EpicMix

I was in Vail last weekend, not only was the snow great and the weather awesome, I was excited to try out EpicMix. As a geek I love a good app, and I also love a good graph and I definitely love skiing.

EpicMix tracks your activity on the mountain using an RFID chip in your ski pass. At the base of each lift your ski pass will be picked up and your activity logged. You can then view your activity on the website or on the accompanying iPhone and Android Apps. You earn pins for your achievements and there are hundreds to unlock. It also tracks your vertical feet skied based on the lifts that you used. New for this year too (although I didn’t try it), was that you could use one of the on mountain photographers to capture images or you around the mountain that are automatically added to your account.

I thought it was pretty awesome, and a great start towards tracking your activity on the mountain. Cons for me are that it doesn’t track which slopes you skied, just the lifts that you road, it could do with integration with your phones GPS, and also that it took 4 or 5 hours to sync to my phone from the time I actually skied. I’m sure it will improve over time… if they need a developer…;-)

EpicMix covers the Vail family of resorts, Vail, Breckenridge, Beaver Creek, Heavenly, Northstar and Keystone.

Get on iTunes here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/epicmix/id395375487?mt=8

 

Ski Tracks

Ski Tracks I discovered a couple of seasons ago. The premise is similar, tracking your journey around the mountain, although instead of RFID in uses GPS, and instead of being a social media platform it is more of a stats app.

It tracks where you skied on a Google Map and shows you your max speed, altitudes, metres skied etc. You launch the app and it runs in your pocket, it integrates with the iPod too. On my 3Gs it drains the battery pretty bad but I’ve heard from others with newer iPhones that this isn’t the case for them.

The accuracy is pretty decent, and my brother and I had a lot of fun with this one, trying to beat our max speed and seeing just how much of the mountain that we’d covered that day. It goes into a lot of detail and you can see a run-by-run breakdown of where you skied.

An obvious advantage over EpicMix is that you can use this anywhere and not just an enabled resorts.

Get on iTunes here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ski-tracks-gps-track-recorder/id365724094?mt=8