“We want visitors to feel like they own this place, that they are stewards of it just as much as we are.” – John Urdi

Mammoth Lakes, California, is a mountain town that thrives on outdoor adventure. But as wildfire threats intensify, the community knows that recreation cannot continue without protection. A serious nearby blaze in 2020 served as a wake-up call for some residents. To safeguard the future of the town and the tourism it relies on, Mammoth Lakes Tourism is investing in wildfire resilience through a project affectionately known as the Mammoth Donut.

The Mammoth Donut, officially the Eastern Sierra Climate and Communities Resilience Project, is a wildfire buffer of more than 58,000 acres that surrounds the town. The goal is to slow down any future fires by thinning forests and reducing fuels, giving the community more time to respond.

It’s a community-wide effort, and tourism is helping to fund it. In 2024, Mammoth Lakes redirected $661,000 from its tourism reserve, which is normally used for tourism education and messaging, into fire protection. The move reflects just how high the stakes have become.

“Tourism dollars are great for promotion, until you need them to protect the entire asset,” John Urdi says. About 80 percent of the town’s operating budget comes from visitors. And after losing fire insurance for the building where it operates, Mammoth Lakes Tourism is facing the reality that a single disaster could erase decades of progress.

Resilience here means more than maintaining infrastructure. It means clarifying expectations. That’s why Mammoth Lakes is also reshaping how it speaks to travellers. “We don’t want people to feel like outsiders. We want them to feel like they own this place, that they are stewards of it too.”, John Urdi explains.

From discouraging illegal campfires to promoting responsible trail use, visitor education has become a core part of Mammoth Lakes’ tourism strategy. The goal is to turn awareness into action helping visitors understand how their behaviour directly affects the landscape they came to enjoy.

Visitors are being asked to align with community values: respect for nature, for workers, and for the ecosystem they temporarily join. Campaigns like The Real Unreal position Mammoth not just as a beautiful escape, but as a place that needs protecting. 

In Mammoth Lakes, wildfire resilience is not a side project. It is the future of the destination, and a shared responsibility between community and traveller.

In this episode of Travel Beyond, you will learn:

• How the town of Mammoth Lakes evolved from a mining hub into a four-season tourism destination.
  
• What the Mammoth Donut wildfire resilience project is, and why it’s so ambitious.
  
• Why tourism reserve funds are now being used for wildfire protection.
  
• What losing fire insurance means for destinations like Mammoth Lakes.
  
• How visitor education supports long-term environmental stewardship.
  
• What it really means for a destination to be “resilient”.

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Show notes

→ Visit Mammoth: Wildfire Prevention Education
Learn how Mammoth Lakes is preparing for wildfire and what visitors can do to help.

→ Whitebark Institute: Eastern Sierra Climate and Communities Resilience Project
Explore the community-led project building a 65,000-acre wildfire buffer around the town.

→ Eastern Sierra Visitor Messaging: The Real Unreal
Campaign designed to foster visitor stewardship and community alignment.

Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been lightly reviewed for accuracy.

John Urdi: [00:00:00] I think that we have actually been very, very clear with our messaging that we are asking people to respect those things and, and be part of our community. I think there are a lot of people that come in thinking that they’re an outsider that will just come in and do whatever they do and leave. We actually want them to feel like they own this area and that they are stewards of it just as much as we are.

David Archer: Hello and welcome to Travel Beyond. I’m David Archer from Destination Think recording from Haida Gwaii, the territory of the Haida Nation off the north coast of British Columbia in Canada. On this show, we look at travel’s role in making a better world, and we highlight leading destinations and change makers.

Our guests are taking local action that the world could learn from. They’re helping to regenerate ecosystems, communities, and economies, and they’re often [00:01:00] making positive change happen from the bottom up. Many of the voices that we’ve highlighted are part of the destination Think collective. A peer group of more than 20 ambitious forward thinking destinations, working toward a better future for travel and the planet.

