I love nordic skiing. I like to contribute to the skiing community in a few ways. I volunteer

• trail building and maintenance
• coaching
• there was a time when I used to submit trail reports That last one. I used to...

It's not 1995

Skinny Ski is a great site for nordic skiing. Well, if it were the 90's and you live in the Twin Cities. Skiers from all of the upper mid west gets some use from the site, but the further you are from Minneapolis, that use degrades pretty fast.

I used to submit trail reports. Why did I stop?

Here are some things I don't like about the process:

1. Reports be submitted from anywhere.
2. Picking a trail to report on means scrolling through every trail in the system (at least it is an alphabetical list).
3. The meat of the information is free form and I have to think hard about what to put in. It does not encourage me to do it trailside with my ungloved hands on a cell phone. Did I mention this site isn't mobile optimized?
4. I have to re-enter all the information about me every time.
5. A moderator gets to decide if my contribution is worthy
6. Did you see that note on the bottom? "Photos can be submitted after..." How do you do that? Where? Oh, yeah, go back to the trail reports main page for this

You have to email the site photos and somehow a moderator has to associate them with the correct trail report.

Now that we are back at the main trai report page, lets talk about that.

How do you find reports you are interested in?

1. Know the region the trail you are interested
2. You have to look through all the most recent trail reports for the region you want, if it isn't in the most recent list you have to navigate to the region.
3. If you are interested in two trails that are just across a region border... have fun navigating
4. You need to read the trail report and make sense of it. What does all that text mean? Is the skiing good or bad?
5. If there are images, they are in a pop up carosel window.
6. How do you know if the person submitting the report is reliable?

Club or Venu

Even if you are blessed to live in the midwest, not every venu goes to Skinny Ski to tell you what their conditions are. Other options include

• Call the hotline, you can call some ski areas and listen to their recording about conditions
• Web site. Some venus will have a report on their website
• Facebook group
• Email some venus are blessed with humorus volunteers who write an almost daily report on the grooming

Summary

The problem with all of these

1. All are very subjective
2. They are disperate
3. For all but the Facebook Groups, you depend on the venu being on top of things.

Solution

Maybe not, but here is what I am setting out to solve

• Works anywhere in the world
• Objective, algorithm driven, information you can understand at a glance
• Can subscribe to the trails you care about
• Easy to submit information
• Reports can only be done from the trail
• Easy to see how reliable the submitter is
• Easy access to trail ammenities
• Designed for you phone, works on your desktop

Extras

• Supports nordic skiing and fat biking
• Easy to submit images
• Works for users and operators
• Able to link to support (shop, food, lodging, travel info)

When is this going to happen you might be wondering? I can't make any promises. I've done a lot of design work. I've started working on the web site. If you are interested, keep checking back on my blog posts. My first goal is to be able to submit and see trail reports for Marquette county. Other features will roll out as I have time.