[greggblanchard]

Glad you guys dig this. As the author of the story, a bit more context here might be helpful for the non-ski crowd.

The simple verison is that small resorts really do operate on minuscule budgets. When I met with the marketing director of this mountain, they were struggling to afford email marketing. Vail might spend more on a single print ad than a mountain like Nordic Valley does all year on marketing. This means that vendors struggle to build stuff that would solve their needs because there's just not enough money in the ski area's pockets to buy it. In other words; solutions like this aren't just clever hacks, they are often necessities.

This often manifests itself in turning stock, off-the-shelf stuff into things like ski racks or signage or tools. Some industry publications will even devote sections of their magazines to these hacks because so much creativity is born from them. This, however is one of the first times I've really seen it crossover into technology which is an awesome step to see happen.

[paddy_m]

Nice blog btw, I'll definitely be digging in. What do you think the chances of Nordic Valley's planned expansion are?

[greggblanchard]

Thanks, been writing 3-5x a week for about a decade so let me know if you're looking for a specific topic and I can give a starting point.

Re: expansion - I think the odds are really, really slim. Ski expansions at that scale just don't happen in 2019. I wouldn't be surprised to see them expand to the ridge just south of the resort like they've been trying for the last few years (and who knows, maybe this is a play to help that move along), but nothing near the plans being outlined.

[rbritton]

One area I've seen that also affect is the data you can get out of a ski resort. On rare occasions, a resort's site will populate its snow report from easily parseable data, but for the vast majority, you're stuck just customizing a scraper for the data because it's likely input manually through a CMS.

[wavefunction]

old rental skis as a bench... the list goes on and on and it's charming every time!

My only quibble is that for resorts like Winter Park (3000+ skiable acres) compared to Nordic Valley (100 skiable acres) the larger resorts and their expansive boundaries require complex interfaces and even then they're seldom all that useful.

I grew up in Colorado but navigating the runs and maps of the big resorts has become meaningless given the scale and my own human failings, and despite my historical experience and knowledge.

Nordic Valley could display the entire resort as a heatmap indicating snow-depth and skiability because it is a small and compact set of runs. While when you take a place like Brighton or Vail or Breck and the sheer scale of the resort makes displaying meaningful data very difficult.

[megy]

> The simple verison is that small resorts really do operate on minuscule budgets.

Yes, all small companies are like this.