Phresheez and PA resorts....

[phresheez]

Hi all, I just wanted to drop by and say that we've finally digitized the last of the PA resorts that our users have been to (Ski Sawmill), so all of PA is now ready to go for next season. I have to say you Pennsylvania skiers and riders -- and I suspect this forum in particular -- were a major driver of getting your resorts digitized. Good job!

 

We also have pushed out a new Android and iPhone app in the last week, so give it a look -- the nav should be quite

a bit easier.

 

Oh, and pray for snow

 

Mike

[sibhusky]

Digitized?

 

Looked you up, now I get it. On Whitefish Mtn Resort's map, you have Elephant's Graveyard as Intermediate. The trail map calls it Expert, not sure where you got Intermediate from. It's got roughly the same pitch as No Name, which you have as Advanced, but it's covered with trees (No Name is not and even gets groomed on occasion), so I'm pretty sure it should be Advanced as well.....

Edited August 3, 2011 by sibhusky

[phresheez]

Digitized?

 

Oh, sorry. In order to work some of our magic, we need to digitize the resorts. That way we know

what run you're on, its difficulty, etc, etc. It's a very laborious task, but we're up to about

300 resorts finished now.

 

Mike

[sibhusky]

Also..

 

Also the "Advanced Snow Making Ponds"??? HA. Since they are PONDS, they are definitely closed and dangerous. The area around them is not really advanced and is just the lead in to Good Medicine.

 

1000 Turns is an Intermediate unless you made it Advanced because it's narrow and there's people dropping down in front of you from above sometimes....

 

Where'd you get this stuff from?

Edited August 3, 2011 by sibhusky

[phresheez]

Also..

 

Also the "Advanced Snow Making Ponds"??? HA. Since they are PONDS, they are definitely closed and dangerous. The area around them is not really advanced and is just the lead in to Good Medicine.

 

1000 Turns is an Intermediate unless you made it Advanced because it's narrow and there's people dropping down in front of you from above sometimes....

 

Where'd you get this stuff from?

 

We get it from their trail maps and from figuring it out with google maps. That said, if we make mistakes

and people tell us, we definitely fix them. Also: their maps get out of date and/or have discrepancies in

them, so it's not always clear which is correct. So local knowledge is always helpful

 

Note that our maps are not to tell you where to go, they're to tell you where you've been. We're not trying

to be a paper trail map replacement in any way. So although the ponds should really be closed, the only thing

it really affects is if some bonehead happened to go in there for his own bone headed reasons.

 

Mike

[phresheez]

Also..

 

Also the "Advanced Snow Making Ponds"??? HA. Since they are PONDS, they are definitely closed and dangerous. The area around them is not really advanced and is just the lead in to Good Medicine.

 

1000 Turns is an Intermediate unless you made it Advanced because it's narrow and there's people dropping down in front of you from above sometimes....

 

 

So I looked this up on Whitefish's map and... not surprisingly the trail map is misleading. Elephant's Graveyard was an error,

but the map sez that 1000 turns is Advanced, so we just do what the resort says. The Snow Making Ponds shows a black diamond

there so again, it's their map that's wrong and frankly dangerous because it should show it as closed. Funny... James Nieheus

maps are usually really good.

 

Mike

[RootDKJ]

Any hope of getting a better blackberry app? Mainly, when I take a pic on my Bb, I'd like to be able to send it to Phresheez,.

[RidgeRacer]

Cool. Thanks for the updates. Looking forward to using it this winter.

[Johnny Law]

Thanks dude for all the hard work, the email about unsubscribing last year was pretty funny.

[sibhusky]

So I looked this up on Whitefish's map and... not surprisingly the trail map is misleading. Elephant's Graveyard was an error,

but the map sez that 1000 turns is Advanced, so we just do what the resort says. The Snow Making Ponds shows a black diamond

there so again, it's their map that's wrong and frankly dangerous because it should show it as closed. Funny... James Nieheus

maps are usually really good.

 

Mike

 

I just checked two paper maps here. The one for last year says it's a black, the one from the year before calls it a blue. Nothing changed in the interim. I'll have to ask them about this. It is sort of hairy to ski because it's narrow and a sustained pitch that makes you increase speed steadily if you don't control it. It's for the "slalom skis", that's for sure! However, the pitch is equivalent to a beginner hill!

 

I see the bit about "snowmaking ponds" on the maps. Nuts.

 

Just informationally, not to make your maps different than the trail maps, here is the "advanced" area around the ponds, taken from the exact spot, looking "up" and "down". In the area BELOW the ponds is the beginning of Good Med. Does the pictured area look advanced to you?

 

 

Below:

 

In the pic above, if you look at it full sized, you'll see the ponds are closed off. The pitch until them is pretty much non-existent, then along side them it's just a short dip, then you're in Good Med.

 

Unfortunately, I don't have pics of 1000 turns, you don't dare stop there as there is no way for anyone to get AROUND you. ...Maybe that's why they made it a higher level...too many gapers traversing in snow plows? I used to use it a lot before I ran into illegal uphill travelers too many times, plus people descending from the trees above it into the trail.

