GPS and skiing

With the winter weather I'm unable to feed my GPS and cycling obsession. The good news is I've found a new obsession: OpenPisteMap. This is part of the OpenStreetMap project.

The idea is to map out ski resorts. I've been using JohnJohn to collect tracks of my recent ski trips. The results have been a bit mixed. One problem I've run into is that many ski hills are north facing, which means the GPS satellites tend to be below the horizon, giving a poor fix at times.

However, I am collecting some reasonable tracks. Below is some data from a trip to Mt Tremblant earlier this week. By plotting altitude, speed and direction (with matplotlib) you can get a reasonable feel for what is going on: I go downhill faster than uphill, you can see some lifts are faster than others etc etc.

Next job is to load the data into JOSM and see if I can create some sort of map.