Poll How many days did you ski in the 2016-17 season?

[Philpug]

Was it your usual amount or were up up or down? For this who are not done yet, please feel free to add your estimated additional days on top of your total.

 

[Bill Talbot]

See here is the problem. Days skied is not the same as 'days on skis'. Some folks ski the morning maybe 3-4 hours and call it a day of skiing. Or pop in to get a few hours in the afternoon if work permits. Others ski bell to bell with maybe an hour missing from the 7 or 8 available.
And it's all good, but it's apples and oranges and does not correlate to 'DAYS of SKIING'...

 

[Philpug]

See here is the problem. Days skied is not the same as 'days on skis'. Some folks ski the morning maybe 3-4 hours and call it a day of skiing. Or pop in to get a few hours in the afternoon if work permits. Others ski bell to bell with maybe an hour missing from the 7 or 8 available.
And it's all good, but it's apples and oranges and does not correlate to 'DAYS of SKIING'...

It's not a problem at all. If you go fishing and either do not catch a fish or even just one? Is it still fishing? Yes it is.

 

[bbinder]

not enough days. never enough days.

 

[fatbob]

Not enough - was aiming for over 50 and I woulda got away with it if it weren't for the pesky broken leg.

ended mid 40s. I do tend towards fuller days especially when skiing alone so most of those will be 20+ lifters

 

[Jack skis]

Got on snow 110 days in 2016-17. Living at CB makes it easy to do, though the time on the hill every day wasn't very long. For me there's a strong relationship between age attained and hours skied per day. As the age goes up the hours go down.

Jack

Stuttered with the attachment, On International at CBMR last days of the season with Wife and son.

 

[surfsnowgirl]

I ended my season at 47 which is the most I've ever done. The season prior i finished with 33 days so i felt good about getting 14 more in. I plan to get an earlier start this coming season with skiing Killington as soon as they open. My goal for the 2017-18 season is between 50 and 60 days.

 

[Bill Miles]

55 days, lowest since I retired in 2002. Reasons are:
Went on a cruise with my non-skiing wife, so I didn't get started until Dec. 20
I am a fair weather skier and there were a lot of weather days (or snowblow the driveway days) this year.

On the other hand, I got to ski four new mountains this year. (Sunshine, Lake Louise, Nakiska, Timberline. OR)

 

[luliski]

Thirty one days. That is probably the most I've ever done. My sister had a ski lease in Tahoe City, so I didn't have to drive two hours to ski. I didn't start until January 14, thanks to Sierra weather patterns, power outages, road closures, wind holds etc. But because of all the storms, I may get a couple of days in this summer!

 

[Sibhusky]

69. Down from the prior six, which ranged up to 83. Mostly due to migraines. Normally I don't get many in winter, but this last season it was different. The years I did less were due to recovering from injuries where my doctors were limiting me. This migraine crap was especially irritating as this was a record winter.

 

[SkiNurse]

My season ended at day 30, which also ended my monthly streak at 39.
That being said, I sure can't complain about the 16/17 season. Every day was the !!!

 

[Guy in Shorts]

At 144 days skied four more days and 100,000 more vertical than last season. Just one of many lucky locals that squeeze skiing and work into the same day.

Hats off to all those hard working weekend warriors that are logging 40-60 days. Fighting weather, traffic and untold misery all season long to get your days in. Kudos

 

[TonyC]

See here is the problem. Days skied is not the same as 'days on skis'. Some folks ski the morning maybe 3-4 hours and call it a day of skiing. Or pop in to get a few hours in the afternoon if work permits. Others ski bell to bell with maybe an hour missing from the 7 or 8 available.
And it's all good, but it's apples and oranges and does not correlate to 'DAYS of SKIING'...

I've had this debate a lot on First Tracks, but the fact remains that for most people number of days on skis is what they remember. Rather than get into a no-win debate of how many hours counts as a ski day, I think counting vertical as a separate measure is better. At the seasonal level, vertical is more informative for an individual to compare seasons. It's fairly simple: on a day when conditions are good and/or you are skiing well, you tend to ski more.

Vertical is not a good way for different skiers to compare with one another as priorities vary. You have the EpicMix types motoring on the groomers running up big numbers and you have people for whom a significant part of the ski day is spent hiking/traversing to out of the way places. And of course backcountry days are completely different animal. 4,000 of earned vertical is at least as strenuous as 40,000 of lift served.

A further refinement to estimate quality for me is to add in an estimate of how much of the vertical was in powder.

As for me, the ongoing season in California has me up to 67 days, even though my first day was Dec. 12. My record is 72 and I have a shot at that. Next weekend will be 3 or 4 days and I expect another 1 or 2 after that.

My vertical record has been obliterated this season. The 72-day season in 2010-11 had 1,318,300 vertical but 3 of those were backcountry. This year I'm currently at 1,497,100, all lift served and bumped up by a nice weather second week (SkiWelt, Kitzbuhel, Saalbach) and 185,000 vertical of piste-bashing in Austria in January.

