Happy holidays, I hope at least some of you are seeing the white stuff now. I spent much of the Christmas weekend building out a few new features for the site. Yeah I know, it is neverending, but that is the breaks when you do a redesign on the fly and on our budget.

After a month of banging away, I finally feel like the site is representing what I had envisioned. There certainly were some choppy moments along the way and probably a few more to come. The snow is flying here in VT and I am looking at getting a 5 straight on the hill. As such here is your overview of the new stuff before I disappear to shred the white, mostly frozen, wave.

The Weather Page

This has been on the docket for a long time. Both John and Klondick had requested expanded and better weather coverage. This is not the final product, but certainly is a solid first step.
I scoured the internets and poached as many North American weather maps as humanly possible. As it turns out, there are a ton of maps to scope.

My favorite is the NAM 84 hour animated prediction model, shown to the left. I have been following it exclusively (not checking any "text" forecasts) since the 23rd and have had a very solid and early view of what was going to happen in Vermont. Like many of the maps I have included it takes some getting used to, definitely centric to weather nerds. I also recommend checking out the snow probability maps at the bottom of the page. This expands on some of the maps we had before by providing info for the next three days in the 4" and 8" range. If there are maps you are interested in or some information you think is missing, let me know and I will do my best to include it.

In addition to the new weather page, we have also updated the weather drop on the front page to include some of the new maps. I was missing the national radar from the old design, so I brought it back along with the "featured" post section. This along with some style clean-up on the drop buttons and video sections makes for a much more coherent front page. You can get to the full page of weather through the "explore" menu or from the weather drop, or just bookmark it, you know you are checking it daily.

Ride Reports

While the weather page is really the big advance, I also added/enhanced a few aspects of the ride reports.

A Year Ago

We are now showing ride reports from a year ago on the front page. You will see these towards the bottom. Just a quick way to see where we were at a year ago, however depressing that may be.

Quick Reports

I know I have been waiting for a day worthy of posting a ride report. Having it featured on the front page makes you want to showcase an above average day. However, a big reason for the ride reports is to record conditions good, bad or ugly. To accommodate the mundane days, I have included a new report called the "Quick Report". All you have to do is fill out the date, conditions, location, and crew. If you don't have an image, the default will be inserted. The report will NOT be included on the front but will be put into the reports page. An example is my Sugarbush report from 12/26, including a shitty iphone photo. We welcome everyone to post ride reports, to get started, simply get an account here.