Los Angeles

We took the skis out of the rental car and laid them along with the ski bags on the sidewalk a block from the sand at Venice Beach, which is just 10 minutes or so from Los Angeles International Airport. The idea was to repack before our flight, while at the same time stealing an hour in the soft salt air.

ANDREW LEWICKY/California Stock Photo (ENLARGE)
With limited artificial snow, Mount Baldy Ski Lifts is at the mercy of the weather.
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A woman in a baby-blue jogging suit stopped to ask where we might be headed skiing on this fine February day.

"As a matter of fact," I stammered, "we've just been skiing, and now we're headed home. To Colorado."

"You've come from Colorado to ski here?" she said, incredulity and a tinge of pity coloring her voice. "Where in the world?"

My friend Jimmy and I turned to the east, and, it being one of those clear, after-the-storm days, were pleased to the snow-white dome of Mount San Antonio, "Old Baldy," floating up beyond the power lines and palm fronds.

"There," I pointed, giddy at the contrast. "Mount Baldy."

Millions of Southern Californians survive all right without a clue that the basin they inhabit is surrounded by very tall and skiable mountains. Mount Baldy, at 10,064 feet, is the third-tallest in the ring and the closest to downtown L.A. But you could spend years in college in Claremont, right at Baldy's base, as I did, and never actually see the peak for the smog.

You might get a rise from a few Angelenos if you mentioned Mount Wilson, specifically the Mount Wilson Observatory. This is the home of the famous 100-inch telescope used by Edwin Hubble to prove that the universe is expanding and to advance the theory of the Big Bang.

Not so many Angelenos would know, probably, that in the 1920s a physicist named Albert Michelson accurately measured the speed of light for the first time by bouncing a beam of light from Mount Wilson off a mirror on Mount Baldy and measuring the time it took to return.

The slightly ungrammatical but scientifically provable motto for Mount Baldy Ski Lifts is "Real Skiing Real Close." The base parking lot is a 45-minute drive from Los Angeles, 40 minutes from most of Orange County. Negotiate the twisting, two-lane road above Mount Baldy Village, and you've entered another world, an alpine haven utterly divorced from the freeways below.

From the top of Lift 3 at 8,600 feet, you can see 100 miles into the Mojave Desert and, the other way, 75 miles over the top of the smog (and over Mount Wilson) to Catalina Island shimmering off the coast.

Angelenos were pooling their gas ration coupons and skiing here as early as 1942. Black-and-white photos on the wall of the Notch mid-mountain restaurant show French champion Emile Allais wearing a silk ascot: "Ski School Director, 1952-54." The caption under one of actress Jayne Mansfied notes that "Mansfield, while still a starlet, tries her luck on skis at Mount Baldy. What a view!"

I first skied Baldy in 1957 with my parents and younger sister. I don't remember a lot from that day beyond an achingly blue sky and white snow, and that I rode a rope tow over and over again.

My recent three-day trip had a business component. Jimmy and I were scheduled to put on an adventure and environmental film program for Upland High School in the San Gabriel Valley, 20 minutes from Baldy's parking lot. The shows were in the evening — we had our days free — so we brought skis along.

What luck! The mountain had received one of its legendary dumps. While inches of rain soaked the lower elevations, precipitating the odd mansion-into-the-canyon house slide, above 5,000 feet it was all snow — seven feet in two days. Snow buried the lift shacks and coated the area's stately sugar pines until they looked like solid confectionery.

Baldy's on-hill crew needed a full day to dig out, but when lifts opened the next morning, Jimmy and I were first in line for Chair 1.

This was the same double chair (installed in 1952 and rebuilt in 1978) that I had ridden with my parents. It features Erector Set towers, a top speed well below that of the modern quad chair, and air-conditioned, wood-slat seats.

The vintage equipment was not the point. The phenomenal snow was. The skiing was frighteningly easy, like carving a bar of soap with two very sharp blades on your feet.

The deluge had smoothed out every bump and dip in the terrain. You could go anywhere, and we did: in and out of the Popsicle trees, spaced perfectly as if skiing had been the idea all along; out the ridge to the soft porcelain sides of South Bowl; and down all the way to the base on Bentley's Dream, a natural half-pipe so steep it should have avalanched. But the marshmallow snow let us down easy, and we were thrilled with the swooping lines we had drawn, feeling very much as if we were dreaming.

