Friday, February 09, 2007
In the know
Skiers have plenty of options to find truthful assessments of snow conditions.
Mark Taylor is outdoors editor at The Roanoke Times.
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Mark Taylor
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With Roanoke getting 4 inches of powdery snow Tuesday night, it stood to reason that conditions would be prime at nearby ski resorts.
Alex Cashman had the mountains on her mind Wednesday, dropping off her skis for a tune-up at Freestyle ski and skate in Roanoke.
Cashman was planning to head to Snowshoe Mountain in West Virginia over the weekend. From a quick trip to Snowshoe's Web site, she already knew that the resort's slopes were covered with plenty of snow.
"It also is going to be cold," said Cashman, a 22-year-old Hollins University student, who snatched her Mom's special thermal underwear before heading back to Roanoke after a weekend home in Charlottesville. "I made sure to get my mom's Hot Chillys."
Like Cashman, few skiers these days make trips on blind faith alone.
Most do their research, consulting a variety of sources to get a detailed idea of what they will find once they reach the slopes.
In today's connected society, the amount of information available and the ease in getting it has reached greater heights.
All resorts publish daily conditions reports on their Web site. Some sites even include constantly refreshed pictures from on-slope Web cams.
The Internet also offers sites that compile reports from resorts, such as Skireport.com and Snowcountry.com. Weather sites offer a detailed look at forecasts.
Oh, they still offer those old-fashioned phone hot lines, too.
Getting the information is one thing. Translating and processing all the data is another.
For example, it's not as if there's an industry-wide set of snow reporting standards.
When a resort reports its average base, there's no rule telling them where or how to take measurements.
The same goes for surface conditions.
The same surface could be called one thing at one resort; something different at another.
Wednesday, Joey Zamorski pointed at that morning's copy of the Southeast Ski Areas Association report taped to the counter at Freestyle.
"This one says 'groomed,' this one says 'packed powder,' " he said. "How did they get packed powder?"
He paused and smiled, then answered his own question.
"They groomed it," he said.
Zamorski, a 49-year-old ski technician at the shop, said he focuses on the weather forecast, because he knows how weather affects skiing conditions.
A challenge with that is that weather atop a ski mountain could be quite different from the weather at the nearest weather station.
Through experience, a skier can learn how to make adjustments. Resort workers, particularly those involved with snowmaking operations, will often be willing to offer tips to skiers on how to figure out a fairly accurate weather picture.
As for those base measurements, Zamorski said he doesn't pay any attention to the numbers.
"The other weekend, I was up at The Homestead and at one place they had a pile of snow that must have been 20 feet high," he said. "There's no way they could measure that snow.
"And no one's going to put 20 feet of snow on a report anyway."
At Virginia's Bryce Resort, ski operations co-director Manfred Locher said measurements are taken by pushing a measuring stick into the snow in the middle of a run near the base of the hill.
"You can't get an exact number," Locher said. "But it's fairly accurate."
While it might seem that resorts would be tempted to sweeten their reports, that practice appears to be rare.
Skiers and resort officials agree that a resort that exaggerates its report would soon develop a bad reputation.
"It's like that scene in 'Falling Down' where [Michael Douglas] says, 'I didn't order that hamburger, I ordered that hamburger,'" Zamorski said.
Except instead of going on a violent rampage, the disgruntled skier would just never come back to the offending resort.
"I don't look at the snow report as a marketing tool," said Lindsay Kutsko, who compiles Snowshoe's report. "It's a factual document."
The information age has made it easier for skiers to pass along information -- good and bad -- to other skiers.
For example, Skireport.com has an option inviting skiers to post their personal reports.
The site is getting three times as many first-hand reports this year than last year, said co-founder Jon Brelig of Austin, Texas.
The reports can be brutally honest.
Consider this report from poster "Top" from early January, after a visit to Snowshoe: "Not excellent skiing ... pay to go west ... bare spots ... overcrowding ... way too many beginners and people with no clue ... we need snow."
As conditions improved throughout the month, the first-hand reports grew generally more enthusiastic.
By Jan. 30, "Anonymous" was raving: "Been here the past four days and the conditions have been incredible! The whole mountain's open, although the weekend lift lines sometimes better than an hour.
"Weekday though, wow! Empty Empty Empty! Lots'a room on the trails, no crowds no lines, fantastic!"
Compared with Kutsko's Wednesday report -- 30 to 46 inch base, with a packed powder surface -- which one seems more apt to get skiers excited about heading up to Snowshoe?
