Interactive Trip Report Maps

[jamesdeluxe]

In a very positive use of AI for a ski forum, I’ve created interactive maps featuring clickable pins that open every relevant report for a particular location.

I'll start with Austrian blogger Marko Schuster, who over the past two decades has published more than 2,400 trip reports on his site In Montanis (Latin for “in the mountains”) documenting 785 distinct ski areas across 34 countries. I can guarantee that you've never skied, let alone heard of, the majority of the many obscure areas. Although skiing dominates the archive, there are also reports covering towns, museums, scenic lifts, public transportation, glaciers without operating resorts, and other places encountered during his travels.

The only drawback is the website’s archaic design, which hasn’t been updated in years/decades – but don’t let its appearance obscure the depth of information it contains. Like many German-speakers, he's morey interested in ski area infrastructure than terrain and conditions. Since everything is in German, the only additional step is to run the URL for each report through Google Translate or your browser’s translation feature.

You may be curious if Schuster covered North America -- he wrote on Alpinforum at one point that he'd never visited our continent and had little desire to do so, largely because he felt that Europe and Asia offered a more appealing mix of languages, cultures, mountain ranges, and lift systems. Political objections with President #45 and 47 later strengthened that reluctance.

Enjoy!

• Italy Map
• Austria Map
• Switzerland Map
• France Map

 

[Tony Crocker]

I pulled the French map, zoomed on the Pyrenees and of course the Spanish and Andorra ski areas weren't there. This page has a right side banner listing his countries, with link to TRs when you click on a country.

Asia offered a more appealing mix

Asia is the Caucasus countries plus Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. No Japan.

This is the guy now boycotting Italy for the helmet law, correct?

 

[jamesdeluxe]

I pulled the French map, zoomed on the Pyrenees and of course the Spanish and Andorra ski areas weren't there.

Because I only created maps of France, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland.

This is the guy now boycotting Italy for the helmet law, correct?

You two are helmet haters.

Asia is the Caucasus countries plus Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. No Japan.

Is there anything else you'd like to nitpick?

 

[Tony Crocker]

Not nitpicking. I only wanted an easy way to check other countries Schuster skied and found a link that makes that process fairly easy.

No wonder James is a fan. Schuster prefers smaller resorts. He disliked Grandvalira and has 70 ski days in Spain, none of them at Baquiera. I read a couple more Pyrenees reports. He ran into a lot of crowds, which he clearly does not like.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

No wonder James is a fan. Schuster prefers smaller resorts.

I've always credited him for leading me to excellent small/obscure areas going back to 2018 (first sentence).

I only wanted an easy way to check other countries Schuster skied and found a link that makes that process fairly easy.

Now that I've created a strong ChatGPT template, I can do trip-report maps for other countries if and when I'm interested in them. While I was at it, I also redid mine and they're much more attractive and user friendly than Google Maps.

The Italy map will be a huge help in providing a visual guide to me for future visits. Check out how there are ski areas all the way down the boot, including 22 of them east of Rome and several in Calabria (pretty impressive for early March!), from which my family left in the 1890s.

 

[Tony Crocker]

These central Italy mountains are somewhat lacking in altitude but occasionally they get insane snowfalls off the Adriatic.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

Updated through June 2026:

I ran Tony's North American trip report history through the map generator. Standing by for comments and corrections.

 

[Tony Crocker]

James has become a power user of ChatGPT! Recalling the amount of time it took to build the WorldwideSkiMap.kml file, it's obvious that AI is doing a lot of heavy lifting on these maps James has created. So yes I have observations/questions.

First, it looks like ChatGPT is using the same underlying map as supercharge.info. This is a big plus because AFAIK virtually every ski lift displays on that map if you zoom in enough, unlike Google Maps (see Trois Vallees, France as Exhibit A).

Since there is a lot of automation, why does James limit my map to North America and his to individual Euro countries? It seems to me there should be one James map and one Tony map!

How is one of these maps constructed? Does ChatGPT search on a username and ski area name? How does it restrict to a country or continent? How does it know what is a ski area and what is not? How would it distinguish a Deer Valley TR from a thread discussing the merits of the expansion terrain there?

Lots of time constructing WorldwideSkiMap.kml was spent scrutinizing Google Earth because I wanted to place the pin within ski terrain for maximum utility. ChatGPT is placing most markers at the ski area bases, which is fine since all the lifts are in the underlying map.

The stress test is backcountry/snowcat/heli areas. I'll get to those questions next.

 

[Tony Crocker]

Backcountry:
Mt. Rainier Sunrise's dot is in exactly the right place.
Mt. Shasta and Mt San Gorgonio dots are on the summits. I was 1,000 ft. short of summit on Shasta and only skied from SanG summit in 1981, not either of the two TR days in 1983 and 2011. Both of these examples are nitpicks.
The Tuckerman dot is on the Lion Head trail. I think you northeasterners will say that is wrong because there is a Tuckerman trail just south of Lion Head trail.
Tioga Pass and Logan Pass are exactly at the road tops of those passes.
Beartooth Pass is the interesting case. The dot for Gardiner Headwall is in the ballpark. The pin for the ski area is on the north side of the pass but not where the lifts are, and the lifts are on the map if you look a bit east of the dot.

 

[Tony Crocker]

Cat/Heli
Mike Wiegele, CMH Kootenay, Great Northern and White Grizzly dots are at/near their roadside lodges.

TLH dot is by Tyaughton Lake as it should be but on the wrong side of the lake (nitpick).

Purcell Heli is at its Golden office.

Baldface is well placed in its ski terrain. Mustang and K3 are in the ballpark of ski terrain. Chatter Creek is at or just off its southern boundary.

