Best Apps for Snow Junkies Review

Best Apps for Snow Junkies Review - Carrying a phone

on the slopes isn't just a good way to make sure you don't freeze to death after careening off an unseen ledge. With the right apps, it can be helpful in non-emergency-related ways, too!

Ignoring occasional glitchiness—particularly with remembering favorite resorts through updates—it's hard to fault North Face's Snow Report app. Its feature list reads like the results of a brainstorm session titled, "Why the hell would anyone want to bring a smartphone skiing with them?" which is actually, probably, pretty much this app's origin story. This means: quick weather updates for virtually any resort, trail maps for quite a few; on-the-ground details, like ski lift running times and snow totals; and a basic route tracking function. Free, iPhone.

An all-in-one personal GPS app that you should probably have anyway, MotionX GPS excels at one broad function: tracking where you've been. Which is pretty important for a skier, I think! By keeping this app running all day, or at least during runs, you'll end up with a full readout of distance skied, elevation gained and lost, top and average speeds, etcetera. It's just as fun to pull out at the top of a run, too, to get a birds-eye topological view of what you're about to tumble down, complete with altitude data. 3, iPhone.

Snow Report does a decent job of providing relevant weather stats, but if you need deeper data—and any skier planning a long-needed, all-too-rare trip really does—then you'll need to go with a dedicated app. I find Weatherbug to have the most complete and accessible data among the free apps. It's certainly powerful enough to give you a sense of how your next day, or ten days, on the slope are going to feel—not just how deep the snow will be. Free, iPhone