So my day of skiing at Sugar Bowl, my first of this season, is in the books. It was a spectacular ski day, Mid 50s, sunny and not a cloud in the blue sky. The snow wasn't fantastic, but as it hadn't snowed in weeks, it was as good as you could expect. As long as we stuck to the groomed runs, it was fine. It was a perfect day for cruising, which is exactly what I like to do anyway, so I was really happy.
As promised, I brought my GPS along with me. I wasn't sure it was going to work from my jacket pocket, but it did, like a charm. The Garmin 705 has a feature which lets you record data for each lap so when I started, I would create a new lap every time I got back down to the lift. After a few rides up, I started a new lap at both the top and bottom of the lift so I get a better reading on how fast I was skiing. So starting at lap 8, you can see the lap that average about 8 mph—those are all the lifts. Lap 18 was a mistake, you can ignore that. Lap 23 includes part of lunch and can also ignored.
The remaining data is really interesting. Now Sugar Bowl, at least the part we were skiing, is not all that steep, and my average speed is somewhere in the 18-25 mph range. The GPS stops recording when my speed drops below 1 mph, but these averages include all the starting and stopping time on a run. On the faster runs, like lap #9 at 30 mph, I'm guessing I didn't stop.
For top speed, I hit 52.5 mph. My buddy Russell thinks this is way too fast—that I need a speed suit to get up that velocity. Perhaps. There were some steep short sections down at the bottom of Mt. Lincoln where I was cranking pretty hard. Seems fast, but the data doesn't lie*.
There are some really interesting things to look. Garmin has added a player to the their website.
You can really get a sense of my ski day by loading up the player. Because of the conditions, only a few runs were "skiable" and it really shows when you hit the play button and see us repeating the same lifts and runs over and over.
Another fascinating thing is that it's possible to export the GPX data from the Garmin and import it into Google Earth. Then you can adjust the camber on the view and get something like a 3D view of the mountain and the path we took on it.
It was a fun experiment and I'll try again on a day where I can ski anywhere on the mountain at a larger resort, maybe Squaw or Heavenly.
* except when it does
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