We shared all of this with maybe 150 to 200 other skiers and snowboarders. It was simply one of the finest days of skiing either Jimmy or I had experienced, and there was almost nobody there.

I called Pete Olson, Mount Baldy's genial president and general manager, to ask about the discrepancy. It's true, he said. Despite great snow in 2004-05 (331 inches fell on top of the mountain, 237 inches at the Notch) and a season that ran from October to May, Baldy still sold only 40,000 lift tickets. And that was good compared to the 10,000 the year before, and the 6,000 the year before that.

Other Southern California ski areas, particularly the ones around Big Bear Lake (Snow Summit, Snow Valley, Bear Mountain, Green Valley) grew bigger, faster than did Mount Baldy, though they have arguably fewer natural gifts. What they have is snowmaking, which allows them to guarantee top-to-bottom skiing by Thanksgiving, while Baldy, with limited artificial snow, must depend on the vagaries of Southern California winters.

"Couple, three bad winters," says Baldy vice president and principal innkeeper Ron Ellingson, "and you lose your market share. Everybody forgets you."

And sometimes, when you have a great snow year, people can't get to you. This last season, Baldy lost nearly a month to storm days when wind or too much snow kept the lifts from running. They lost a week in January when one of Southern California's biblical rainstorms washed out the access road.

SoCal skiing, I was beginning to get the picture, is like the girl with the curl in middle of her forehead: When she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was ... well.

Snow Summit, while it's another 75 miles farther east, did more than 500,000 skier days last year. In part, it's the snowmaking. And partly, it's the Disneyesque personas the "guaranteed-snow" areas have built for themselves. They are unabashedly youth-culture, surf/skate/board-riding hip, with high-speed lifts, night skiing, electronic ticketing and all the bling.

Summit's neighbor and financial partner Bear Mountain, for example, boasts of man-made "features" (jumps, rails, pipes) on every trail. Its Web homepage begins with the greeting, "Hey, Brah."

Baldy, by contrast, is pleasurably stuck in time. The only thing it sells is downhill skiing on natural terrain that is taller (2,100 vertical feet), broader (400 to 800 acres) and steeper than anything in Big Bear. Olson, an L.A. native who was given shares in Mount Baldy Ski Lifts in lieu of years of back pay, and Ellingson, who went to high school in Upland and "always dreamed of owning a ski area," freely admit that their hill hasn't evolved much past the 1950s. But they have plans.

They've just received permission from the U.S. Forest Service to take water from San Antonio Falls near the base area, which will allow them to extend their snowmaking coverage. And they are moving ahead with plans to expand onto the north side of the ridge, down into Stockton Flats, which would double the acreage and give them a second base. Perhaps most important, this north-facing basin catches and holds snow better than just about any place on the massif — insurance against the sudden false springs and beach- weather meltdowns that inevitably plague SoCal skiing.

Jimmy and I were in no hurry for Baldy to modernize. Down in the village after skiing, in front of the fireplace in Ellingson's unpretentious Mount Baldy Lodge, Jimmy shook his head and described again the brittle, black-and-white photo he'd spotted in the Notch.

In a scene similar to the one we inhabited, skiers in leather boots and wool gabardine pants relaxed before a fire, whiskey glasses in hand. And one of the revelers, Jimmy was certain, was his former father-in-law, an early Pasadena skier and mentor whom Jimmy had come to love. My friend was stunned and pleased.

I remembered more from my last visit in 1957: my sister's snowman and frozen hands, and the effortless grace of a family friend, a transplanted Austrian in a white sports-car cap, smoothing through untracked snow in Sugar Pine Gully. His parallel esses seemed a miracle to a snowplowing 8-year-old.

And yet here we were almost 50 years later, redrawing those turns in snow so perfect we could only babble in disbelief.

Peter Shelton taught skiing for years in California and Colorado before switching to writing about it. He has been named national ski writer of the year four times. His latest book is "Climb to Conquer: The Untold Story of World War II's 10th Mountain Division Ski Troops" (Scribner).