The Short Version
- Narration: Katarina Ewerlöf carries fourteen hours of two intertwined life stories alone, with a companion PDF supplied alongside the audio
- Themes: a marriage as a working partnership, Depression-era childhood, the making of a ski area, Olympic coaching, Eastern Sierra history
- Mood: warm and nostalgic, paced like a long conversation on a porch
- Verdict: A generous, affectionate chronicle for anyone who loves mountains or the people who built things on them, told by someone who was in the story.
Robin Morning is named in this book's own description, tucked into a list of the ski racers Dave McCoy coached onto Olympic squads in the 1960s. Charlotte Zumstein, Jill Kinmont, Linda Meyers, Penny McCoy, Dennis McCoy, Robin Morning. That last name is the author. It is the single most useful thing to know before starting this fourteen-hour audiobook, because it explains the temperature of the whole thing: this is not a journalist reconstructing a mountain from archives, it is somebody who skied for the man writing down what he and his wife built.
Dave McCoy was born in 1915 and spent his childhood in tent camps while his father built early California roads. When the family came apart during the Depression he was sent to his grandparents at the Wilkeson Coal and Coke Company in Washington, where he learned to fly fish, tie flies and ski. After high school he hitchhiked south to Independence, a small town in the Eastern Sierra, rode a Harley Davidson, fished, skied with the Eastern Sierra Ski Club and took a job with the LADWP that eventually made him a hydrographer. In 1941 he moved to Bishop, married Roma Carriere and took the hydrographer's post at the Long Valley Dam on Crowley Lake. A badly broken leg and an essential job kept him out of the war, so he built rope tows for the servicemen coming home instead.
By the 2000s that improvisation had turned into twenty-six chairlifts, two gondolas and a ski area at Mammoth Mountain that a July 2020 tribute on the page describes as home to a million skiers and riders a year. That same tribute puts its finger on the book's method: an easy, conversational style, more interested in the relationship and the hardships than in business milestones. The chairlift count is the least interesting thing here. What the chronicle is really tracking is how two people kept saying yes to work nobody had asked them to do.
The sequence in between is where the book earns its length. Rope tows lead to building upskis, upskis lead to racing, racing leads to coaching, coaching leads to a mountain that needs lifts, and each of those steps is a decision taken by people with no capital and no model to copy. Nothing about it was inevitable, and the chronicle is careful to keep the Depression childhood in view while it happens, so that the tent camps and the twenty-six chairlifts belong to one continuous story rather than to a before and an after.
Why Listen to For the Love of It
The longest tribute on the listing, filed in January 2021 and signed in its heading with a different first name than the account that posted it, makes the argument better than any summary can. It resists calling this a book about a ski resort and describes it instead as the story of a lifelong love affair between two people whose feeling for each other spilled over into a sport, a mountain range and the community that helped them build. Read the structure that way and the long passages about weather, equipment and rope tows stop being background. They are the couple's shared language.
What comes through across fourteen hours is a specific and now largely vanished kind of California: skiing in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s before the industry existed, when getting up a mountain meant building the machine that took you there. Roma is not a supporting figure in this telling, and the balance between the two lives is the reason the chronicle holds together at length. Anyone who has spent a season working at a mountain will recognize the economics and the weather, and anyone who has not will get an unusually clear look at how a place like Mammoth actually came to exist, one hand-built lift at a time.
What to Watch For in For the Love of It
Not one of the five visible tributes mentions the recording. All five carry five stars while the page reports 4.8 from eighty-four ratings, and all five were posted across 2020 and 2021, two to three years before this audio edition was published in June 2023. One of them, from February 2021, says outright that two more copies have been ordered for family, and the writer knew the people in the book personally. So the praise you can read is genuine and worth having, but it is praise for a printed chronicle, and it tells you nothing about how fourteen hours of it sound in Katarina Ewerlöf's reading.
Two smaller things are worth knowing before you buy. The listing carries the short title while the description gives the full one, The Mammoth Legacy of Roma and Dave McCoy, so if the bare four words made you expect a novel, that subtitle is the honest description of the contents. And the audio comes with an accompanying PDF, which for a book this dense in names, dates and places is not a decoration; close to twenty racers and three decades of Eastern Sierra history go past quickly through headphones, and having a document to check against changes the experience considerably.
Who Should Listen to For the Love of It
Skiers first, obviously, and particularly anyone with Mammoth Mountain or the Eastern Sierra in their history. But the audience is wider than that. A September 2020 tribute describes getting so attached to the people in it that the worry, near the end, was that the story would not carry far enough, which is a reaction to a family chronicle rather than to a sports book. If you like biographies of builders, of marriages that functioned as working partnerships, or of mid-century American self-invention, the mountain is only the setting.
Anyone allergic to affection in a biography should think twice. This is written from inside the circle, by a participant, about people the writer admires, and it does not pretend otherwise; readers looking for a hard-nosed account of the resort industry, labor conditions or the business of Mammoth Mountain will find the emphasis elsewhere. Consider the length too. Fourteen hours on one couple is a long stay, and the reward is accumulation rather than incident, so if you want the ski history without the childhoods you will spend a while getting to the snow.
Good to Know
Does the For the Love of It audiobook include the accompanying PDF?
Yes. The listing states that the PDF arrives in your library along with the audio when you buy the title. Given how many names, dates and Eastern Sierra locations move through fourteen hours, it is worth opening rather than ignoring.
Is this a ski book or a biography?
Both, and the biography comes first. The chronicle follows Dave McCoy from a 1915 birth and a Depression childhood through his marriage to Roma Carriere, his work as a hydrographer, and only then the rope tows, the racing and twenty-six chairlifts. Expect life story with the mountain built around it.
Why does the audiobook title look shorter than the one in the description?
The listing shows only For the Love of It, while the description supplies the full title, The Mammoth Legacy of Roma and Dave McCoy. Nothing else differs, but the subtitle is the part that tells you what the book actually covers, so it is worth carrying into your decision.
How much of it deals with Olympic ski racing?
A substantial stretch. The 1960s section covers coaching close to twenty racers onto Olympic squads, naming Charlotte Zumstein, Jill Kinmont, Linda Meyers, Penny McCoy and Dennis McCoy among them, and runs alongside the development of Mammoth Mountain into a major ski area.