Today we’re going to learn all about something called the Mammoth Donut. And yes, it’s shaped like a donut. It is large, but no, you can’t eat it. It’s really an environmental stewardship project in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range. We’re heading to the town of Mammoth Lakes, which has been a ski destination for more than 70 years.

It’s known for the Mammoth mountain ski area, as well as hiking and many other outdoor activities. The town largely relies on outdoor recreation and tourism. And as I’m sure you’re aware, California and many other places have been facing elevated forest fire risks fueled in part by climate change, and we’ve seen that play out this year already with the tragic LA fires.

Mammoth Lakes has had its own set of wildfire challenges too. In 2020, a massive blaze called the creek Fire threatened the town, and today’s [00:02:00] guest says that this was a wake up call for residents. Thankfully, the town itself was spared, but it was a close call. And locals are well aware of the threats posed by fire in a new way.

This is where the Mammoth donut comes in, also known as the Eastern Sierra Climate and Communities Resilience Project. An area of about 56,000 acres surrounding Mammoth Lakes has been marked for fuels reduction treatments. That is the removal of plant material that could fuel a large fire. This is meant to reduce the threat to the town and the surrounding region.

Mammoth Lakes Tourism is supporting this effort through funding, and it’s also educating visitors about how to take care of this spectacular place when they visit, especially if they’re first time campers or hikers. John Erdi is the president and CEO of Mammoth Lakes Tourism, and we talked about how the Mammoth Donut is helping to protect the town about what fire resilience really means as a community.

Some ways visitors can reduce wildfire risks, and why you should see yourself as a steward of Mammoth Lakes too when you [00:03:00] visit. Here’s our conversation.

John Urdi: John Erie. I’m the president and CEO of Mammoth Lakes Tourism here in the Eastern Sierra of California. 

David Archer: Can you tell me a little bit about your experience in the tourism industry? 

John Urdi: Yeah, I’ve been in the tourist industry basically my entire life. I started as a ski patroller at a ski area, uh, back east in New Hampshire when I was 15.

Uh, worked directly at ski resorts or for ski resort conglomerates for, uh, the better part of my career. But I’ve been in Mammoth Lakes as the CEO here at Mammoth Lakes Tourism for the past 15 years. And so we’ve been through a lot of different changes and obviously different challenges, different opportunities, so, uh, seen a lot of things over the years.

David Archer: What’s one thing you always take friends to do when they, when they visit you? 

John Urdi: You know, it depends. Summer or winter, I think summertime you have to go to Devil’s Post pile National Monument, which is just off the backside of the ski area. Uh, it’s a kilometer basalt. Rock formation, that’s absolutely phenomenal and it’s probably our [00:04:00] number one draw in the summertime.

Wintertime, it’s pretty obvious I take ’em skiing on Mammoth Mountain. So it’s uh, the third most visited ski resort in the country. And we’re open typically from, uh, early November until 4th of July. This year will be a little bit shorter, probably mid-June just because we haven’t had the snow that we normally do.

But, uh, the skiing is still phenomenal. I skied the other day with my wife and it was absolutely amazing. 

David Archer: Yeah. And can you describe the environment around Mammoth Lakes? You mentioned the Sierra Nevada. 

John Urdi: Yeah, 

David Archer: Tell us about that. 

John Urdi: It’s gorgeous, mountainous. Um, we’re surrounded, the town of Mammoth Lakes itself is surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of public land.

And so, you know, we’re basically just a, a, a theme park of nature. You know, you start to hike out of the Lakes basin here in Mammoth Lakes, and if you’re going up to say Duck Pass, you will hike past 15 lakes before you even get to Duck Lake. So it’s just, it’s continuous. Embarrassment of riches if you were as to all the different [00:05:00] opportunities that you have here and the fact that they are all right outside the door.

You know, in the summertime, my, uh, my car is, uh, lovingly referred to as the adventure wagon because it’s got hiking shoes, paddleboards, uh, golf clubs, mountain bikes, whatever you, whatever you could possibly need on any given, uh, afternoon, depending on what you’re driving by and what you want to go do. 

David Archer: So whatever, it’s, you’ve got the gear to make it happen.

