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man skiing on blue sky day
(Photo: Amy Jimmerson/courtesy JHMR)
man skiing on blue sky day
Robert "Buddha" Baker skis Rendezvous Mountain at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, Wyoming. The phone in his pocket logs each of the five million vertical feet he'll descend this season. (Photo: Amy Jimmerson/courtesy JHMR)

How Vert-Tracking Apps Are Reshaping Ski Culture

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When even the hardest-core ski bums are logging their data, is there still room for fun?

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Robert Baker clicks his flame-orange Tecnica boots into his bindings on the summit of Rendezvous Mountain, the high point of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. Folks are just waking up in the valley below, but at 53, with bristling gray eyebrows, perma-rosied cheeks and a mariner’s beard, Baker wastes no time.

I watch Baker drop into Rendezvous Bowl, his skis cutting clean arcs through the wind-scoured snow. He moves with the ease of someone who’s skied this line for more than three decades—light on his edges, unbothered by the chop. A cloud of powder trails behind him, then settles as he stops below, looking back upslope for me.

Baker has skied like this for decades, a local who built his life around the mountain. Until five years ago, he was running a plum and grape farm in Fresno so he could spend his winters here. Only in the last few years has he started tracking vertical feet, out of curiosity. By the end of last season, he logged 5.8 million feet—a full million more than the next closest skier at Jackson Hole. If this winter is anything like the last, he’ll take more than 1,100 tram laps, spending the equivalent of a week of his life just riding back up the mountain. Unlike the younger skiers chasing single-day records, Baker’s approach is about sheer accumulation—stacking vertical, day after day, all season long. The Jackson Hole app will track nearly every foot. In classic ski bum-ese, Baker, called “Buddha” by the locals—says he doesn’t obsess over stats.

“You get what you get,” he says. “I just go skiing.”

man posing outdoors with skis
Baker stands near the aerial tram—his main lift up the mountain, which he rode more than 1,100 times last season. (Photo: Amy Jimmerson/courtesy JHMR)

At first, Baker seems like an odd poster boy for the vert-obsessed ski culture. He doesn’t check his stats every night. He doesn’t post daily screenshots of his numbers on Instagram. He’s not cycling the same lift all day just to pad his numbers. But while he shrugs off the stats, plenty of skiers are chasing them like a high score.

“For a subset of skiers, vertical feet is the competitive metric now,” says Curtis Herbert, founder of , a popular tracking app for iOS and Android. “Where once it was about maintaining a streak or counting your days on the mountain, now it’s all about vert.”

In the world of snowsports, “vert” refers to the cumulative vertical feet you’ve descended while carving down a mountain. For decades, skiers kept informal tallies, piecing together lift and run data to estimate their numbers. But over the last decade, apps have turned this practice into a science.

In recent years, vert tracking has gained momentum—ϳԹ has covered the trend with backcountry skiers like Noah Dines, who set a record for self-powered ascents while skinning uphill. But it’s on the groomed runs of major resorts, vert tracking has exploded. Thanks to smarter smartphones and apps that utilize their ever-better sensors, capturing your stats has never been easier. Newer phones use dual-frequency GPS for pinpoint accuracy, while 3D mapping turns static trail maps into interactive terrain. Battery life has also improved, meaning skiers can log an entire day without worrying about a frozen, dead phone.

Even Baker, who started tracking just three years ago, cites technology’s reliability as the tipping point. Until then, “I just never had a phone that could run a tracking app but stay charged the whole day,” he says.

Independent apps like Slopes—created in 2013—have become indispensable tools for skiers and snowboarders. Beyond vert, they track speed, distance, and other performance metrics, along with some social and navigation features. Major industry players have followed suit—both and Alterra Mountain Company’s (neither of which responded to repeated requests for comment for this story) have made tracking a core part of their offerings, integrating personal stats with leaderboards and achievements. (At Snowbasin, Joe Brougher topped the Ikon Pass vertical leaderboard for the 2023-2024 season, .) Along with Jackson Hole, many other resorts have proprietary apps with tracking built-in: Killington Resort, Copper Mountain, Snowbird, and Palisades Tahoe, to name a few.

“This is skiing’s version of a loyalty program,” explains Stuart Winchester of the . “Resorts want skiers to channel their time and energy into their mountain, and then brag about it on social media. That’s free marketing.”

