Schematic visualisation of ski resort trails

Abstract

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Trail maps for winter sports often take the form of highly illustrative landscape paintings, or panorama, overprinted with trails and lifts to allow skiers and snowboarders a mechanism for on-mountain navigation. The character of mountain environments lends itself particularly well to the traditional form of representation which creates aesthetically pleasing maps. These have become the de facto standard for trail mapping in ski resorts. Navigating on mountain is not always easy since conditions, map perspective, orientation and the illustrative form often make reading the map awkward. The map developed here presents an alternative to the traditional trail map by reducing a mountain and its trails to topological primitives. By taking on the style of Harry Beck's famous London Underground schematic map, the network of trails and lifts becomes visible and immediate, thus enhancing a users ability to navigate the mountain. The map illustrates the 176 trails in Breckenridge, Colorado derived from GPS tracklogs and incorporates a range of other contextual datasets. The paper outlines the rationale and design of the map which has been produced entirely using ESRI ArcGIS v9.2 alongside the Network Analyst, Schematics, Spatial Analyst, 3D Analyst, Maplex and ArcScene extensions. It also incorporates a 3D digital panorama of the ski resort rendered across a curved perspective DEM to provide a visual context for the main map.

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