Exactly. Excellent. You mentioned public lands. Uh, for people who aren’t maybe in California or the US can you tell me what that means? 

John Urdi: Yeah, so literally owned by the public. So it’s government, uh, owned land, whether it’s through the Forest Service, uh, National Park Service with the Devil’s Post Pile National Monument, or here in California with the Bureau of Land Management.

We’ve got a number of, uh, organizations that basically manage the unincorporated land around us. And so some of that is wilderness. Uh, in the state of California. Here, we’re fortunate to have the Pacific Crest Ter. Pacific Crest Trail and the John Muir Trail that run right through Mammoth Lakes. [00:06:00] And so thousands and thousands of through hikers will start, uh, their journeys in, in Mexico and walk all the way up through right here to Mammoth Lakes and, and keep going north of us.

So, um, that, that land is pretty wild. There’s really not a lot of opportunity out there for motorized. In fact, you know, we talk about some of the, the clearings that we’re doing out there. The town is taking on with the, the John Muir Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail, and it’s to the point where if we’ve gotta a tree down, you’ve gotta cut it by hand.

It’s not a, there’s no chainsaw, uh, there’s no motorized, there’s no mechanized, uh, opportunities out there. So it is truly wild land. 

David Archer: And so you, you have a lot of hikers. You mentioned coming up the long trails. Yeah. Tell me about the location of Mammoth Lake. If 

John Urdi: You look at a map, we’re almost dead east of San Francisco, a little, a little bit southeast of San Francisco.

Drive time in the summertime is about an, uh, five hours. We do have flights from San Francisco that are 32 minutes. It’s almost a scenic flight. They fly right over, uh, Yosemite National Park. Uh, we’re five [00:07:00] hours north of Los Angeles and we’re five hours west of San Francisco, or excuse me, Las Vegas. Okay.

So, you know, we’re kind of an epicenter here. We’ve got the highest point in North America in Mount Whitney. Just over 14,000 feet. And then we’ve got the lowest point in Death Valley at minus 281 feet below sea level. So those are within hours of each other. And it’s, um, everything in between is absolutely stunning and, and amazing.

David Archer: Wow. Yeah. So where do people tend to visit from? 

John Urdi: Even though we are kind of mid-state, um, we do most of our traffic coming in from Southern California. Even in the wintertime when we have a 3, 4, 5 foot snow storm happening, you’re not gonna really see snow until you’re about. 15 minutes from, uh, Mammoth Lakes.

So coming from Southern California, there’s really not a lot of, um, issues with driving up here. We’re very fortunate in the sense that we have 40 million people that live within six hours of us, but we are still a natural destination and an escape for people to come to. 

David Archer: Yeah. You know, snow only within 15 [00:08:00] minutes might be something of a surprise to people when they arrive.

It is. And, and it’s 

John Urdi: Even funny for me, my first year here in 2010, 11, we had a pretty big year. We had, uh, 14 feet of snow in 10 days right around Christmas. And I drove south in the town, Bishop, which is about 35 miles south of us. I could have played golf. Wow. So just a 4,000 plus foot elevation difference and, and a world apart.

David Archer: Yeah. That’s amazing. Tell me about Mammoth Lakes historically as a tourism destination. You know, when did modern travel kind of begin there? 

John Urdi: You know, that’s a good one because, you know, back in the day, obviously our indigenous people were here Youngs ago. Then you have, uh, a big mining history here. They had a, you know, Mammoth City that was a big mine.

And they had everything from, uh, bars and opera houses and brothels, uh, and there was a huge amount of people here trying to find their, their gold back in the, the, the gold rush time didn’t really find much. So they pretty [00:09:00] much, uh, after the town burned down for about the third time, I think they all decided to bail out.

And then, uh, on the recreation side, you know, fishing’s always been a big thing up here. But then in 1954, Dave McCoy opened Mammoth Mountain Ski Area. Dave was a hydrologist for the LA Department of Water and Power. He was up here measuring a snowpack and looked at Mammoth Mountain and said, wow, that would be a great place to ski.

