Grays On Trays

If you look at a number of ski maps, especially those of larger areas, you’ll notice a name far off in one corner. It’s an artist’s signature, really: James Niehues.

Fortune magazine calls him the Ski Trail Map Painter. In an interview with the magazine, he says “I’ve probably done 75% of the large resorts.”

Niehues renders photographs of mountains and topographical maps into art, and says that creating trees takes up 80% of each job.

You can read more about Niehues at his website. There we learn some of his art:

“Whether it’s a ski map, a regional or a resort property all perspectives are rendered in a way to best show all aspects of the terrain. In many instances, distortions are necessary to bring everything into a single view.”

Do you ever look at a trail map that claims somewhere that the mountain has X number of trails and then wonder if that’s actually the case?

The map of Mont Tremblant claims 94 trails. Take a look at the trail map, and you’ll see that each named route has a unique number.

Is there a logic to the sequence? It’s not obvious.

Do you like to study the landscape of a ski area before you visit? Looking at the trail map and reading descriptions (online sites, guidebooks, etc.) can help.

But maps are flat, and sliding on the snow requires, by definition, ground that is not flat.

At least one company, 3D Ski Maps, offers color-coded maps for a number of mountains in North America. These include Squaw Valley, Aspen Highlands and Ajax; Vail and Beaver Creek; SugarLoaf USA, and Okemo.

You can look at static maps or Java-enabled ones that let you rotate, scan and pan the map. The Java maps take a bit of work to maneuver, however.

Though the selection is limited, the site is worth a visit.

GraysOnTrays.com has a directory of North American ski and snowboard resorts. It lists most if not all places with a web presence, sometimes giving a snapshot from Google Earth so that you can see where the places are in relationship to each other.

But here’s a tool that may be even better: the Ski Bonk directory. (Here’s a look at Colorado.) It uses Google Maps to give you a map of a given state, with icons representing some lift-served terrain. It even gives, for each area, snow conditions and the number of lifts open. Click on the icon to get even more goodies, such as trail maps and a weather forecast.

The About page says the service is “a mashup of SnoCountry, OnTheSnow, Weather Underground, the National Weather Service, and several other data feeds to provide a graphical view of worldwide skiing conditions on a Google map.”

The service appears to use your Internet address to provide the default map, but you can type in the name of a state, city, or even a ski area. (Be sure to put the name of the resort in the appropriate box, or you’ll get invalid results.)

Try it out!

Many ski areas offer online trail maps, but only a few do it right.

Some places require you to down load a PDF file. For the resort’s staff, that’s the easiest and least time-consuming approach. Vail, offers as PDF, as does Michigan’s Boyne Mountain. If you don’t have a color printer, a PDF map loses some of its value, and on some computers, it takes a while to open the Acrobat Reader. A nice supplement to PDF maps is to give site visitors the option to view a JPEG map as well. Ohio’s Mad River Mountain does this.

Not quite as desirable is a JPEG map. Jackson Hole, Wyoming presents an overview map that is fairly useless for anything but drilling down to a smaller area of terrain. But even then, the result is unsatisfying. Zoom in on the Gondola area, and you get an unreadable JPEG file. You can zoom into that file, but only once.

Flash technology can be useful; with that, you can click on, say, a blue square to see all the blue slopes. Click on another icon and all the lifts show up. (Minnesota’s Afton Alps gives an example of this approach, but the results don’t work out too well. The trail names are printed in a very small type size.)

Some resort maps let you zoom in quite a ways. Aspen/Snowmass uses this approach. The company offers three versions of maps: low- or high-resolution JPEG, or Flash. But again, the maps can be hard to read if you look at a large section of the map, and if you zoom in too much, it’s easy to lose perspective of the rest of the mountain.

How about having multiple options? Mammoth Mountain offers three choices: a PDF map, an interactive Flash map, and what the resort calls a “static map.” Actually, it’s better than a static map; you can scan and pan the terrain, and the fonts are a reasonable size.

I’ve been experimenting with the trail map at Gunstock, New Hampshire. (Here’s the page from which you can launch the map.) It’s interactive, meaning that you can select from trails of various colors. That’s fairly common.

But Gunstock goes one better by giving you pop-up windows that dispense more information. See that squashed little oval icon at the base? Hover over the icon and you’ll find out that it’s the tubing area.

Then head to the slopes and Gunstock shines. Want to find black diamonds? Easy enough. But then click on a specific trail and you’ll find some commentary on that trail. The note for Upper Recoil says “A couple of steeper pitches, but wide.” The intermediate snowboarder looking to advance to diamond slopes might find this to be a good place to start. On the other hand, the notes for Tiger Steeps reads “like skiing through Volkswagens.” These notes–assuming that they are accurate and are not merely marketing fluff–make the map more valuable than most.

The solution to ripped, wrinkled trailmaps may be a cloth.

While at Crested Butte a couple of weeks ago, I was given a localized version of The Spanky. Short for “Sports Hanky,” the spanky is a cloth that can be used as a fabric for cleaning off your goggles, and more importantly, for finding your way around the mountain.

A key element to the product, according to the company’s web site, is a “fabric that will not scratch today’s high tech len’s surface.” They claims that it’s safe for goggles and camera lenses as well.

Buried in the cloth is a trail map of Crested Butte. I always like having a trail map with me, but paper maps quickly become wrinkled, ripped, torn, and worse, rendered into several pieces through repeated acts of placing in and removing from coat pockets.

That can’t happen with the Spanky. Though mine get a bit wrinkled and in need of cleaning, it’s all in one piece, even after three days on the mountain and the trip home.

The Spanky doesn’t take the place of a paper map, however. Before heading out to a mountain for the first time, get a paper map and study it carefully. Take a look at the statistics, such as elevation and lift hours, that aren’t on The Spanky. Get familiar with the names of slopes that you’d like to visit. The names of black trails show up very well on my copy, but the names of green trails are harder to see, and some of the blue names are very difficult to read at all.

The company has over 40 resorts represented in its inventory, including 11 mountains in Colorado alone. You can get one for under $15–$8.95 plus shipping, handling, and tax as applicable.

If you’re going to a place for just a day or two, The Spanky is on the spendy side. But if you’re going to be somewhere 3 or more days, it may be more worthwhile.