About this site
The Latest is a record of what has happened to Mammoth Lakes — what property has cost, what has been built, what has opened and closed — assembled from newspaper archives, public documents and market reports going back to 1971. It is not a listings site and nothing on it is for sale.
The rules it is built to
- Every figure is traceable
- Prices, openings and closings carry the source that printed them, and usually the sentence. Most of this record comes from newspaper prose, and a reader is entitled to check the sentence rather than take a number on trust.
- Weak evidence is labelled, not laundered
- Where a source printed a bare year and never said what it measured, that is flagged and drawn differently. Where a figure is carried by an index rather than observed, it says so. The alternative — quietly promoting a guess to a measurement — would make the charts look more certain than the record is.
- A filing is not a fact about a business
- Liquor licences, fictitious business name statements and directory listings are filings. Names get registered for businesses that never open and abandoned years after the doors shut, and a licence surrendered on transfer looks exactly like a closure. Each is recorded as what it is.
- Only Mammoth Lakes
- Every source available covers the whole Eastern Sierra. Each business is placed by the address on its own licence or its geocode, and 775 that turned out to be in June Lake, Bridgeport, Lee Vining and elsewhere are held out. Where the town line is a judgement — Convict Lake has a Mammoth postal address and sits outside the town limits — the judgement is recorded with its reason.
- Article text is linked, never republished
- Facts are extracted and a short quote is kept as evidence. The words belong to the publications that wrote them, and every extracted row links back to the original.
What it is built from
30 sources. The reliability rating is our own, and it describes how much weight a series can carry rather than how much we like it.
| Publisher | What it provides | Covers | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| CA Dept of Insurance / CA FAIR Plan / CAL FIRE | FAIR Plan policies and exposure, non-renewals, fire hazard severity zones | — | 5/5 |
| CDEC / NOAA GHCN / Mammoth Mountain | Snow course, snow pillow, climate station and ski-season records | 1924-11–2026-08 | 5/5 |
| CFPB / FFIEC | Home Mortgage Disclosure Act loan register, Mono County | — | 5/5 |
| Federal Housing Finance Agency | House Price Index — annual, developer files (zip5 / zip3 / county / tract / CBSA) | 1975–2026 | 5/5 |
| FHFA via FRED (St. Louis Fed) | All-Transactions House Price Index & macro context | — | 5/5 |
| Freddie Mac | House Price Index (FMHPI) | 1975-01 | 5/5 |
| IRS Statistics of Income | County-to-county migration | — | 5/5 |
| Town of Mammoth Lakes / Mono County | Housing Elements, Needs Assessments and Community Indicators | 1980–2024 | 5/5 |
| United States Geological Survey | FDSN event catalogue, Long Valley Caldera, 1970-present | — | 5/5 |
| US Census BPS / CA HCD / Town of Mammoth Lakes | Building permits, housing production, STR permissions | 1980–2026 | 5/5 |
| California Association of REALTORS® | Monthly county median sale price, DOM, unsold inventory index | 2005-01–2026-06 | 4/5 |
| Mammoth Lakes Board of REALTORS® (RPR®) | RPR market statistics reports, ZIP 93546 | 2001–2022 | 4/5 |
| Mammoth Times | Weekly legal notices and classified advertisements, 1997-2003 | — | 4/5 |
| Realtor.com Economic Research | Inventory Core Metrics (zip & county history) | — | 4/5 |
| Redfin Data Center | Market Tracker (city/county/neighborhood) | — | 4/5 |
| The Sheet | Weekly market columns | 2009–2026 | 4/5 |
| Town of Mammoth Lakes | Community Indicators Report | 2014–2024 | 4/5 |
| Town of Mammoth Lakes / Mammoth Lakes Tourism / FAA | TOT & TBID revenue, visitation estimates, airport enplanements | 1987–FY2025-26 | 4/5 |
| Zillow Research | ZHVI / ZORI / inventory public CSVs | — | 4/5 |
| Destination Real Estate (Mammoth Lakes) | Monthly market update posts | 2013-07–2026-06 | 3/5 |
| Los Angeles Times | Real-estate and news archive, retrieved via ProQuest | 1971–1997 | 3/5 |
| Mammoth Lakes brokerages | Published market statistics (Resort Realty, Jodi Melton, others) | — | 3/5 |
| Matthew Lehman / homesmammoth.com | Monthly Mammoth Lakes market reports (text) | 2013-12–2026-08 | 3/5 |
| Matthew Lehman / homesmammoth.com | Chart values recovered by pixel measurement | — | 3/5 |
| Newspaper archives (various) | Historical price mentions | 1971–2010 | 3/5 |
| Paul Oster / Mammoth Real Estate Blog | Bi-weekly broker sales reports (narrative) | 2006-04–2025-10 | 3/5 |
| Town of Mammoth Lakes | Draft 2009 Housing Needs Assessment (Housing Element background report) | 1999–2008 | 3/5 |
| US Census Bureau | American Community Survey 5-year estimates (B25077 value, B25064 rent) | 2009–2024 | 3/5 |
| Matthew Lehman / homesmammoth.com | Market report tables & charts (extracted from images) | — | 2/5 |
| RE/MAX of Mammoth (Paul Oster) | Broker's Report, recovered from the Internet Archive | 1997-04–2008-03 | 2/5 |
Photographs
Every photograph on this site is public domain or openly licensed, and each is credited where it appears as well as here. Five are Creative Commons and require attribution; naming the photographer is a licence condition, not a courtesy.
The Sherwin Range above the townCarol M. Highsmith · Public domain · Commons
Condominiums behind the aspens off Old Mammoth Road — the stock nearly every price on this page describesThe Latest · Own photograph
Mammoth Mountaineering Supply on Old Mammoth Road, in the building that was Grumpy'sThe Latest · Own photograph
The Village at Mammoth, opened 2002The Latest · Own photograph
The Long Valley Caldera, whose rim the town is built onblmcalifornia · Public domain · Commons
Lake Mary and Lake George, in the Lakes Basin above townSrishti Sethi (talk · contribs) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons
The Minarets, seen from the top of Mammoth MountainUS Forest Service, Region 5 · CC BY 2.0 · Commons
Meadow below the Sherwins in summerEmmanuel Maceda bochie · CC0 · Commons
The Main Lodge in July, with the road still under snowThe Latest · Own photograph
New housing going up across from Sierra Park Villas, on the lot where Frosty's mini golf course stoodThe Latest · Own photograph
The same lot in 2012: Frosty's mini golf, beside the Sierra Nevada LodgeThe Latest · Own photograph
The bench on the Sherwin Vista path, above Old Mammoth RoadThe Latest · Own photograph
The Sherwins from the sagebrush flat at the south edge of townThe Latest · Own photograph
Chateau Blanc, 3199 Chateau RoadThe Latest · Own photograph
Corrections
Some of this is certainly wrong. The record is assembled from archives with real gaps in them, and the people most likely to spot an error are the people who were there — who know which year the restaurant actually closed, or that the building changed hands twice before the licence caught up.
If something here is wrong, please say so. Corrections are the cheapest research available and they are acted on: a verified correction goes into the record with its reason attached, and the site is rebuilt from it.
The same address handles requests from publishers. Short quotations are kept as evidence under fair use and everything links back to the original, but if you own material used here and would rather it were not, it will be removed on request without argument.