And people thought he was crazy because of the, uh, amount of snow and the exposure that it has. And so here we are in 2025, still enjoying what Dave put out there with, you know, 3,500 acres and, you know, more than 400 inches of snow annually. So amazing. It’s, uh, it is pretty amazing. And, and so the history really since 1954 has been.

Focused on recreation. The wintertime is really skiing, snowmobiling, Nordic skiing, and snowshoeing. A lot of people get out in the wintertime to enjoy those activities. And then in the summertime, it’s really hiking, biking, fishing, golfing. You know, I think there are a lot of opportunities for folks to get [00:10:00] up here.

There are less barriers to entry in the summertime. We have a couple thousand campgrounds that are also available in the summer that are not available in the winter, obviously. And so the summertime really sees more people. You know, less spending from those folks, but more people come into town during that time.

David Archer: For sure. So you’ve got about 75 years worth of ski history behind you there. Uh, I imagine that attracts people to live in Mammoth Lakes too. Is that, would you say that’s fair? Absolutely. 

John Urdi: I think that, you know, if you were to really talk to the majority of the folks in town, they’re here because they love the outdoors.

They love to recreate, they love to get out and enjoy nature. There are very few people that are here because it’s a place to work. Obviously like a lot of resort towns, it’s a fairly expensive place to live. Lack of housing is challenging here for us as much as it is anywhere else. And so I think that really when you look at it, you need to want to be here.

This isn’t a place that you would just stumble upon and say, Hey, I’m gonna get a job here, and I. And just survive through a 400 inch winter and, uh Right. You know, not, [00:11:00] not enjoying it. 

David Archer: Yeah. Well you’re, you know, you’ve got access to big cities, but, uh, not in the bedroom community sort of sense. You’re right.

Exactly. You are a little bit 

John Urdi: remote. We like to say we’re an island complete with a volcano because Mammoth Mountain is a volcanic, uh, structure. So, yeah. 

David Archer: Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Can you describe maybe some of the values that you think the community stands for? And I know that’s quite a broad and maybe impossible to answer question, but what, what’s your impression of that?

John Urdi: Well, you know, it’s funny because we just went through a strategic session with my board and my team, and one of the things we came up with was a purpose statement that talked about the fact that we’re inviting people. To come here to align with our community values. And our community values are about stewardship.

They are about outdoor recreation. They are about, uh, respecting the community and the environment. So it’s not just going out and not trampling on wildflowers. It’s also making sure that you’re, you’re kind, considerate, and patient with your servers, and that you’re really [00:12:00] respecting the entire ecosystem that makes up the tourism here, because we’ve been here for, you know, decades and decades and we want to be here for decades and decades to.

David Archer: Moving forward, do you think that those values affect the travel experience today in Mammoth Lakes? 

John Urdi: I think they do. I think that we have actually been very, very clear with our, um, messaging that we are asking people to respect those things and, and be part of our community. I think there are a lot of people that come in thinking that they’re an outsider, that they will just come in and do whatever they do and leave.

We actually want them to feel like they own this, this area and that they are stewards of it just as much as we are. 

David Archer: Yeah, absolutely. So, you mentioned that you’re starting to put some of this into your messaging to visitors. Um, has that sort of priority just begun recently or, or how has that been going?

John Urdi: No, you know, we actually started prior to Covid and it was really about just respecting the, the environment more than anything else because we were [00:13:00] seeing a number of people coming up here that were maybe not as respectful as they should be, uh, whether it’s, um. With their, themselves, their pets, uh, camping in the woods where there shouldn’t be unlawful fires, et cetera.

And so we started that in motion. And then obviously Covid hit. We pulled all of our efforts. And then once we opened from Covid. We were one of the places that saw a boon. You know, people were trying to escape the city, and as you’ll recall, I said, we have 40, 40 million people within six hours of us.

I think most of them came here shortly after Covid. Yeah. And unfortunately, they would go to Walmart and buy a tent and think they were campers and go out in the woods and leave it and walk away from it. So, uh, we had a lot of education to do. And so once we came out of Covid. We first started off with messaging for visitors to come back.

Uh, we quickly retooled that this is what we expect when you come back to visit us, uh, to make sure that you’re respecting the community and the environment. 

David Archer: Yeah, a lot of first time campers in the 2020s, I think. 

John Urdi: [00:14:00] Yeah, no question. And, and really from that, we evolved, uh, three years ago we started a campaign called The Real Unreal.

The whole point is that we don’t want this place to seem real. When I go out hiking with my wife, we’ll stand on the top of a, uh, a mountain and look out at the snow-capped mountains behind us, and she’ll say. This isn’t real. This is a movie set. It’s a green screen, whatever it is, because it does look that fantastically, um, fake that it is unreal.

And the whole point of the real unreal is that we don’t want people to come up here. You’re escaping a place like Los Angeles. Don’t turn this place into Los Angeles. Uh, it completely defeats the purpose of escaping. 

David Archer: And speaking of education, what’s one thing you think visitors can learn from a trip to Mammoth Lakes?

John Urdi: You know that that nature is, um, amazing. It’s accessible and it’s fragile. I think that they really need to understand all of those things because again, being, being a small town and the fact that I could walk out of my office right here and, and walk onto a trailhead, it’s [00:15:00] incredibly accessible, but it’s also very fragile in the sense that if we don’t protect these things, they won’t be here moving forward.

Or worse, we would have situations where maybe the. The forest gets closed because of the disrespect or the danger that comes with that. Yeah. And so I think that there’s a lot of responsibility on the visitor to make sure that none of that happens, so that it’s here for themselves when they come back.

And then ultimately their grandkids. And their grandkids. Grandkids. 

David Archer: Yeah, absolutely. If we can turn a little bit toward fire prevention, um, yep. And that responsibility, you know, I imagine shared by locals and visitors as well, but can you gimme a little background on sort of why this issue is on people’s minds locally and Yeah.

And how that’s come up. 

John Urdi: I think obviously big Picture California is in the news quite a bit for the wildfires that happened here. Obviously the Palisades Fire and the Eaton fire down in Los Angeles and Pasadena. This, uh, this January was tragic and terrible and massive and really, uh, probably [00:16:00] the most expensive fires in history.

But I think if you go back, I got here in 2011, we had a fire called the Aspen Fire. It was a decent sized fire, but you know, the air quality index was upwards of 1500, which is incredibly unhealthy, and it burned off the backside of the mountain. And, you know, they finally got that out after, after, maybe a few months back, uh, right as we were coming, uh, on the Covid side on Labor Day of 2020.

Let’s see, 2020, we had a fire. It was the largest single ignition fire in California history at the time. And so the creek fire burned almost 400,000 acres and it burned right through the burn scar from the Aspen fire, which we thought, okay, the burn scar from the Aspen fire is a great natural break.

It’ll get to that point. It’ll, it’ll stop. It didn’t. Then it came to a bunch of granite, um, cliffs in the backcountry thinking, okay, there’s no vegetation there. It’s [00:17:00] gonna burn itself out. It didn’t, and I think there was a day where the fire grew 75,000 acres overnight. Wow. As it was burning towards town.

The mountain, uh, this was coming right up the backside towards the mountain and the mountain had all of their snow guns prepared to, to turn on and, and fight this fire. They finally got it contained about a mile from the backside of the mountain town. Didn’t evacuate, but I think it was very close to that point.

And so really from that experience where we were a few months, it, it, it, it was not a hundred percent contained until Christmas Eve that year. So it went for, it went for months, um, with some severe, um, air quality issues and, and obviously the burn itself. And so from that, I think the community really.

Paid attention and said, Hey, we’ve gotta be prepared. And there have been fires around us. The Rainbow Fire, which happened well before my time, I think it was probably in the late nineties that was burned down by Devil’s Post Pile, Rainbow Falls. Uh, we’ve had fires in the Sherwin [00:18:00] Mountains just to the south of town.

