Currie Bowl


My latest FAR TripBit from 2010-06-06 13:30:48
(See on map as well as more of this month's FAR bits)   

A Forgettable Season, but a Cool Web Toy

The 2009/2010 ski season was a decidedly mediocre beast that will probably, and deservedly, quickly drain from the ever more porous memory bins of my aging mind. It started well, with a very nice Christmas season, but come January new snow was all but absent for three long months of powder cold turkey. It did return in April to provide a lift to a season that would otherwise have been memorable for the wrong reasons, but there were no epic days to fuel future bar conversations.

Although I don't think many folks noticed, I did return to provide fairly regular updates this season in the form of TripBits, which are picture and audio clips from an app I wrote for my iPhone. One of the nice features of these is that they are geotagged using the phone GPS and so can be plotted on a map. I recently discovered this is particularly cool when used with the 3D capabilities of Google Earth, as it allows you to pan, tilt and zoom to see the slopes, ridges etc. This inspired me to spend the week since the lifts closed, cobbling together the web goodie now at the bottom of my main FAR page (redtree.com/far for those of you not already reading this there).

If you don't already have it you will need the Google Earth plugin, which I would highly recommend in any event, and a reasonably current browser. Thus equipped, you should be able to see my plots of all the current runs as well as recent TripBits posted at the ski hill, most, but not all by me. Clicking on the run lines will pop up a description, usually with pictures, while clicking on one of the red trees will produce the TripBit picture and audio clip.

Rather cool in my biased opinion as it definitely gives a better perspective of the terrain than any static 2D map could. However I would think that as I suffer from terminal geek syndrome, so if you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know.