Around August, I usually begin to have a weekly vivid dream in which I am tearing down sheets of powder between rows of spruce trees. I awake only to compulsively check off the days on the calendar until ski season. Well winter is almost here, and now I’ve begun compulsively checking the snow conditions at my favorite resorts, near and far.
Given my penchant for well-informed market participants and e-transparency initiatives, I was very pleased to find the following notice on the snow report Web page for Mount Snow, a Vermont ski resort:
Truth in Snow Reporting
Our snow reporting goal is simple, transparency. No one should ever second guess what a mountain reports as its conditions, weather, trail surface or anything else. When you pick up a snow report at Mount Snow it should be trusted as if you wrote it yourself.
This is why over the past two seasons we have drastically overhauled our snow reporting philosophy. It began with a fundamental change to report percentage open as opposed to trails. It’s pretty simple, an acre is an acre but one trail can certainly be a lot different than another. We continued this season by revamping our trail map to what we believe is a more accurate trail depiction.
Having been frequently frustrated by showing up at a mountain that reports plenty of snow but is merely a face of ice, I found this notion oddly comforting. It’s nice to know that some people are taking transparency seriously where it matters most…
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