I’ve always been really interested in mapping and statistics. Ever since I started running and cycling I’ve been keeping an exhaustive training log tracking the distance and time for every single workout. One of the things I was most excited about when I got my first smartphone was the ability to track myself while skiing and be able to catalogue all the stats from my day – total vertical skied, top speed, average speed, total distance, max slope, etc. On my Droid, I used Google’s My Tracks app. My Tracks does a great job at recording a simple path that can be overlaid on a Google map, and generates some statistics. When I switched to an iPhone last fall, I struggled to find a replacement for My Tracks.

The first app I found that did the closest thing to replacing My Tracks was Ski Tracks. This app is designed to track skiing and provides a nice UI while the app is running for watching your stats. It’s somewhat complicated to export the GPS path, but it can be done, and the app seemed to work just fine.

Recently, Big Sky Resort released Big Sky Replay, a branded version of Alpine Replay. The resort was pushing their app hard, so I downloaded it and tested it out last weekend. Basically, Big Sky Replay does exactly the same thing as Ski Tracks. It records your location and generates all the same stats (minus maximum slope angle). Big Sky Replay/Alpine Replay also has an excellent web app to go along with their iOS app. Once the day of skiing is over, the data from the app is uploaded to the website. The web app does a better job of displaying the information gathered and provides a great interface for exploring, run by run, a full day of skiing. It even manages to know the names of the various lifts and will match your location information to the lifts. I still haven’t figured out a way to export the GPS tracks, however.

Yesterday at Bridger Bowl, I ran both apps at the same time, in order to compare the data they gathered and to see how Big Sky Replay would function at another ski area. Big Sky Replay/Alpine Replay seemed a little slow to get started and managed to miss my whole entire first lift ride up the Powder Park Chair. It picked up tracking again at the top of Powder Park and matched all the names to the lifts just like it did at Big Sky. My only assumption on the error is that it only tracks the GPS location when the rate of change changes. This makes sense, because the app provides a breakdown of the day into skiing, riding lifts, and resting time. Jumping on a lift would trigger tracking because the position change would go from slow (while walking around the base area) and then suddenly speed up to lift speed when you sit down on the chair. The algorithm for tracking and determining the type of activity must be set to watch for this change. Since a GPS signal can sometimes take a while to get up in the Bridgers, the app must not have started tracking until I was on the lift already. Then, as the speed of the lift was constant, the app would have not registered a change until I unloaded. This also parallels the experience I’ve been having with the app when I stop to take pictures or do a beacon search. Alpine Replay decides that I’m resting and stops recording the track. It also deletes the track from that point back to the last lift ride, erasing everything uphill of my stopping point in some cases and refusing to start recording again in others.

Here’s a screenshot of the Alpine Replay web app showing my tracks for the day at Bridger Bowl.

You can see the missing lift ride. Both apps also missed the new rope tow to get from the bottom of Pierre’s Knob to the bottom of New Bridger, but since the elevation doesn’t change rapidly and and the speed isn’t that much different from skiing it’s understandable. Also worth noting is that when it makes the GPS overlay, Alpine Replay uses it’s own fixed definition of the location of the lifts. This provides a much cleaner track for a lift ride and helps to cancel out some of the error inherent in GPS units, but when a ski area moves a lift, as Bridger Bowl did with the Bridger Lift, it apparently takes Alpine Replay some time to update their locations, as my track still shows the old location of the Bridger Lift.

This screenshot shows the excellent page on Alpine Replay’s web app showing their report on my data for the day.

Comparatively, here’s Ski Tracks version of the GPS map overlay.

View 2.6.2012 Bridger Bowl in a larger map

Ski Tracks got all of the tracks and lifts as a line on the map, but when you go into the actual run/lift breakdown it had similar problems to AR with the rope tow. Ski Tracks will also combine two lifts together if the time between them isn’t far enough apart/the vertical drop isn’t enough. Riding up Powder Park, skiing the cat track down to New Bridger, and then riding up New Bridger is all assumed to be one lift ride with a dip in the middle.

Here’s the data Ski Tracks gathered during the day.

Overall the two seem to be very close to each other in all the major tracking categories.