And it’s just, it’s one of those things when you are in a small town surrounded by mountains, it tends to feel very, uh, funneling for a fire. And so the community has really made a lot of effort. Not only the local fire department, but also through other, uh, larger efforts that are ongoing and multi-year and multi-hundred million dollar projects.

Yeah. 

David Archer: Wow. So, so this, uh, you said the creek fire I think was 2020? Yep. So just. Sort of after Covid began and, uh, what a stressful year that must have been for everyone. 

John Urdi: Yeah. Yeah. That was not, well, it was when, when Covid hit in March, uh, we had not had a great ski year, and then all of a sudden when Covid hit and everything shut down, it started snowing.

I. So people were going out in the backcountry and we had to discourage them from going in the backcountry because we didn’t want them getting hurt and taking hospital beds that might be needed for, for covid. Uh, fortunately we didn’t have that issue, but [00:19:00] yeah, there were a lot of things. And then we got to Labor Day and we finally were getting things back open.

We opened, uh, lodging back on June 19th, 2020, and then, uh, right after Labor Day, we had this fire and. I was actually driving back from Las Vegas with my son and from miles and miles away you could see the pyro nimbus cloud that was coming up over the Sierra, and it looked like an atomic bomb. That was two days after the fire started, and then it just went full force, uh, and really scared the hell out of us.

So yeah, that woke a lot of people up to the idea that we’re not one, we’re not invincible, and two, it it with all the drying, with all the beetle kill, with all of the other issues that we have out here, that it, um, it was a realistic challenge. And it’s funny because we have big snow years and everybody thinks that’s a good thing.

Big snow year here means a lot of rain in California, other places. What it does is it creates new vegetation and that vegetation eventually dies, dries out and becomes more fuel. So, [00:20:00] you know, as much as it helps us when the, when it’s happening, it actually can potentially cause more challenges as we move forward.

David Archer: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. It’s, uh, yeah, I can’t imagine. And, what a wake up call that must have been. So let’s talk a little bit about what’s kind of been happening since that, around that time. So, yeah, I guess let’s, let’s talk about the mammoth donut. Can you tell me what the Mammoth donut is?

John Urdi: Absolutely. A lovingly called the Mammoth donut, the Eastern Sierra Climate and Community, uh, resilience. Project. Yes. I never actually called it by its real name. It’s always the Mammoth Donut. So the Mammoth Donut is a project that has been years in the making. Uh, white Bark Institute here in town is coordinating this.

And it’s a, it’s, it started as a thinning and a resilience project for 50,000 acres around town. So again, mile Town, 50,000 acres around it, uh, makes a nice donut around town as a protected barrier for fires coming into. Potentially [00:21:00] threaten the community. The project has actually expanded quite a bit.

It’s, uh, up to 65,000 acres and it’s not just Mammoth Lakes alone, it’s actually moved up, uh, route 3 95 in Mono County to some other, uh, high risk areas as well. So, but the 50,000 acre donut is really that area right around Mammoth Lakes too, to help protect that area. 

David Archer: Again, mammoth Lakes. The town is sort of at the bottom of a valley and, and the donut is the, the forest floor surrounding 65,000 acres.

What are some of the project’s goals? 

John Urdi: So the project’s goals are to get to the point where they can slow the progress of anything that does happen. So it could be getting there. The debris on the forest floor cleaned up. It’s taking down dead and dying trees. It’s, uh, lemming trees to a certain extent so that they don’t catch on fire if there is even a low, uh, rolling fire that comes through.

There are a lot of, um, a, a lot of efforts that are really geared towards not necessarily stopping fire, [00:22:00] but really slowing it down. I think when we just talk about resilience in general, it’s really, it’s really toughening and this is really kind of, uh, hardening on a mass scale for the community. And so it’s, it’s something that’s being designed to give us better odds in the chance that we do have something that comes into town because we are surrounded, like I said, by hundreds of thousands of, of acres of trees, some of them in great shape, some of them in not so great shape, and that would burn very, very quickly.

David Archer: What is funding this project? Or, or what’s the scale of, of, uh, of what’s happening here? 

