Changes To Jackson Hole 3dSkiMap Required

I posted this to the forum and thought I should also post it here. Someone pointed out that I hadn’t put a color scale on the Jackson Hole poster.

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Yes, I realized that as I was drifting off to sleep a few nights ago. I was trying to think if there was anything I left out, and then I realized “D’oh! No scale! No logo!”

I was hoping to get it ready this weekend, but just for completeness I went back over the code that translates slopes to the color scale, and there was another “D’oh!” Not a huge deal, but I had a line that was putting a ceiling of 45 degrees on the translated data. I think I might have put that there temporarily, intending to fix it later.

It turns out it hardly matters for many of the resorts I’ve done, but when I took that line out and ran it on Jackson Hole, there were slopes of up to about 81 degrees. So now I’ve spent my whole weekend trying out ways to represent that.

It seems clear that the scale as it is now gives a good color range for representing 99% (or some high proportion) of ski slopes. I wouldn’t want to just expand it to make the high end 85 degrees, because then almost all slopes would be green and blue. Even on Jackson Hole, the area greater than 45 degrees is almost exclusively in the cliffs, according to my data.

So I decided to retain the current scale and then added a section on the top. I tried a lot of variations: scale reversal to repeat the colors but in a shorter space; yellow fade to black; yellow fade to white, and different versions of all those.

At this point yellow fade to white seems the most likely solution, it’s the only one that came anywhere near to grabbing me. But I’m going to sleep on it and see if I still like it tomorrow.