Marks of a Good Online Trail Map

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.