Mistakes?
Island Lake’s dot is at the top of one of Fernie’s lifts. The road to Island Lake’s lodge is on the map, as is the lake itself, so lodge location is very findable.

Valhalla’s dot is on the road south of Nakusp. Its terrain is west of there and their office is farther south toward Nelson.

Wild Horse is the worst error I’ve found; I thought for a moment that it was missing. Its dot is in Nelson but office has always been in Ymir. Terrain is east of Ymir.

I’m posting all this detail as an aid to James. It’s very impressive that a map like this can be created with presumably minimal grunt work and a very low error rate.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

Since there is a lot of automation, why does James limit my map to North America and his to individual Euro countries? It seems to me there should be one James map and one Tony map!

Chat takes over a majority of the grunt work that we went through with the earlier FTO map; however, there was still a fair amount of oversight needed with yours. The bot had to go through every post you ever made on FTO (more than 15,000), figure out which were trip reports about skiing (685) and which weren't, then go to work placing the pins and compiling them for each location. I had to make a lot of changes (formatting, positioning, missing reports due to how the state/province was labeled, etc.) so adding your other continents into one map would've been too much work at once.

My maps were far easier because I had the existing Google Maps (North America and Europe), which were up to date and accurate, and the bot was able to transform them into the new and improved versions with a minimum of errors. Now that my maps are finished, I can join them into one map. We can do the same with yours once all errors are addressed.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

Mistakes?

• Island Lake’s dot is at the top of one of Fernie’s lifts. The road to Island Lake’s lodge is on the map, as is the lake itself, so lodge location is very findable.
• Valhalla’s dot is on the road south of Nakusp. Its terrain is west of there and their office is farther south toward Nelson.
• Wild Horse is the worst error I’ve found; I thought for a moment that it was missing. Its dot is in Nelson but office has always been in Ymir. Terrain is east of Ymir.

I requested those changes. Here's the revised map.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

And here's the map covering your trip reports outside North America. I haven't given it a review; I'll leave that to you. As mentioned, once it's finalized, I'll combine everything into one map.

 

[Tony Crocker]

Sorry, my first comment was poorly worded. Valhalla’s dot should be just south of the writing “Valhalla Provincial Park.”

You have put Chimgan’s dot deep into the mountains in Uzbekistan. Its lift is the longer one near near where Akcau creek crosses the D006 road.

You have not done Australia, New Zealand or Japan yet. The other Southern Hemisphere places and Iceland/Norway look good. I haven’t reviewed but I suspect James has the Alps under control.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

You have not done Australia, New Zealand or Japan yet.

I see 8 NZ and 11 Japan report locations noted in the map screenshot below

I told the bot two different times to check for your Australian ski reports and here was its tart reply:

The only first-person Australian ski report I found by Tony Crocker is Thredbo, July 18, 1997. The same FTO thread contains a Perisher report; however, that was written by the member Anthony, not Tony Crocker. Tony later added his old Thredbo notes and photographs within that thread. His other Australian posts concern sightseeing, diving, eclipses, or commentary on Australian skiing; they are not reports of places he personally skied. I’m therefore adding one Australian pin — Thredbo — rather than incorrectly attributing other members’ reports to him.​

​

If you click on the map link in my previous post, it now shows your Australian ski report.

Feel free to run with those two maps -- use Chat to combine and edit them however you see fit.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

It seems to me there should be one James map and one Tony map!

Here's my current map, which includes both North America and Alps destinations/reports.

 

[Tony Crocker]

I suspected Thredbo inserted into someone else's TR would be problematic but you found that one.

The two New Zealand club fields are placed incorrectly, but should be easy to fix since the lifts are on the map. Broken River's dot is in the Mt. Cheeseman ski area. Zoom to where you see the lifts, go north from there and you'll next see the Broken River lifts. From the Mt. Cheeseman lifts, move SW over the actual Mt. Cheeseman (brown triangle), continue in that direction a bit farther than Broken River was in the other direction and you will see a Mt. Olympus brown triangle and the lifts just to the south of the mountain.

Harris Mt. Heli has a vast selection of terrain. I'd prefer that its dot be in the Mt. Alta Conservation Area north of Treble Cone. While that is probably where I skied, the main reason is that a dot south of Treble Cone might be confused with Cardrona. I skied Cardrona in 1997 before I discovered FTO in 2001. I have scanned pics of the Tasman Glacier skiplane day in 1982 but have not yet posted that.

In Japan the Niseko Moiwa dot is at the Annapuri base, which connects above to the rest of Niseko United. Moiwa has the two isolated lifts to the west of Annapuri.

 

[ChrisC]

Are you guys going to create a tab or page for this? For most trip reports, can AI identify them easily? If you get to 80--90% success!

This would be more useful than searching threads.


I generally like maps, but I never understood your Google Earth project with mapping all the ski areas. Maybe I did not understand the objective.

 

[Tony Crocker]

I generally like maps, but I never understood your Google Earth project with mapping all the ski areas. Maybe I did not understand the objective.

Google Earth can be tilted to view topography. This allows the viewer to see how steep/flat the terrain is, and the range of exposures. These are very hard to determine on a two dimensional trail map, particularly when you have Alps-like sprawl. That's why I spent the time to put the pins in the ski terrain rather than at the base.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

For most trip reports, can AI identify them easily? If you get to 80--90% success!

It identified approx. 95% of mine on the first try, about 80% of Tony's. A huge job reduced to about 90 seconds. As mentioned above, I still had to go in and do a certain amount of tweaking but regardless, it's a brave new world. While my map is mainly a way to organize my articles and reports, the Italy map I made for Marko Schuster's monstrous output has already been a big help for planning.