• Vertical Feet: 5600 AR/5213 Ski Tracks
• Top Speed: 51.8mph/47.5mph
• Ski Distance: 5.1 miles/5.7miles

Even though they both gather essentially the same data, there are aspects of both that are superior. I really like the cumulative data and web app of Alpine Replay, but the detailed mapping, concise report, and the ability to export the GPS path in Ski Tracks is also really important to me. For that reason, I’ll probably keep using both when I’m out skiing. It wasn’t worth hiking the Ridge yesterday, but I’m also curious to see how Alpine Replay handles a slow, human-powered ascent. Hopefully it doesn’t mark it as resting and refuse to generate the track.

In other news, Bridger was totally socked in by a huge cloud yesterday and the snow was rock hard and scrapy. I skied for about an hour and a half and then called it a day.

I had this shot printed and made into a 18″ Fracture.

Overall, I’m extremely impressed with the quality of the Fracture. The print arrives in very handsome packaging and includes all the mounting materials to hang the print on a wall. The print itself is simple. The image is printed onto a sheet of glass which is then backed with a thin layer of foam core. Fracture claims that their method of printing provides “vibrant, rich, and glossy colors” behind a glass plate that is scratch and fade resistant.

The print that I definitely meets these claims and met my expectations. Color reproduction was accurate, although I feel that the print is a bit dark. It’s always recommended to bump up the brightness of an image before printing it, as most computer screens are backlit, and I think the extra layer of glass might require a extra bump in brightness.

The glass layers does seem to make the colors richer and more vibrant, however, and I could easily tell the difference when viewing the image on the wall. The print resolution was also excellent. I had some concerns that when viewed through the glass the image would end up being soft, but the details and lines of my print were just as sharp as the original file.

Given my experience with this test print, I would not hesitate to order a Fracture again and I’m hoping to offer it as a print option for ordering from this site.

It’s been an unnaturally warm, windy, and dry winter in southwest Montana. Pre-season, the weather guys couldn’t stop talking about how this “La Nina” winter was going to bring more banner snowfall, cold temps, and winter conditions to much of the northwestern part of the country. That prediction has failed miserably. Bridger Bowl has received 88″ of snow to date, and Big Sky isn’t much better at 127″. Snowpacks in the area are running at around 70-80% of their usual depths at this time of the year. To say that the area needs snow badly is an understatement.

Despite the lack of new snow and the continued failure of the weather forecasters to predict anything close to the correct forecast, the snow that we have received is skiing pretty well. I worked out of the Bowl at Big Sky on Sunday and, despite the 30-40mph wind gusts that rocked the lift station, the skiing was great. The Triple, Shedhorn, and Dakota all went on windhold for most of the day, leaving the 20+ skiers who happened to be uphill from the Tram at 10:45AM as the only ones able to access it for the rest of the day. Bowl and Summit patrols and those lucky 20 essentially had their own private 11,000′ mountain to ski for the day. The high winds were buffing out the snow constantly and moving it around so that each run was on smooth, grippy hero snow. Great stuff.

The forecast for the foreseeable future looks like more of the same, but as long as it doesn’t deteriorate, I’m more than happy with what we have on the mountain.

View 1.29.2012 Big Sky in a larger map

Bridger was eerily similar to the East Coast today. The snow on the lower mountain was very heavy and wind-affected. Anywhere that the wind was able to scour was scraped down to hardpack and was almost unskiable. I hiked up B-Route once to Sluice Box. It was a gorgeous bluebird day and the views from the top of the Ridge stretched from the Tobacco Roots to the Crazies and the Absarokas. The skiing improved the farther down I skied. The upper narrow part of the route was heavy, clumpy snow that rapidly lightened and became much more skiable. Well worth the 1st trip up the bootpack but not necessarily worth a return trip.

There’s a couple of inches of snow in the forecast for the area over the weekend which might do a lot to freshen up the snow. However, we still need big storms and lots of them.

View 1.27.2012 Bridger in a larger map

I drove up to Bridger Bowl this morning for my first day there this season. It snowed for a while overnight and Bridger was reporting 7″ this morning. Conditions were very soft, deep in places, and rocky in places. South Bowl was a minefield with good snow covering bare rocks. I only managed to ski one run before the power went out to all of Bridger Canyon. I was halfway up Pierre’s Knob and made it to the top on the diesel backup.

Patrol had no idea when power would be back so I raced up the Fingers bootpack ahead of the crowds for one run down the 3rd Finger. Only one person had been down before me and I took an alternate route through some tight trees and scored knee-to-waist deep powder down the entire chute. My legs were toast from a full patrol day at Big Sky the day before and the bootpack was jammed up so I headed home.

