I have never done the watch nor phone app ski tracking thing until Mustang in 2023 when they explicitly mentioned the Avenza app and a dedicated 'trail' map of their tenure. Going forward I would think I mostly would record unique or new ski areas> Perhaps an occasional Eldora day if I am data experimenting with known altitudes, verticals, etc... like I describe below.
For those familiar with my Mustang ski track maps the past two seasons, it turns out there is an old, poorly labeled but free, map of Eldora on Avenza. Combined with the fact that my cheap Fitbit died in the hot tub at Mustang means I upgraded to a Garmin watch (one of the cheap ones for Garmin but still better, more capable and pricier than prior). The Garmin, despite being on the lower end side of their many watches still does ski tracking. I thought I'd compare the two apps to see if they were very close in distance, altitude, elevation drop, etc...
I have not had time to do more than a glance at the numbers they produced, but very interesting experiment that I only remembered to start about a third into my ski day March 3. I clearly goofed up, starting and stopping the Garmin for each run. It then lists each run separately as its own event/exercise and then only maps each run out one at a time. Reading up later, the claim is that the Garmin will recognize each lift ride and pause recording. I'll try it, but will be surprised if true.
The Avenza map will not show any difference in lift rides versus going downhill and will not calculate each run separately unless you do start/stop at the top and bottom of each run. Either way, the stats as recorded are as close as only 3 vertical feet different on a run between the two methods to nearly 80 vertical feet different on a run. Unfortunately I really need to synchronize both by taking laps only on a lift with known vertical to test. I did a fair bit of top of one lift to bottom of a different lift, or with long lift lines end up 20 verts at least up hill from the base or etc... The Garmin definitely tracks TONS of data points (speed, max and min speed, elevation, vertical, etc...)
Avenza is easy to export a whole 'layer' (day) as a kml or etc... to google earth as well. Garmin only exports to GPX format (should be able to pull into Google Earth Pro), but I can only do so one run at a time based on the way I recorded things which is clearly much more painful. If the watch works as described though, it could be easier to set it and forget it all day long, then export all the runs at once.
Of course set it and forget it will chew through a lot of the watch battery which was one reason I kept starting and stopping it. I didn't record the detail, but would estimate ~10-15% of watch battery usage for 2/3 of a day by turning on and off GPS each run. Implies maybe 25-40% battery drain for a full day of skiing with GPS on. Avenza only uses a few % of cell phone battery turning tracking on and off for each run. Surprisingly low power consumption, though it only tracks a point once per 2 seconds or something like that (I think it is more intended for hiking/backpacking).
Avenza partial day (I actually forgot about it until after I started recording on the watch for a couple runs already)
Garmin track with speed shown: A Moose glade run (pre-Avenza mapping).
This is the same far lower left track on Avenza: Powderhorn Glade/Bonanza