Like any outdoor pursuit, quantification can quickly become an obsession. Is it really lunchtime if I haven’t hit 10,000 feet yet? I got interested in vert tracking during a warm March day at Jackson Hole last season, when I hit 30,000 vertical feet almost without trying (like I said, it was warm.) On the gondola, I met “Ted R”, a local who casually dropped that he would spend more than 110 days on the mountain over the season, and frequently racked up 70,000 feet or more in a day. In the handful of times I’ve skied Jackson Hole since, I’ve found myself staying out later, occasionally arriving at après with legs feeling approximately as sure as a newborn deer, a sign I’d been chasing those invisible numbers more aggressively than I’d imagined.

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Unlike vert chasers who rack up numbers by lapping the same steep groomers, Baker takes a different approach, using the entire mountain, from powdery tree runs to backcountry gates. (Photo: Amy Jimmerson/courtesy JHMR)
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(Photo: Amy Jimmerson/courtesy JHMR)

Vert tracking starts as personal validation—a way to justify a pricey lift ticket or season pass, or quantify your escape from office life. But as tracking technology evolved, resorts couldn’t resist turning personal stats into public competition. Jackson Hole’s JH Insider app displayed both season-long and daily leaderboards. Skiers could see how their totals stacked up over the winter or chase bragging rights for the biggest single-day number. In January 2023, when snowboard instructor Ester Francus logged 100,641 vertical feet in a day—”equivalent to skiing from the top of the Aerial Tram more than 24 times”—the resort celebrated with , even dangling a GoPro as a monthly prize for the vertical leader.

Just weeks later, local skier Eben Coursey pushed the record to nearly 125,000 vertical feet in a single day, a feat that involved bombing the Wide Open run and crossing busy traverses 54 times. “My strategy was to be first in line at Teton Lift and start running laps as fast as possible,” . “I was averaging 45-55 mph per run. The chair lifties were high-fiving me and cheering me on.”

Fifteen months later, a high-speed collision left an off-duty Jackson Hole employee, Peter Wuerslin, fatally injured. Though unrelated to vert chasing, the incident forced a reckoning about high-speed skiing culture. In a , a friend of Wuerslin’s pointed to the resort’s promotion of speed and vertical achievements, writing that “Rendezvous Mountain has devolved into a lethal shooting gallery.”

On January second—a day after I skied with Baker—Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s CEO, Mary Kate Buckley, , presumably in response to concerns like those shown in that editorial from months earlier. Buckley removed the JH Insider app’s vertical feet leaderboard, which she acknowledged could inadvertently “promote fast skiing.” The resort launched what she described as a “comprehensive campaign” focused on safety, introducing “Family Zones” for slower skiing, and partnering with the to address on-mountain collision prevention.

The debate reaches beyond safety. Herbert, aware of how quickly numbers can become obsession, designed Slopes’ leaderboards to be private, shared only among friends. Speed stats, he says, are available, but de-emphasized. “I’ve always been aware of slopes’ potential influence on skier behavior,” he explains.

The cultural divide runs deep: snowsport stat culture is contentious. When one snowboarder recently claimed a “world record” of 105,146 feet at Steamboat, the was swift and brutal. “Dork shit,” declared one rider. “Vert farming,” posted another, deriding the endless laps on groomers. One online critic likened it to “an 8 year old who jumps off the diving board into a pool 53 times and then runs right back to do it again.”

Back on Rendezvous Mountain, Baker, his cement gray knit cap bearing the skull-and-crossed-poles patch of the Jackson Hole Air Force, leads me toward one of the resort’s backcountry gates. While others chase vert on groomers, Baker moves fluidly between on-piste runs and quieter corners of the mountain, finding his rhythm to the beats of Australian house DJ Dom Dolla on wired earbuds, volume low enough, he says, to hear his surroundings.

“This place is like a mental institution and we’re all crazy,” Baker says, gesturing with a pole bedazzled in red, white, and blue sequins. “This is where we get it all out. Everybody’s got their own thing. That’s the best part of skiing—it’s your own personal signature on whatever program you want to be on. Some people chase vert, some ski groomers all day, some never check their numbers at all. It’s all skiing. Just go skiing. The more laps you do, the better you get, that’s just how it works. I got good on this mountain by chasing the best people and skiing as much as I could. But you’ve got to love it. That’s the difference. If you’re just chasing numbers, what’s the point?”

We ski onward to the bottom of Rendezvous, towards the tram, the base now buzzing with riders. Baker’s already back in line for another loop. The numbers can wait. He won’t check them until the end of the day. I, on the other hand, am already pulling out my phone.

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Lead Photo: Amy Jimmerson/courtesy JHMR