 

Another trail there are differing opinions on is Heaven, marked blue on the maps but black at the top of it when you're on the slope.

Edited August 3, 2011 by sibhusky

[sibhusky]

Wow, just looking at more discrepancies. Larch is marked as black on this map and is right by Powder Bowl, but on the trail, it is where Corkscrew is and is a blue and Corkscrew is the next opening over...It's like someone in the office has never looked at the trail signs as they go down the hill! Quite confusing! I'll have to check things out right there, but all my friends and I refer to the areas as they are marked on the signs and not as marked on this map. And, of course, we have lots of areas not marked on the map... Crazy. I don't know how you can do what you are doing! What happens when a user goes down the area between Big Horn and Gray Wolf on the map? How does it get counted? That would be "Super Mario" to some people and it is clearly a double black in fact if you don't watch it you'll be in a world of hurt because there are cliffs. (Sibby doesn't ski there, but Siblet does...)

[phresheez]

Wow, just looking at more discrepancies. Larch is marked as black on this map and is right by Powder Bowl, but on the trail, it is where Corkscrew is and is a blue and Corkscrew is the next opening over...It's like someone in the office has never looked at the trail signs as they go down the hill! Quite confusing! I'll have to check things out right there, but all my friends and I refer to the areas as they are marked on the signs and not as marked on this map. And, of course, we have lots of areas not marked on the map... Crazy. I don't know how you can do what you are doing! What happens when a user goes down the area between Big Horn and Gray Wolf on the map? How does it get counted? That would be "Super Mario" to some people and it is clearly a double black in fact if you don't watch it you'll be in a world of hurt because there are cliffs. (Sibby doesn't ski there, but Siblet does...)

 

It's definitely something of an art doing this digitization, and we rely heavily on the resort's own maps to

be correct. In the case of the in betweens, we usually label them as in between the two adjacent runs, but it

depends how close they are together... GPS is only accurate to 10' at _best_ so we usually leave a fair amount

of the trees on the side of runs in the run itself to not accidentally trigger you being in the trees. Also: above

the tree line in big open bowls where there are three or four runs, it's sort of a fiction to say that this is where

one "run" ends and another begins -- maybe there is some topography that divides the two in some cases, but often

it's completely arbitrary. So I expect that most of the time we get it as right as any other opinion of where these

imaginary run bounds are, but it's completely possible that we get it wrong in some cases too.

 

And yes, there are tons of locals' names for areas that we usually don't know about. The really cool thing about

our digitization project is that it has the potential to actually capture those names and areas for posterity.

Another interesting aspect is that while we use the resort's difficulty of a run at face value, for our gaming

we have the ability to adjust what we call the run's challenge rating (if you're any sort of D&D geek, yes

that's where we got a bunch of the ideas for Top Dog) which can in theory can level out differences in rating

between the resort's (often bloated) designation, and what could be called a consensus of its rating ("that

ain't no double diamond!").

 

Mike

[Ride Delaware ?]

I usually don't take my phone on the slopes, but if I do, I'll be sure to try the app out...

[sibhusky]

So, did you have people ski these runs to give you tracks? Or did you just overlay Google Earth with the resort trail map or what? For instance, why is something like Back Nine represented with a zigzaggy line, when actually it's an AREA and there are such dense trees you'd be unlikely one day later to find the same line as you did the day before? And how do these lines work in reality? Just looking at the Lower Inspo, Lower Expressway, Bad Rock, area, nothing seems to line up with any trail system. I'm just wondering what the application does in a situation like that? (I don't have a smartphone, I want my battery to last all day.) .. and a lot of the resort has no cell service -- how does THAT work? I think the cell tower is on radio tower peak there and if you are in the shadow of some cliff or down a gully or anything line of sight, you have to wait to get a signal. Don't users find lots of dead spots when they are using this? Or is there something in the smartphone that overcomes the cell service issue? (Like I said, I don't own a smartphone...)

[sibhusky]

When Siblet was in the desert two summers back, she was the only one in the camp with a working cell phone because everyone else had smartphones, all different service providers. That was with the LG5500. I recharge my phone less than once a week and it's not because it's run out, it's because the battery is down to two bars.

[phresheez]

So, did you have people ski these runs to give you tracks? Or did you just overlay Google Earth with the resort trail map or what? For instance, why is something like Back Nine represented with a zigzaggy line, when actually it's an AREA and there are such dense trees you'd be unlikely one day later to find the same line as you did the day before? And how do these lines work in reality? Just looking at the Lower Inspo, Lower Expressway, Bad Rock, area, nothing seems to line up with any trail system. I'm just wondering what the application does in a situation like that? (I don't have a smartphone, I want my battery to last all day.) .. and a lot of the resort has no cell service -- how does THAT work? I think the cell tower is on radio tower peak there and if you are in the shadow of some cliff or down a gully or anything line of sight, you have to wait to get a signal. Don't users find lots of dead spots when they are using this? Or is there something in the smartphone that overcomes the cell service issue? (Like I said, I don't own a smartphone...)

