Vertical Drop and other “Tall Tales”

If you haven’t taken a look at MountainVertical.com, you might want to sneak a peak and check to see what the “true-up” vertical for your favorite resort is. It’s a bit tough to tell who maintains this site as well as exactly what their methodology and source for their statistics are. There is a Stats and Accuracy page, but it doesn’t clearly define where and how they are compiling these stats – accuracy to the foot? I would hope that topo maps with minimally 10 ft increments were used, because if Google Earth were used, it has variation of +/- 10 meters, or an over/under of over 30 feet each way which means a potential 120 foot vertical error rate. This all noted, I still like the site, with it’s clean look, easy user interface and unique perspective on presenting ski resort data.

Here’s what I like:

• It’s clean and simple
• Data is presented in an easy to understand format
• Searching for resorts works quickly and simply
• As a skier, I love long, sustained fall-line skiing, which is basically what their “true-up vertical descent” stat represents

Here’s what I still would like to see:

• Some sort of comparison tool
• Details on the “true-up” locations for each resort, on a map would be really helpful
• More details on the data collection process are needed as well

MountainVertical.com is an interesting and fun site and I hope to see it expand further in the coming winter season.

Welcome to my "Resort Marketing" blog. I hope that you will consider subscribing to my blog's feed or leaving a comment on this post. I look forward to seeing you again soon and thank you for visiting!