Google Maps' Ski-Area Overlay is Gone

jamesdeluxe

jamesdeluxe

Administrator
Staff member
A very useful aspect of Google Maps over the years was the overlay of ski areas' lifts and trails. I believe that they stopped adding new ones a long time ago; however, that feature seems to have been completely removed since last winter. For example see below, the three Park City ski resorts are no longer visible (here's a recent thread on Google Maps Help where people are bemoaning this development):
1734437475852.png


Luckily, openskimaps.org has that functionality. Below is a screenshot of Loveland, A-Basin, and Keystone:
1734438086564.png


Upsides to Open Ski Maps compared to Google Maps:
  • Virtually all ski areas are plotted, even the tiniest lift-served molehills.
  • In addition to the lifts, if you zoom in, all trail names are noted (at least in North America).
  • For each search, there is a link to the ski area's official map (at least in North America).
  • You can filter searches according to downhill vs. nordic, vertical drop, and elevation.

Downsides
  • You can't measure distances -- helpful to determine how many miles across the footprint of a ski circuit is or how far a restaurant, hotel, or other in-town infrastructure is from a point on the ski map.
  • You can't determine how to walk or drive from one location to, for example, the bottom of a lift.

Any other thoughts?
 
Never used it before. Could be interesting, but I see a couple more downsides:

jamesdeluxe said:
Downsides
Click to expand...
  • Only metric based measurements as far as I can tell. Not going to get much US folks to use something that can't convert and display imperial units IMO.
  • No "3D" satellite views. One nice feature of Google maps is the ability to view the landscape at an angle and rotate from different compass directions to get a better sense of the terrain. Obviously Google Earth being the best tool out there for that type of use case.
Definitely missing at least some nordic skiing. Greek Peak's nordic trails by hope lake are missing for example (I only checked a couple spots that I know super well as a test).
 
I may have mentioned before the independent supercharge.info website displaying location, history and detail of Tesla superchargers. Skilifts are displayed, even for obscure places and topography is color coded. Sella Ronda example here:
SellaRondaSupercharge.jpg

Zoom in more and all of those brown triangles will display peak names. The Falzarego and Cinque Torii lifts are at far right and their names are also displayed in closer zoom. I do not know what this underlying map software is, but I have occasionally seen it other places besides supercharge.info.
 
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