain with the already legendary bighorn sheep. They bought a pair of sheep from a zoo and released them on the mountain in 1922. Today descendents of those two rare Mount Baldy/Zoo bighorn sheep run wild on the mountain.”
My friend went on to say, “To prove that ski development doesn’t cause any problems with these rare bighorn sheep, I have some movies of a pair of them trying to make babies right under the main chairlift as I was riding up early one morning late in the spring of 1955.”
I told this story half a dozen times when I was making presentations with the film to counteract the resistance to expanding the ski resort boundaries and we were successful.
I drove on to catch my 6:30 plane back to Seattle. It climbed rapidly and as we turned left over Mount Baldy I wondered how many rare bighorn sheep bothered to notice the loud jet noise overhead.