View 1.22.2012 Bridger in a larger map

Driving up Gallatin Canyon on my way to work this morning, I was despondent. at 6:30 AM the temperature was 42F and it was pouring rain. Very much par for the course for this winter. Last week a strong storm pounded Montana, delivering record snowfall in most of the major cities. Bozeman and the surrounding area recorded under an inch of snow.

Lone Peak, however, was operating under its own weather system. I turned onto the access road and immediately the rain turned to snow and intensified. I crawled up the road at about 15 mph because it was snowing so heavily that I couldn’t see much more beyond my headlights. This pounding snow continued all day until about 1pm and then resumed at 2pm.

The Andesite complex was skiing extremely well all morning, with about 4-5″ inches of heavy powder on top of the groomed terrain from the night before. As the day went on the temperature dropped and the snow got lighter and fluffier and the skiing improved. I spent the afternoon at Shedhorn and the glades and trails were skiing incredibly, albeit with some areas of thin cover. All in all, an excellent sleeper powder day.

Driving back down the canyon at the end of the day, the snow at Big Sky turned to rain in the canyon and then back into a blizzard around the Lava Lake bridge. It’s still snowing heavy, wet flakes in town. Tomorrow should be just as good.

In a non-skiing related tone, I edited all the images in this post with the just-released public beta of Lightroom 4. Although I’m not fully switched over to it yet (and likely won’t switch until it’s officially released and I can import and convert my Lightroom 3 library), I’m pretty excited about the new beta. Adobe’s Tom Hogarty has a pretty good interview on the changes and new features here, but in my brief experience with it so far the newly tuned sliders seem much improved and the mapping function is pretty neat. I’m also excited about the inline video viewing and editing tools that this version provides.

On Boxing Day we hiked out to Long Point Light in Provincetown, MA. Long Point Light is located on the very tip of Cape Cod and guards the entrance to Provincetown Harbor. It is located in the Province Lands of the Cape Cod National Seashore. Parking for Long Point is available at Pilgrim’s First Landing Park (Click the link for a Google Map and Directions). I parked there for several hours up until and after sunset and didn’t have any trouble, but this was off-season so YMMV during the summer and possibly before sunrise.

Leading straight away from the parking area is a mile-long breakwater that cuts a huge section out of the hike. Some of the rocks are slightly unstable and might be slippery/covered in guano. Also, be sure to check a tide chart before hiking out as the breakwater can be underwater at high tide.

You can see Long Point Light for the entire walk along the breakwater and the route to the Light is very obvious. Just follow the shoreline. Depending on the tide, the hike can be kind of complicated. A channel cuts through the dunes about halfway out to the light and if you have to cut all the way around the channel the hike will be much longer and take way more time.

View Larger Map

We chose to splash across the shallow water and made out just fine and on the hike back the tide had gone out and there was no channel to deal with.

The lighthouse itself sits in the dunes. There’s a small hill just to the southwest of the lighthouse with a memorial cross and a small clearing.

The way the point curls around, the sun sets behind the dunes to the west somewhere near Wood End Light and rises to the east over the open ocean.

There’s a good view of Provincetown and on a super clear day I’d imagine it’d be possible to see Boston. There’s interesting aspects to shoot all around, including some old pilings from a pier. There is one annoying solar panel sitting next to the lighthouse which is kind of a pain, but I’d imagine that could easily be photoshopped out.

It’s a five-mile hike if you can walk straight along the shoreline and it took us two and a half hours roundtrip, not including shooting and setup. Hiking back in the dark along the breakwater was entertaining, too.

I was lucky enough to shoot both sunrise and sunset on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve sunrise I spent at Beavertail State Park. As I was driving home for Christmas Eve dinner along the beach in Falmouth, the sunrise started going off and I pulled off the road at the first place I could find. Bristol Beach is not usually a location that I would pick for a sunset shoot as there isn’t much interesting going on there, but I managed to find an old set of pilings and used the tele end of my 18-200 to frame Nobska Light behind the sun.

The cool thing about Beavertail is that the lighthouse is right at the top of the point that makes up the State Park, which means that it can be interesting for both sunrise and sunset.

I also used my new D200 with a borrowed 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 this morning and took some long tele shots looking out into Buzzards Bay. I really like the flexibility  that having a long telephoto lens (especially on a crop body) gives in terms of composition. Not many people use tele lenses for landscape photography but I try to always check out what the long focal length can give me in terms of unique perspectives.

The rest of my shots from the morning are in the gallery below.