Town of Mammoth Lakes
With fewer than 8,000 full-time residents, the town welcomes tourists during both the summer and winter seasons, reaching over 35,000 occupants on peak holiday weekends. Mammoth Lakes is home to one of the largest and most-visited ski resorts in North America: Mammoth Mountain Ski Area. Surrounded by 2 million acres of National Forest, and with only two paved roads connecting Mammoth Lakes to the rest of California, the town is uniquely vulnerable to climate change. Recent years have brought climate “whiplash” effects, with rapid swings from very wet to very dry conditions.
Pathways Climate Institute, as a subconsultant to Dudek, is supporting the development of the Town of Mammoth Lakes CAAP. Pathways will characterize existing and future conditions for a suite of climate-related hazards, including extreme temperatures, snowfall, rainfall runoff and snowmelt-related flooding, wildfire, and drought, leveraging data informing the Fifth California Climate Change Assessment.
Pathways will communicate changing hazards in a concise and easy to understand manner with supporting maps and graphics and will identify transportation infrastructure vulnerabilities, given the critical role of both local and regional transportation assets in this remote community.
Pathways will also lead a cascading impacts workshop to support assessment of the impacts of hazards on the Town and essential City functions and assets, and how those impacts could increase overall impacts on the community. Both the transportation infrastructure assessment and the cascading impacts workshop will support collaborative identification of a prioritized list of actionable projects for the Town and its partners to implement.