Since the 2005-2006 ski season, I have been tracking how many vertical feet I have skied with a Suunto watch. I skied a handful of times before that season, but we’ll just stick to that year since it’s when I really started skiing regularly.
Since that time, I have skied over one million vertical feet! I crossed the milestone last Tuesday during racing at Alpental. To put that into perspective, that’s like going 190 miles up in the air and skiing down. That’s just a little bit lower than the space station! Given the average ski slope (as calculated by my GPS data), that means I’ve traveled over 1500 miles on skis. That’s longer than the distance from Seattle to Minneapolis!
Some other stats about the first million vertical:
- It took 843 ski runs over 59 days to accomplish this.
- The biggest single day ever was 62,000 on March 8 of last year for the American Cancer Society fundraiser.
- At just about every resort I visited, the average ski run was between 900 and 1200 feet high.
- I visited 18 different ski areas.
Here’s to the next million!
PS. That lovely photo is one of the rejects from our photo shoot last winter. Bernard asked us to sign waivers so he could sell the photos and I’m betting that’s one that got picked. Haha I hope it gets used in a magazine sometime.