Cross-Country Skiing in California: Where the Trails Are

4 trail systems in California say on their own pages that a machine goes on the trail, and the ones that publish a figure add up to 56 km. Mammoth Lakes groomed non-motorized winter trails, run by Town of Mammoth Lakes, is the largest of them at 30 miles (48.3 km). Another 2 places name ski trail without saying it is groomed.

California sells one pass for its own trails: the SNO-Park permit, $15 a day or $40 for the season, issued by California State Parks. It covers parking at any of the eighteen plowed SNO-Park lots in the Sierra Nevada, which are the trailheads for most of the state's non-motorized winter trails; it is a parking permit and not a trail fee, so a club nordic center still charges its own pass on top. Clubs and nordic centers charge their own fees on top of that.

There is no single conditions report for California. 3 of the 6 systems publish a grooming report of their own, and those are linked beside each one below. The clubs and the nordic centers update theirs the most often, because skiing is the whole of what they do.

November 1 to May 30, though the state's SNO-Park permit window runs from November into late spring, which is the outer edge of the season; the club nordic centers groom a shorter stretch inside it, roughly December into early April. That is California State Parks’s own framing. Grooming is set by snow depth rather than by a date, so a system can sit idle inside its own season and run past the end of it in a good year.

A groomed trail has had a machine over it: the snow is compacted and, on most nordic trail, a pair of parallel tracks is cut into it for classic skis, with a flat lane beside them for skating. An ungroomed trail is whatever the last skier and the last storm left. Both are worth skiing and they take different skis, which is why these pages say which of the two a manager is claiming rather than counting every ski trail as the same thing.