Working On Stowe, Disappointed With Data

I seem to get a lot of hits whenever I do something Back East, so I started working on Stowe Mountain, Vermont. Also, it’s pretty tedious and painstaking work, making these maps and the posters and t-shirts, so I like to have more than one thing going at once so I can switch around when my mind starts to wander.

Anyway, I did the Stowe slope map and the 3d model, and it’s got these incredible layers. And I mean that literally, incredible, because I don’t believe the mountain really looks like that. The thing is, these DEMS, Digital Elevation Models that I’m working from are made in different ways, and probably some are handcrafted by different people. Sometimes they’re made by digitizing contour maps, and I think this map of Stowe is a poorly digitized contour map.

I don’t know, maybe someone who’s been there can tell me that there are these terraces all over the place, but I just don’t believe it. It’s really disappointing too, I mean, if you look at the ski areas I’ve done in Utah - Snowbird, Alta, Park City - those have some real steeps and while there’s a little evidence of aliasing, it’s not nearly as pronounced as it is for Stowe.

The ultimate solution would be to do a LiDAR scan of the mountain, but that would cost a few thousand dollars at least. Not really enough money in 3dSkiMaps for that, yet. There are some satellites going up that may be able to offer really good elevation data and images a few years from now. But that will cost several hundred dollars, and there’s not enough money in 3dSkiMaps for that either, not yet.

I would love to fly around the world, madly digitizing every ski mountain there is and making beautiful 3dSkiMaps™ of them all. If anybody knows anybody who wants to fund something like that, steer them this way, please. Until then I’ll keep doing the best with what I’ve got. Come to think of it, it seems like it would behoove just about every ski area to have a good LiDAR scan, if only for maintenance purposes.