Top 10 ski apps to stay connected, bond with friends and track your descents

Ski apps can provide fun and valuable info for your day on the slopes. (Maridav)

Everyone seems to be plugged in while on the mountain to some degree. Whether it is to track what you’ve done, get in touch with ski patrol or simply waste an hour in the office while you are supposed to be working with something ski related, these apps can make it happen, both on and off the mountain.

10. SnowFit

This app takes up the last spot on this list because it is the least enjoyable part — getting in shape — particularly before the season. The $6.49 app from Insider Studios gives brief workouts designed for skiers. Word of warning: It is available only for Android.

9. FIS

For those who enjoy competitive skiing, getting results can be difficult, and watching it for free is nearly impossible unless the event is stateside or in Austria.

But FIS, skiing’s governing body, does have an app that includes a bevy of highlights across each discipline. Its live results page is excellent, showing sector splits and making it easy to follow if you’re unable to watch.

8. Ski and Snowboard Live

For those who don’t mind dropping $80 per year to see Mikaela Shiffrin, Ryan Cochran-Siegel and Team USA go for the podium, this is the way.

7. Grand Mountain Adventure

Because not all apps need to be serious. This is a skiing game for your phone where you try to ski down trails while avoiding avalanches, crevasses and other guests to unlock bigger sections of the mountain. While free, it does mean having to sit through ads every now and again.

It will take a minute or two to get the hang of directing yourself down the trail, but once you figure it out, an hour will be happily wasted away.

6. Avy

Developed for the start of the 2023-24 season by the Northwest Avalanche Center, the app currently has 10 zones — the Mount Washington Avalanche Center is currently the only zone in the Northeast — but there are hopes for expansion.

It is designed to give all of the weather and snow condition tools someone would need for planning a trip into the backcountry. In addition to publishing the avalanche forecast, it allows user-submitted reports (including photos), specifying whether the user is a forecaster, professional or a member of the public.

5. On The Snow

This app from Mountain New Corporation is billed as the most downloaded ski app. It offers a bit of everything in a generic but easy-to-digest design, and it is hard to beat the cost, zilch.

When you download the app, you add your favorite resorts and it gives a basic rundown of new snow, base depth, open lifts, and a graph shows the new snow in each of the past five days. When you click on a specific resort, the snow report is a bit more detailed and adds a place to post and look at first-hand accounts.

It also has tabs that show a copy of the resort’s trail map and webcams, and finally an overview tab that gives a brief description of the mountain, historical snowfall and assorted mountain stats.

Don’t bother with the lodging option at the bottom of each page, which redirects to Trip Advisor. Looking at Loon Mountain, I entered a couple dates and my first option was for a Comfort Inn & Suites in Lincoln, Ala.

4. Peak Finder

For the person who loves to document the views of the mountains around them, PeakFinder will show you which mountains are in the shot.

By using GPS and the compass from your phone, the app does not need an internet connection to display the outline of the mountains around you. That outline can be removed with a quick change of settings so it simply shows the name of the mountain and the elevation above each peak.

It does come with a small cost of $4.99 but can be used year-round for those summer hikes as well.

3. Slopes

Slopes is a very good app and an easy way to track your day, but to me it is second in class to the top choice for tracking your day. For those who ski as part of a group with skiers that need to break off because of varying abilities, this is probably a better choice (with the same $1.99 price tag) because it has a location sharing option.
It gives short bios of each resort with mountain stats and user-sourced conditions that range from the previous 48 hours to 30 days.

2. App for the resort you are currently at

Whether you are at your home mountain or somewhere new, there are plenty of good reasons to have the resort app on your phone. Whether it is tracking your day — though I’ve found a dedicated tracker to be the better alternative — or looking to see what is open, it gives the skier/rider a dedicated portal to the mountain. For many, its like having guest services in your pocket.

Helpful additions to some apps include being able to contact ski patrol, lift wait times and food ordering. Some offer not only a traditional trail map — there’s still nothing better than a physical trail map — but also one dedicated to which trails were groomed the night before on the main page.

Even if your mountain doesn’t have a dedicated app, it might offer text notifications so that you know when a lift goes down for wind hold.

1. Ski Tracks

Everyone likes to have the numbers. What we do with those numbers varies greatly depending on each individual. Are you trying to rack up vertical feet, or find out just how fast you can responsibly ski the Gondi Line at Sugarloaf? Or maybe you want to map out each run. Ski Tracks, created by skiing and snowboarding enthusiasts Core Coders, allows you to track and keep record of it for $1.99.

It has 17 activities ranging from skiing and snowboarding to ice yachting and sledding to track your day. Even for skiers, it asks whether you are skiing, telemarking, ski touring or monoskiing. Thanks to GPS, the app can give you the order of each of your runs with details on each one.