SWEET SIXTEEN
Published in the Nov. 1, 2025 issue.
Good things take time. Great things, apparently, take 16 years, extensive environmental review, a mini excavator, and seven people with shovels.
Over the summer, the Town of Mammoth Lakes trail crew built five new trails in the Sherwin Area, totaling roughly five miles, said the Town’s Trail Program Director, Andrew Mulford, in a presentation to the public Wednesday night at the Eatery at Mammoth Brewing. Next year, the crew expects to complete another eight miles of trail.
This work represents the latest phase of the Sherwin Area Recreation Project (SHARP), a long-winded project to expand and organize the trail system which spans from Hayden Cabin to the end of Old Mammoth Road.
Some of the 13 miles of trail in development are user-created routes that already existed but couldn’t be maintained because the USFS didn’t officially recognize them. By reworking and adopting them into the Town’s network, officials hope to transform the region’s spiderweb of paths into maintainable single-track for cyclists, hikers, and equestrians.
For the time being, the Town isn’t publicizing the new routes to allow the arid dirt to settle, but they are walkable, and Mulford said winter snow will help to pack the dusty paths down.
“A lot of people come here and say, ‘man, the soil’s not great,’ but if you get on trails that have been there a while, like the Mammoth Rock Trail or the Mountain View Trail, they pack in eventually and become quite fun,” he said.
Attendees of the meeting were asked to suggest names for the new trails, jotting them down on maps of the area. “Please just try to avoid the word ‘connector,’” Mulford mused, anxious not to introduce a fourth trail with that descriptor in the area — and definitely not a fourth, a fifth, or a sixth.
Looking ahead, Mulford said another phase of the project is now taking shape to add trails that didn’t make it through the most recent environmental review. This additional phase is “one step back” for the planners, he said, but a necessary one.
“[The trails] either have some archaeological issues or some interactions with whitebark pine or hydrology that made the environmental review process a little more tedious and time-consuming,” he said.
These plans are now subject to another, more extensive review with archaeologists, biologists, and other specialists from the Inyo National Forest. And there’s no telling how long it will take.
“We should receive approval, but it just takes a lot of time, and well, money,” Mulford said. “But we think it’s important, and there’s really no other option. The other option would be to pretend they don’t exist.”