2016-17 was not a great powder season. I nearly always get some on my annual cat or heli ski trip, but that was only 3 days this year. Lift served trips are more luck of the draw, and the only lucky ones were the first week in Austria in the Arlberg and the 5 days at the Whistler Gathering. Most of my Mammoth skiing is in the spring and for the 3rd time in the past 5 seasons my timeshare week at Snowbird was completely skunked for powder. Thus 155K vertical of powder this year vs. my record 291K in 2011-12.

Historical detail here: http://bestsnow.net/vertfeet.htm
The above does not include 2016-17 because it's not over yet.

 

[dbostedo]

Being new-ish here from Epic, I'm still trying to figure out how this is a flawed poll.

And I like just counting days that you did any skiing, because of simplicity. If you have to define "ski day" any other way (number of hours, number of runs, amount of vertical, etc.) you get into arguments and grey area. It's easier just to track how many days you got to ski, and still is sufficient to differentiate folks that ski a handful of days, versus those that ski 40, 50, etc.

 

[Paul S.]

This year 73 days, last year only 39 because my wife was injured on day 7, 2 years ago 90 days.

 

[James]

See here is the problem. Days skied is not the same as 'days on skis'. Some folks ski the morning maybe 3-4 hours and call it a day of skiing. Or pop in to get a few hours in the afternoon if work permits. Others ski bell to bell with maybe an hour missing from the 7 or 8 available.
And it's all good, but it's apples and oranges and does not correlate to 'DAYS of SKIING'...

Well how would we define "a day"? What if you spend two hours total on breaks and eating?
I know some who almost never ski more than 4 hours.
Not all days are created equal apparently.

 

[Chris Walker]

Plus sometimes you can do more skiing in two hours than most people do all day. Counting vertical feet is also problematic, as you can easily rack up 50k by bombing groomers, but 20k of steep terrain with Volkswagen-sized bumps is far more work. I used to say 12 runs were required to count as an "official" ski day, but even then runs vary too much. The way I think of it is any day I got to ski at all is a good day.

 

[TonyC]

If you have to define "ski day" any other way (number of hours, number of runs, amount of vertical, etc.) you get into arguments and grey area.

There's no gray area regarding vertical, but you need a watch or an app unless you're a nutcase counting chairs as I had to before 1995. Vertical has the virtue of implicitly recognizing short days vs. long days, breaks, etc.

Counting vertical feet is also problematic, as you can easily rack up 50k by bombing groomers, but 20k of steep terrain with Volkswagen-sized bumps is far more work.

That's why I mentioned the caveats above. Skiers tend to ski by their preferences. For both the groomer skier and the bump aficionado, their better days will tend to have more vertical. So vertical is a good measure for the individual to compare days and particularly seasons to one another. Vertical is not a good way to compare the bumper to the piste-basher.

I also noted that my own season vertical in 2016-17 got inflated beyond my usual pattern by a whole week of skiing almost exclusively on piste due to conditions of that week. It was not repetitive or boring since the areas were massive and new to me. But subjectively I'd rate 2011-12 as higher quality due to nearly twice as much powder. Vertical was also depressed in 2011-12 by 9 backcountry days, 8 of them on the Antarctic cruise, which was the trip of a lifetime.

But 2011-12 and 2016-17 are outliers in terms of type of skiing in the context of my overall 40 years of skiing. Overall season vertical + powder vertical provides a fairly good ranking of ski season quality IMHO.

 

[pais alto]

As far as @Bill Talbot's issues with what makes up a 'day' - what about patrolling? There are days where I'm lucky to get three runs, not counting the ones with a toboggan or ropes or signs. Some days I might get 7 or 8 'free' runs or very occasionally even more but no way you can count on that.

And whaddabout backcountry days? Two to four hours of skinning, 15 to 30 minutes of skiing. Those count?

Probably/likely over 100 days where I skied, but I didn't count.

 

[Jully]

Well how would we define "a day"? What if you spend two hours total on breaks and eating?
I know some who almost never ski more than 4 hours.
Not all days are created equal apparently.

Plus sometimes you can do more skiing in two hours than most people do all day. Counting vertical feet is also problematic, as you can easily rack up 50k by bombing groomers, but 20k of steep terrain with Volkswagen-sized bumps is far more work. I used to say 12 runs were required to count as an "official" ski day, but even then runs vary too much. The way I think of it is any day I got to ski at all is a good day.

Not all days are created equal, but I think putting a definition on what a ski day is and is not just turns it into a competition.

Skiing is a tremendous joy and so the number of times I put on skis and slide on snow is a great experience. Who cares if I only got to take 3 runs? Maybe I was hiking, maybe there were wind holds, maybe I was teaching my 3 year old nephew/niece. Skiing is an experience that isn't easy to quantify beyond: today I went skiing.