GeoGirl
Certified Ski Diva
Hi ski divas!
My burning question of the day is: how do resorts decide whether to classify routes as green, blue, black, double-black, etc? Is it like rock climbing where several people run it and decide "huh, this feels like a blue" and then come to a consensus? Is it determined by the steepness of the slope? If you've been involved in making new ski trails, what goes into your thought process about difficulty?
The "Geo" part of my usernames stems from the fact that I'm a geologist in a geography master's program and therefore a total nerd. Skiing has given me some great ideas for projects for my geospatial information science classes! Namely, I'm hoping to run slope, elevation, and aspect analysis on elevation data for Mt. Hood and Mt. Bachelor and then compare it with the ski trails. I'm curious about the slope, and variation of slope values, on trails of different difficulty levels and how those would vary between ski areas. These would just be estimates, unfortunately, because the elevation data is just ground elevation and doesn't take snow grooming into account.
Anyhow, I would love some feedback. Also let me know if you'd be interested in me posting the final results of that analysis.
My burning question of the day is: how do resorts decide whether to classify routes as green, blue, black, double-black, etc? Is it like rock climbing where several people run it and decide "huh, this feels like a blue" and then come to a consensus? Is it determined by the steepness of the slope? If you've been involved in making new ski trails, what goes into your thought process about difficulty?
The "Geo" part of my usernames stems from the fact that I'm a geologist in a geography master's program and therefore a total nerd. Skiing has given me some great ideas for projects for my geospatial information science classes! Namely, I'm hoping to run slope, elevation, and aspect analysis on elevation data for Mt. Hood and Mt. Bachelor and then compare it with the ski trails. I'm curious about the slope, and variation of slope values, on trails of different difficulty levels and how those would vary between ski areas. These would just be estimates, unfortunately, because the elevation data is just ground elevation and doesn't take snow grooming into account.
Anyhow, I would love some feedback. Also let me know if you'd be interested in me posting the final results of that analysis.