John Urdi: Yeah. There, there are a tremendous amount of grant funds that go into it. Uh, unfortunately with some of the chaos that’s going on with our country right now, a lot of those funds have been, I. Somewhat frozen, even though they, they’ve been committed, uh, they haven’t been paid out.

So fortunately because of our success as a tourism destination, we do have funding in a tourism reserve that was able to fund, uh, this summer’s program to the tune of [00:23:00] $661,000. So those are dollars that come in from our visitors staying in our lodging properties. And while those dollars are typically used for tourism.

Education and, and messaging. Uh, we felt that they were really more geared towards, you know, protecting the community at this point. One of my former mayors here in town had a great saying that water’s great for drinking until your house is on fire. 

David Archer: Yes. 

John Urdi: And I think that’s the same thing. The tourism dollars are great for, for education and tourism until you need something that’s going to protect your entire asset.

So, uh, that was committed by the council a couple of weeks ago, so that summer’s, this summer’s project is well underway. There are a number of other things that go on with this. There are, um, potentially fire breaks that’ll be, uh, built in. Right now the Forest Service is actually doing quite a bit of mowing in some of the meadows that could catch on fire, and, and they’re trying to pre, uh, preemptively.

Prevent that so that there’s actually a kind of a moat around town. I guess I would, okay. I guess I would almost call the donut project a fire moat. All right. Uh, where, where we can really [00:24:00] keep, uh, the fire at bay before it gets into town. 

David Archer: Yeah. What sort of timeframe does this project 

John Urdi: have? It’s a multi-year, so it’s probably looking out to 2030.

It’s probably a toll. It’s probably a $200 million project. It’s critical. You know, ironically, as we’re talking today, I received a letter from our insurance company this morning dropping our fire insurance. 

David Archer: Oh, okay. 

John Urdi: For, for my building, uh, here, my office building and places like Weston saw their bill go from $ 300,000 to 1.8 million Dollars.

So it’s, it’s, it’s real. And in order to really try and be as proactive and fight this as much as possible, a program like this is something that needs to happen. We are remote. There’s no cavalry that’s coming to us. If we, uh, if we have a fire that burns close to us, as I mentioned, the creek fire advanced 75,000 acres overnight one year.

If, um, if we had something like that in town here, uh, we would be [00:25:00] devastated very much like what Tyler saw in Jasper. 

David Archer: I imagine this project has taken quite a bit of collaboration across the community. Can you tell me about sort of how the community is coming together for this? 

John Urdi: Yeah, absolutely. And, part of the collaboration is that growth from a 50,000 acre donut to a 65,000 acre total project because there are other areas of need, and through the collaboration we found more support from the.

The federal government and the funding. So by bringing in other communities to enhance this, it’s really helped the entire project. And then locally, obviously the town of Mammoth Lakes is incredibly invested in this. The fire district is really kind of coordinating things from that side. And then White Bark has a tremendous outreach for funding as well.

Again, if we don’t have the, if, if, if we have a fire that comes through here, we have nothing. 

David Archer: We, we are done. What do you think it means for your community to become fire resilient? 

John Urdi: Fire resilience [00:26:00] is basically making sure that we’re prepared to take the hit, but get back up. And I think that by minimizing any impact that can come from a fire, it could be a small fire, but being able to mitigate that, being able to know that the efforts that have been put on the ground are going to give us a fighting chance, then that’s exactly what it needs to be because we as a community.

Need to bounce back just like we did from Covid. 

David Archer: How do you think visitors can help reduce the risk of wildfire? And I know this is probably in parallel to the mammoth donut, but um, yeah, tell me a little about that. 

John Urdi: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, um, heating our education and our, our, you know, trying to teach them how to interact with nature.

How to interact with fires here? You know, really, again, outside my office here, I’ve got a few thousand campfires or camp sites and most of them have fire rings, which is fine, but then we have a lot of dispersed camping as well with no fire rings. And [00:27:00] unfortunately people do end up leaving fires that haven’t been drowned out, and that can cause huge issues for us here.

