Ski Squaw Valley

It's a tradition for us. For several years already we are spending the President's week in Squaw Valley, this year like last year staying in the Red Wolfe Lodge, right next to the slopes. The weather is a surprise every year. We have had weeks with 5 feet new snow. This year however the sun has been out, the snow plenty, and we had lots of fun.

Last season I started playing around with the GPS app from Motion-X on my iPhone, which generates great track maps. However, what I was much more interested was an elevation profile. The place to generate profiles is GPS Visualizer, a nice little website. There you can upload your GPS file, pick from a multitude of options and then the website draws a nice altitude profile.

And a profile is required, as you can see on the two pictures from the Silverado chair. On a simple map it would just show a line, pretty much the same line if you go up or down. However, typically up is smoothed out by the chair, while down is much less predictable, and steeper. For example, on the picture left we came down pretty much through the center, passing the two little trees, while on the right we were pretty much underneath the chair until we went around that cliff on the right.

Here are a couple of elevation profiles for our runs today (2-18-10). The run in the morning was with my daughter, while in the afternoon Michael jointed me for the last three chairs. BTW, I loaded the elevation profile from GPS visualizer into GIMP to add some context information.

This is the profile of the morning run with Jennifer, about an 1h and 40m. Several interesting things to see: The lower mountain is really much lower than the rest of the ski resort. The wait time to get on the chairs gets a new dimension, at Shirley Lake it took us about 250s or over 4' to get back on the chair ;-)

And here is the afternoon profile: