Lexington, MA – Like many of us, MIT graduate Frank Lo lives to ski, always looking for the biggest mountains to descend. He’s been frustrated, however, by misleading statistics touted by the marketing departments of ski resorts around the world.
“For example, I hate to pick out Whistler specifically because I’ve been there and it was a divine experience, but I think its a bit silly that they report their vertical drop as 5,280 feet,” laments Lo. “Those stats have been skewed upwards for marketing purposes.”
To set the record straight, Lo has co-founded www.mountainvertical.com, a website dedicated to ascertaining a ski area’s true skiable vertical drop. Lo and his buddies set about defining the term “True-Up Vertical” that excludes that solitary run that inflates skiable vertical, or situations where it’s not physically possible to ski from a resort’s highest point to its lowest without taking a lift ride in between or a long catwalk or traverse connecting the two. It also eliminates the additional vertical drop created by terrain accessible solely by hiking.
“We literally go through a rigorous process of analyzing real topographical data to figure out what are the true stats, independent of what the ski resorts claim themselves,” Lo explains. “What we found is that some resorts report accurately but a huge portion of them round up or inflate their numbers. Skiers deserve to know what’s real, so we report out the real numbers. It’s all on the site we put up. This is all about providing something meaningful to all of us who love getting out there onto the slopes.”
That’s no easy task to complete for the thousands of ski resorts across the U.S. and Canada, ranging from the largest resorts to small mom ‘n pop slopes.
“We’ve already figured out the true stats for hundreds of resorts — every listing where you see the green check mark has been verified by us. This is a very time consuming process, but no one has done this before and we’re glad to be able to contribute this to the skier and snowboarder community.”
To check out the true statistics of your favorite hill, log onto www.mountainvertical.com.