Um, again, the note on my insurance letter this morning said that our wildfire rating was 100. It’s out of a scale from one to 100. Okay. And so a lot of that has to do with the winds that we have here in town. Uh, previously they had really estimated that everybody in California has 20 mile an hour winds.

Mammoth mountain on, uh, any given day could have 150 mile an hour winds. And so when they took the winds into account, my score may have only been a 50 at 20 miles an hour. But when they really take into account winds, it’s, it’s, uh, something that, that. Put us to that, that full end of the a hundred meter spectrum.

So it’s something where we, as the DMO, are focused on educating our visitors as to how they impact the ecosystem. Yeah. Same with locals. You know, locals need to understand, and there, there [00:28:00] are, you know, the, the. History of starting fires is everything from, uh, dragging chains from your boat trailer on the side of the road that spark a fire to again, leaving your campfire.

Um, embers going when and walking away from it. So this pretty wide spectrum of how people can participate. It’s throwing a cigarette butt into a pile of, uh, pine needles. It’s, it’s, there’s a lot of different pieces right down to even the spark arresters on your TV. You know, if you don’t have the right spark arresters and, and something gets out of your, uh, tailpipe and starts a fire, there’s a lot going on here.

David Archer: Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned the 2020 wildfire being a wake up call for residents. Do you think that a similar thing is happening among visitors? And I’m wondering about California too, because, you know, if the fires in LA et cetera. 

John Urdi: Yeah, absolutely. Visit California does a lot of research on that and there is, um, you know, it’s challenging because even with the, the LA fires.

So the LA fires burned less than 2% of [00:29:00] LA County. If you asked people around the world, and even in LA, they would tell you, I think the response was 47% of LA burned. So there’s perception and there’s reality, and unfortunately the perception is, well, maybe we’re not gonna plan a trip to California because it’s always on fire.

You know, we suffer from that. If there’s a fire in Yosemite, 

David Archer: What’s one thing that you hope for? Travelers take away from this story, like if you were going to visit Mammoth Lakes, what would you want that person to know? 

John Urdi: You know, I really do think that it is knowing their impact and knowing the, the smallest thing that could take down the entire town.

As I was mentioning, I think when the Kaldor fire hits South Lake Tahoe. My, my take on it was we’re Mammoth Lakes. If we have a fire that comes that close, they’re gonna send in every troop that they could possibly send in to, to put it out. And the Kaldor fire moves so quickly that it almost took out South Lake Tahoe, and that was a wake up call for me.

So I think that just people really understand what their impacts [00:30:00] can be and mitigate those as much as possible, so we’re not just telling people to douse uh, fires because, you know, we want, we want them to, uh. Walk away with a feeling like it’s done. We wanna make sure that it doesn’t burn down our town when an ember blows out of the fire ring.

David Archer: Any last bits of advice for others working in this area? Who might be in your shoes? 

John Urdi: Collaboration. It’s all about collaboration. We’re all in this together. This community goes away. Everybody in it goes away. And so I think that we all need to recognize, and again, utilizing Tourism Reserve dollars towards, uh, building fire breaks may not be what everybody thinks those dollars are for, but it’s critical that we.

Uh, make sure that we’re getting these projects done, even if the federal funding has, uh, been delayed or, or dried up or gone away. So it’s a collaboration. It’s working together towards a common goal of protecting this place. 

David Archer: Thanks, John. I think that’s a great place to leave it. I really appreciate your time today.

Thank you, David. Appreciate it.[00:31:00] 

This has been Travel Beyond presented by Destination Think. And that was John Erie from Mammoth Lakes Tourism. For more resources and show notes, visit our website@destinationthink.com. And by the way, if you’re heading to Mammoth Lakes, you can go to visit mammoth.com for some important travel info, including road conditions and a guide to getting around.This episode was hosted, produced, and has theme music composed by David Archer. Sarah Raymond Du Bois, my co-producer Lindsay Payne. And Cory Price provided production support. If you like what you hear, please take a moment to give us a five star rating to help more people find the show. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back with more next [00:32:00] week.