VAIL — We board Gondola One at Vail Village and eight minutes later get off at Mid-Vail. There we encounter the problem every Vail visitor faces. With 195 trails spread over 5,289 acres, what terrain do we tackle today?
Faster than a Realtor whipping out a business card, my wife, Dianne, slips off her glove, reaches into her jacket and plucks out her iPhone. Fingers flying, she launches the app and punches the “Time” icon.
“The Game Creek Express chair shows five-minute waits. Northwoods and Avanti are three. High Noon at the bottom of Sun Down Bowl requires a whopping seven-minute wait,” she announces. “There are only one-minute lift lines at Blue Sky Basin. Let’s head there.”
In the past, Dianne and I have used the free EpicMix app primarily to monitor our vertical descents. Lift tickets and season passes used at Vail-owned resorts employ RFID chip-card technology, which allow sensors to record our every chairlift ride. Since what goes up must come down, the vertical rise of the lifts equals the vertical descent skied. Dianne and I have proudly endured Aleve-gulping days where we’ve skied more than the equivalent of the 29,029-foot vertical drop from Mount Everest’s summit to the sea.
New this year, the Time function measures how long guests have to stand in line to get on a chair. The constantly updated results can be viewed in table format or displayed on GPS-enabled trail maps.
In addition to the wait-time information, a quick punch of the lift name brings up information such as whether it’s a three-, four- or six-person chair, the difficulty of terrain served, bottom-to-top ride times and what hours that particular lift runs. It also indicates if the lift is even open, handy for chairlifts that may be temporarily closed because of high winds or avalanche mitigation.
This year, EpicMix Time works only at the four Vail-owned resorts in Colorado. We find it’s handy at Vail, where powder-day lift lines can be monumental, but seldom use it at Keystone, where North Peak and the Outback offer few chairlift choices.
At Beaver Creek, EpicMix Time tells us where best to go when we get bored on Larkspur and Grouse Mountain. At Breckenridge, it shows whether Peak 6 and Imperial Bowl are open, whether we’re better off dropping down to Beaver Run or grabbing the Merc on Peak 9 and whether we should head for Peak 10 or simply spend the afternoon skiing off the E Chair and Chair 6.
There is, however, one chilling problem we’ve discovered using EpicMix Time. It’s the black screen of battery death.
Maybe other models do better, but our iPhones abhor the cold. If I carry my phone in a convenient outside pocket, my battery power drops faster than the Nuggets’ playoff hopes. If I tuck it into a warm inside pocket, I have to strip down like Superman in a phone booth to get to it.
Of course, being the great husband I am, I found a foolproof way to solve the problem.
“Dianne,” I say to my loving wife. “I don’t have my reading glasses. Would you mind pulling out your iPhone and checking the lift times?”
Dan Leeth is a travel writer/ photographer; more at LookingForTheWorld.com.
