Skiing and Google Maps Skiing and Google Maps

Keystone Ski Area from space:

This is a satellite picture of Keystone Ski Area, via Google Maps. The area consists of three mountains: Dercum (formerly Keystone) Mountain to the north (top), North Peak in the middle, and the Out Back to the south (bottom). Most of my time over the last five seasons working at Keystone has been on the front (top/north) of the northernmost mountain. This is also the part of the area that I helped clear in the summer of 1970. We cleared about half of what was ultimately cleared in the front that summer, and the area opened for operation that winter.

The way to read the image is that the base area is at the top. There are two base areas, the Mountain House to the left (West), and River Run on the right (East). Where all the spagetti comes together is the Summit area on top of Dercum Mountain. Then, SW from there is La Bonte's Cabin at the bases of the Ruby and Santiago lifts. SE from there is the top of North Peak. SW from there is the Wayback lift, and SE from a bit below the bottom of that is the Outback. You can compare this to the more abstract official 2006-7 Keystone ski area map.

Actually, it isn't a single satellite picture, but rather Google puts together a bunch of them, which I downloaded and reassembled into the image we see here. Interestingly, Google downloads about twice the number of satellite image files than are actually displayed at any one time, at least on my computer. This may be to provide for monitors that can display more than mine can, or to allow a minimal amount of moving the display around w/o having to download more images. In any case, I could only see about half the mountain at any one time in Google Maps, but found that I had downloaded images for the entire ski area.