App: Snow Pick
Developer: Quyen Ngo
Contact: qngo@icloud.com
Snow Pick uses your phone's location to find the closest ski resorts. For each one, it queries a live weather forecast at the resort's mid-mountain elevation and assesses today's conditions — fresh snow, base depth, temperature, and wind. Each resort gets a 0–100 score and a Go / OK / Skip rating. You see the best one as the hero, and the rest ranked behind it.
All weather and snowfall data is fetched live from Open-Meteo, a free open weather API. We query at each resort's mid-mountain elevation so the numbers reflect what's on the runs — not what's at the village in the valley. Forecasts are model-based estimates; always trust your eyes when you arrive at the mountain.
Because we can't get those numbers honestly. Real-time lift status, grooming reports, and open-terrain percentages come from proprietary resort feeds — paid services we'd have to pass on to you, and that often disagree with what's actually happening at the lift line. Snow Pick deliberately sticks to verifiable weather data and lets you make the call. If you need to know whether a specific lift is spinning today, call the resort directly.
Fresh snow drives the score the most — a powder day is what most people are chasing. Base depth gates whether a mountain is even rideable (under 30 cm base is a hard penalty). Warm temperatures and high winds subtract points (warm = slush; gusts above 70 km/h = likely lift holds). The full breakdown is in the App's "How Snow Pick picks" screen.
The resort list is a hand-curated seed dataset. Coordinates and base/summit elevations are approximate and may be off — if you spot a resort in the wrong place or with a clearly wrong elevation, tap it and use "Report wrong location" at the bottom of the detail screen. Your reports feed into the next dataset update.
Snow Pick is free to download. You see the top 3 ranked resorts free. Snow Pick Pro is a one-time non-consumable In-App Purchase that unlocks the rest of the nearby resort list. There is no subscription, no auto-renewal, no recurring charge. Pay once, chase powder forever.
Open Settings inside Snow Pick and tap "Restore Purchases". This re-applies any previous Apple-verified transactions on the same Apple ID.
Snow Pick defaults to Google Maps when it's installed, falling back to Apple Maps. You can change the default in Settings → Directions → Default maps app, or use the "Open in Google Maps / Apple Maps" buttons on the resort detail screen to override per-resort.
The score is based on the live weather forecast at the resort's mid-mountain elevation. Local microclimates (a single lee-side bowl, a north-facing aspect that holds snow longer) aren't visible in the model and won't be captured. Treat the score as a quick filter — if it says Go, the resort probably has decent conditions; if it says Skip, the mountain as a whole is probably not great today. Local knowledge always wins.
Yes. The current dataset focuses on Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, the European Alps and Pyrenees, Japan, Scandinavia, and Scotland. We expand the list over time. If your local resort is missing, email us with the resort name, coordinates, and base/summit elevations and we'll add it in the next update.
Not in v1. The wedge is "one-tap decision on your phone before you leave the house". A watch and CarPlay version may follow if there's demand — let us know.
Email qngo@icloud.com with feedback, feature requests, or bug reports. We read every message.