Skier Behavior (Wonkish)
April 11th, 2009Posted in Skiing Everywhere
With my apologies to Paul Krugman for the low level of wonkishness this post will provide, I thought I’d provide one of his warnings in the headline.
When I say skier behavior to my friends they immediately think of liftline misbehavior, reckless actions on the slopes and foolishness in the bar. What does that say about my friends?
The particular skier behavior I’m thinking about is how and why skiers choose to ski where they do, both on a macro level, which continent, state or mountain, and then in a micro level, which side of the mountain, which run, which side of the trail?
There are lots of people with a large economic stake in understanding and in shaping the macro level skier behavior- economic development agencies, tourism boards, resort associations, and individual resorts. On what I’m terming the micro level I’ll bet any research here is by academics and possibly a consulting firm or two in the business of helping resorts plan new lift installations or on mountain restaurant locations- maybe. Research efforts tend to follow financial incentives, so who really cares which way skiers head down the mountain as long as a lift is there to haul them back up to a place where they can grab a burger or a beer or reach another part of the mountain. (OK, on public land, government plant and wildlife biologists have a huge interest now days when resort changes and expansions are being planned, but I think their interests are primarily construction impacts and summer usage impacts when plants, animals and soils are more vulnerable to human disturbance than in winter when most of the animals are gone and everything else is buried under several feet of snow.)
It’s been centuries since I was in grad school reading research on hiker behavior in wilderness areas- which trails do they take and why, where are they heading and why, how often have they hiked here and why are they doing it again, etc) but some of the statistical models geographers have developed for transportation planning were useful in understanding foot travel. Now that ski season is winding down, I hope to find time to see if any curious grad students or skiing professors have applied their skills and tools to the important question of “Where do powder skiers head for first tracks when they dismount the lift?” (This is a POWDER BLOG after all!) I’ll bet there are some cool computer maps that have been generated showing skier dispersal patterns, and more importantly, the blank areas between the dots. Even cooler would be ones showing the change, say, every half hour.
I can see eyes rolling. But there is a method to this madness, just ask trucking companies and taxis companies or airport limo companies how much time and money they have saved as the work of geographers has been rolled into apps for GSP devices and mobile communication tools. I’ll bet it won’t be many more years before a resort such as Vail embeds a nano GPS tag in every lift ticket and season pass and will be able to monitor on a computer in their offices a tiny blinking dot for every skier on their mountain in real time aiding them in deploying their staffing, their equipment and food resources more efficiently. And yes, they will certainly be interested in where those little dots go after the lifts close.
Stay tuned, we’re only nine years into the 21st century.
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