MEASURE U SPOTLIGHT - THE MAMMOTH CHANNEL
Through Measure U, Mammoth Lakes Recreation is proud to support Dan McConnell and his endearing love for The Mammoth Channel. The Mammoth Channel began in the summer of 1979. Jim Warta, the owner of Mammoth Electric Cable TV, hired Dan and Ed Power to start a local television channel.
They gladly took on the challenge and started by covering high school football games. Soon after, they started a magazine show that covered everything in the area - ski races, fishing reports, rock climbing, road bike races, early mountain biking, and of course interviews with local experts in a variety of fields. The duo covered the first Kamikaze Mountain Bike Race at Mammoth Mountain, dubbed “The World’s Fastest Mountain Bike Race”. Coverage expanded beyond outdoor recreation and included music festivals, theatre, dance recitals, and graduations. As we all know, the news isn’t always good news. The Mammoth Channel also reported the news stories during the growing pains of the 80’s and 90’s and the new development period of the early 2000’s.
All these original stories were captured on various video formats, which ended up at the local channel office in Bishop for storage. When the station sold, the new owners were going to discard all the videos. Dan couldn’t let that happen, so he boxed up all the tapes and brought them home to Mammoth. And, trust me, this wasn’t just one trip. There were hundreds of videos and film reels that needed to get loaded up and brought up the hill. Dan didn’t quite have a plan, but he knew these videos were too valuable to the history and culture of the area to be destroyed.
To preserve the video archives, and reclaim his storage space, he began to digitize all the footage. To digitize them takes real time, playing the tape through a digitizer onto a hard drive, then re-editing and reformatting them for playback. The Mammoth Channel video archives consists of hundreds and hundreds of videos that are being run through this process.
In 2022, The Mammoth Channel applied for Measure U Special Project Funding to help offset the costs of cataloging, digitizing, and editing the archives. MLR’s Allocations Committee saw the importance of this project and recommended funding for the Measure U Special Project. Successfully completing the pilot project, or Special Project, Dan applied for another round of Measure U funding for The Mammoth Channel. Successful again, The Mammoth Channel is now in it’s second year of funding for this important, historical project.
Currently, the work consists of condensing the videos onto one website where they will be accessible to anyone. The “Archive Project” is an ongoing endeavor that may never end. While in progress, there are lots of fun clips to watch; you can find a few teaser reels HERE.
I asked Dan if there were any good surprises he found when sifting through the archives. “I recently watched an interview with Bob Drake who worked with USGS during the mid 1990’s. That was a period when the area was plagued with earthquakes and received a lot of bad press that led to a local recession,” McConnell said, “also, Dave McCoy on the original zip-line was great to see.”
Many of the segments are playing on the EasternSierraLegacy.org Facebook page. You can also head to MammothChannel.com or The Mammoth Channel YouTube channel for more fun and adventures!
Stay tuned, there is a lot more to come!
About Mammoth Lakes Recreation
Formed in 2014, Mammoth Lakes Recreation’s mission is to deliver cutting edge sustainable recreation, mobility, and arts & culture opportunities and infrastructure for the benefit of the community and natural environment of Mammoth Lakes. For more information, go to www.mammothlakesrecreation.org.