Mountain Trail Histograms: Alta, Aspen Mountain, Jackson Hole

I’ve been thinking about how to use my data to rate mountains numerically. Now, I realize that steepness is not the only factor in difficulty, but still, steepness is the only difficulty factor that can be measured completely objectively. So I did histograms of a few resorts, shown here.

What these images show are counts of the number of points having a certain slope only within the masked off area of the trails. The images are not normalized vertically, so the vertical size of the histogram reflects the total area of the trails. This presentation is still under development though, because it doesn’t show off-piste data. This is difficult to quantify from this kind of analysis, because some off-piste areas really are unskiable, whereas some mountains like Jackson Hole capitalize on vast amounts of off-piste skiing (I think, never been there).

So I think I would have to have two histograms, one for the official trails and one for the off-piste stuff as nearly as I can estimate. But then the case could be made that the official trails do give an approximate idea of the steepness of the off-piste areas, so it may be sufficient to only give the Trail Histogram since off-piste skiing is a different kettle of fish anyway.