Smartphone applications have made it easy to keep score in our lives, as if we’re inhabiting a massive video game. Foursquare gives points and badges for checking in to stores and restaurants. Using Nike+, runners can set running goals and track stats from past workouts. From Chore Wars (an app that rewards household tasks) to SuperBetter (a game that aids in recovery from illness), gamification is seeping into every corner of our lives.

Even skiing and snowboarding aren’t immune. For a group obsessed with tracking vertical feet, top speed and days on the hill — and comparing stats with buddies — this isn’t a bad thing.

AlpineReplay, launched this season, allows a skier or rider to track a rich set of on-hill data. As long as you have an Android phone or iPhone, you can see your speed, airtime, vertical feet, calories burned and distance traveled for every day on the slopes.

The application uses the GPS device built into smart phones to track your position. The bonus of riding the areas known to the app? It will register the name of the hill you’re on, and in some cases even which lift.

AlpineReplay has also partnered with a couple resorts to make specific applications, including three in New England. The Sugarloaf Replay, Sunday River Replay and Loon Replay apps are paired with the resorts. While you can still track your stats using the applications no matter where you ride, they offer mountain-specific content. Sugarloaf Replay, for example, includes lift status updates, grooming reports, the Daily Report, and updates from Sugarloaf’s Twitter Feed.

You can also earn medals at the New England resorts (this is about making life more gamified, remember, remember) — colorful icons that reward achievements. The Sunday River Explorer medal is granted if you hit all eight peaks in one day, and Loon Mountain Full Vertical is your reward for covering more than 2,100 feet in one run. Sugarloaf and Sunday River each have 10 unique medals, and Loon has nine.

What do the medals mean? Well, not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. Still, they’re a cool way to compare how you tackle the slopes with other skiers. The AlpineReplay tag line is “Ultimate Bragging rights for skiers and boarders,” and you can easily weigh your medals and stats against your friends, other people at the mountain, or skiers and riders around the planet.

On top of bragging rights, the stat tracking can be used for a good cause. Earlier this season, Sugarloaf reported that Tom Hanson, the Ski Museum of Maine treasurer, was attempting to ski at least three million vertical feet this season. Hanson is collecting pledges, with all the money going to the museum. With Sugarloaf Replay, donors can track his progress and marvel at how much time he’s spent on the hill.

As of Jan 19, he’s already logged his first million vertical.

AlpineReplay isn’t the first app that tracks on-hill progress. In the 2010-11 season, Vail Resorts made big news in skiing and technology circles with the launch of EpicMix.

Rather than using GPS-enabled phones, Vail opted to track the RFID chips already built into their passes and lift tickets. It’s a great solution for the Vail family of resorts, but also means that EpicMix only tracks stats at those specific mountains.

The neigh-unpronounceable smart phone app Phresheez tracks most of the same stats as AlpineReplay through GPS, though they have a more bare-bones approach. You can also work Phresheez onto some handheld devices that aren’t phones, though the process is a bit more complicated.

The technology isn’t perfect — some of the stats putting tops speeds at Sugarloaf in the high 80s are a bit dubious, and the airtime tracking has some kinks (and is MIA on iPhones) — Alpine Replay offers the most comprehensive stat-tracking this side of a coaching team. And it’s all on your phone. For skiers who have particular loyalty to Sugarloaf, Loon and Sunday River, packed-in snow reporting and updates sweeten the deal even further.

As much as I appreciate skiing as a chance to disconnect from technology, the quest for those ever-important bragging rights is just enough for me to keep my phone turned on.

Josh Christie is a freelance writer and lifetime outdoors enthusiast. He shares column space in Outdoors with his father, John Christie. Josh can be reached at:

joshua.j.christie@gmail.com

 

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