The Rate Tier Structure Is the Decision-Making Core
Six ticket rate fields — Holiday Rate, Weekend Rate, Weekday Rate, Weekend Evening Rate, Evening Rate, Afternoon Rate — stored as USD currency values per resort record. That's the information that actually determines whether a given resort on a given day is worth the drive versus triggering your Epic or Ikon pass instead.
Most skiers carry this information in their head, approximately, for two or three resorts they know well. For a bucket list that runs across Colorado Rockies, New England, Utah, Pacific Northwest, and Lake Tahoe, the rate data degrades fast. You're comparing a Friday holiday rate at Pats Peak against a weekday at Sugarbush without reliable numbers, and the difference across a family trip is not trivial.
The Dasometric Record That Tells You What the Mountain Is
Summit and Vertical in feet, Peaks, Lifts, Trails, and Acres — these six technical spec fields are what separate a resort catalog from a bookmark list.
Summit elevation matters for snowpack stability and seasonal window. Anything under 3,000 feet summit in the northeast is fighting the same rain-on-snow events every January that compromise base depth by mid-February. Vertical drop tells you how much real skiing you're getting per run — a 300-vertical-foot resort with 40 trails is a fundamentally different day than 2,000 vertical and 18 trails. Experienced skiers know this intuitively; the record makes it explicit and comparable across 20 entries without having to remember which resort was which.
Trails and Acres together capture terrain density. A resort with 1,500 acres and 30 trails is going to ski completely differently than one with 400 acres and 48 trails — the latter is going to show crowd and congestion patterns by midday that the former won't. For a February Presidents' Week trip with a mixed group including intermediate skiers who need consistent conditions, that distinction drives the decision.
Skki allowed? and Sno-Go allowed? as boolean fields with a linked policy URL address the adaptive equipment access question that doesn't appear in any standard resort comparison tool. If you ski with someone who uses a Sno-Go or a Skki sit-ski frame, this field determines which resorts are actually viable for the group — before anyone drives three hours to find out at the ticket window.
When the Visit Log Closes the Loop
The linked Ski Trips library — connected to each resort record via Visit Log — captures the actual experience: Ticket Cost, Confirmation Code, Workout Track URL from your GPS activity, who you went With, and a Featured Photo from the day.
You're planning a Utah Rockies week and trying to decide between Deer Valley and Alta based on past experience. Filter your Ski Trips linked entries for those resorts and you have the actual ticket costs you paid, the days you were there, the GPS tracks of what you actually skied, and the confirmation codes if you need to reference anything. That's a different quality of memory than trying to reconstruct it from photos and credit card statements.
The Priority 7 field in the Ski Trips library is a sequencing tool for planning a week with multiple resort days — ranking which mountain on which day based on forecast, pass coverage, and travel logistics. Combined with Week of boolean to flag multiday vs. day-trip structure, the trip planning layer sits inside the same database as the resort intelligence.
Season Pass tracking — Epic, Ikon, New England Pass — cross-referenced against which resorts are in the record gives you the pass coverage map without having to consult the pass provider's website every time. Resorts tagged with the applicable pass options tell you immediately which days in your trip window are covered and which require out-of-pocket ticket rates.