How Mammoth Lakes’ food bank is saving the town’s tourism industry

“We wanted to make sure the unemployed were taken care of and we wanted people to be here for when everyone is able to go back to work,” Urdi explains.

Mammoth Lakes Tourism has so far invested $245,000 in the food bank, which operates on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and hands out bags of cupboard-staple goods that would retail at around $50.

Urdi says the community has been “incredibly appreciative”, adding: “They can put the $50 they’re not spending on food towards electric bills or rent, or it allows them to go and buy the food we’re not able to supply them with.”

Working together

The local community with funds to spare has been extremely engaged with the food bank too, with an extra $180,000 raised in charitable donations from both businesses and individuals in the surrounding area.

“It’s heart-warming to see the support we’ve had,” says Urdi.

The Mammoth Lakes food bank is currently supplying 200-225 households – or around 750-900 people – with produce every day, while at its peak was helping up to 350 households or 12,000 people per day.

Of course a great deal of manpower is needed to achieve such success, with Urdi originally expecting to need just four volunteers per day, but now needing 13 and having 175 in total.

“Some volunteers have done two hours and some have done 60,” says Urdi, who has himself racked up hundreds of hours of volunteering, even spending weekends packing and preparing food with his 16-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son.

This time he’s dedicated to the food bank has seen him gel with the Mammoth Lakes community: “I’ve made some very good friends – people I’d never met before – and now I see them once a week,” he says. “I can’t wait to go and have cocktails with them once this whole thing is over.”

He tells me about the chief of staff at the hospital too, who has worked every day for a month and who, when finally able to take a day off, spent it volunteering at the food bank.

The future of the food bank and Mammoth Lakes

As it stands Mammoth Lakes Tourism has $35,000 left to fund the food bank, which will last around two weeks, but Urdi’s team is planning a big push for donations so that the food bank can stay in operation until at least 1 July – this is when he’s hoping the town will be able to reopen to tourism (with all the required social distancing rules and regulations).

“My goal has always been that we will run [the food bank] until two weeks after people start working again – we want to make sure we really take care of these folks,” Urdi says. This is to account for the time workers are in business before their payday.

When it comes to this recovery period, Urdi is confident Mammoth Lakes will bounce back as fast, if not faster, than other tourism destinations: “We stand the best chance of recovering because [the activities people come here for such as] skiing, hiking, biking, fishing and golf are all naturally socially distanced,” he says.

It’s true that many tourists will be looking for ways to travel that involves avoiding crowds, enclosed spaces and public indoor areas after the pandemic. In fact, a survey conducted by Mammoth Lakes pre-pandemic revealed 11% of visitors liked to camp, while the same survey conducted six weeks ago showed this percentage rise to 33%.

Talking about domestic tourism, which makes up 82% of Mammoth Lakes’ visitors, Urdi predicts that “after being quarantined in Los Angeles people are going to want to get back to nature.” This is an idea that fuelled the release of a brand-new tagline for Mammoth Lakes: "Release yourself back into the wild".

Although the international tourism market at Mammoth Lakes is small at 18%, almost half of that is made up of visitors from the UK.

“[These] people like to combine San Francisco, Las Vegas and Los Angeles with Mammoth Lakes and Yosemite national park,” says Urdi. “The UK has always had a soft spot for Mammoth Lakes.”