 

It's a little of both but mostly using maps, yes. The zigzaggy line is just trying to show that it's that whole

area, rather than just a line. Note that all you're seeing is the run traces, not the actual polygons that define

an area. The polygons in the system are actually what determine whether you're on a run or not.

 

It works fine with no cellular coverage: GPS is a satellite system that doesn't require cell service at all,

and we just store the points in the flash memory until we can call home... that day, a month from then, whatever.

So only real thing that the dead spots on the hill affect is our Friend Finder -- if you're out powder spelunking,

they may have to wait a bit before you're back on the radar

 

Mike

 

PS: if you have a garmin or other handheld GPS, you can use that too and upload it to Phresheez... not as

convenient, but still works.

[sibhusky]

So, how often are the points stored? Just curious. I use a SPOT tracker with my daughter, and "drift" due to weather and angles (we're pretty far north, so there are extended periods when mountains block transmissions from the SPOT for hours) causes sometimes EXTREME anomalies and I've found her 'tracks' on the wrong side of cliffs (assuming the track was received at all). I realize that you are not transmitting, only saving, but aren't there issues with satellite connectivity? How many satellite does the smartphone or a normal GPS receiver need to connect to before it has enough info to determine where it is?

[phresheez]

So, how often are the points stored? Just curious. I use a SPOT tracker with my daughter, and "drift" due to weather and angles (we're pretty far north, so there are extended periods when mountains block transmissions from the SPOT for hours) causes sometimes EXTREME anomalies and I've found her 'tracks' on the wrong side of cliffs (assuming the track was received at all). I realize that you are not transmitting, only saving, but aren't there issues with satellite connectivity? How many satellite does the smartphone or a normal GPS receiver need to connect to before it has enough info to determine where it is?

 

It varies, but typically 1/second while you're moving. Anomalies can be a problem especially in really dense

trees, etc, or where you might get into multipath situations, but the surprising thing with the zillions of

tracks our users have made is how accurate they are on the whole. We also do our own filtering which does a

pretty good job of dealing with outliers. I've literally seen tracks from somebody around Squaw who made a

quick sidetrip to Spokane and back in a few minutes... uh, no

 

You should check out if you can get output from your SPOT tracker in GPX format (the standardized format for

interchange) because you could upload those files to Phresheez and see the tracks. You can do all of this

from phresheez.com.

 

Mike

[sibhusky]

Oh, yeah, I can get that output, I do it in either KML or GPX and suck it into Google Earth if the adventuress is on the move. However, for skiing it would be useless as the transmission is only every 10 minutes. It would keep showing me going up the chair again. LOL! See the topic "Siblet looks for turns at Logan Pass" to see the kind of output it generates. Go to Post #3 for the gpx output of the route. (Blue line). Things labeled "track" are KML dots.

Edited August 3, 2011 by sibhusky

[phresheez]

Oh, yeah, I can get that output, I do it in either KML or GPX and suck it into Google Earth if the adventuress is on the move. However, for skiing it would be useless as the transmission is only every 10 minutes. It would keep showing me going up the chair again. LOL! See the topic "Siblet looks for turns at Logan Pass" to see the kind of output it generates.

 

Oh, yeah that's going to look pretty boring. Once a second and you can actually start to make out individual turns.

What's really cool is that when you friend people, on our web site you can add them to the animation and watch both

of you zipping around the hill at the same time. It's pretty neat.

 

Another cool thing we get out of our digitization: we know when you're in a lift line, on a lift, or on a run so

we can tell which resorts have the most waiting time. One interesting thing that came out of that is how dramatic

a difference high speed quads make: even resorts with hellacious lines are not terrible when you compare them to

a normal lift with no/little lines. Of course no one likes lift lines, so there's that subjective factor

 

Mike

[sibhusky]

I found here that the difference of lift speed between using Chair one and using the 4-5 combo (which NEVER has even one person waiting because it's only open during holiday times, so everyone forgets about it) meant a line had to be at least 8 minutes before it paid off to go to the 4-5 combo. And even then, it didn't really pay off because there's no foot rest, so your circulation is getting cut off while you sit forever. We almost never have an 8 minute lift line here. The result of those kind of crowds when translated to the Ant Hill at the top is reminiscent of Camelback's Honeymoon Lane at 2 PM, so I usually leave not because of the lift lines, but because I like more elbow room on the hill these days and can't stand the sort of "gang skiing" that occurs when a large family all decides to inexplicably cut en masse from the right side of Big Ravine to the left side all at the same time.

[Ride Delaware ?]

Does the app total vertical?

[OutCold]

I'm curious, how many users do you have? I'm just wondering how many people actually track this kind of info.

[phresheez]

Does the app total vertical?

 

yes, and it can total it over the entire season too. and much, much more.

 

Mike