Clansi and I went down to the snow a week ago on Sunday for what will probably be our last skiing day for this season. The weather was spectacular, with no wind and extensive visibility; in fact, the sun was perhaps a bit too bright for the softening snow. By mid afternoon there were shiny patches of slush in places heralding the arrival of spring.
For a bit of fun, I took my GPS receiver with me tucked into the elastic band of my goggles (I have found that the device sometimes struggles to get good signals when it is in a pocket). I wasn’t afraid of getting lost, but the experimental scientist part of me tends to get excited about the datalogging capabilities of my GPS receiver. I was actually quite surprised at some of the information it recorded; for instance, I was a little unnerved to find that I had been travelling at up to nearly 50 km/h on the snow!
The best bit about GPS is of course being able to see a map of the day’s adventures. Here is an interactive zoomable map showing our entire day’s path colour coded by speed. It is superimposed on the Google aerial imagery, which must have been photographed during the summer. Continue reading »