
Tool for tracking upcoming powder days at ski resorts and last-second flights - Gaussian
https://www.zrankings.com/powderfares
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ISL
Agreed that it's a cool idea, especially if extended to international travel.
Some parts of the world are closer than we expect.

Local note: Why would a Seattleite fly from SeaTac at $562 to Vancouver in
order to arrange other transport to Whistler? There are direct sub-$100 buses
SEA-Whistler...

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pashabitz
Sweet! Please add sorting by powder (hi to lo) combined with price (lo to hi)
for an ultimate "powder per dollar" index. Thanks

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avn2109
This is the killer feature.

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meteore
I am surprised that nobody has mentioned the environmental perversity of this.
Guys, wake up! There will be no snow for you or for anybody very soon if you
go this route.

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nether
The ranking's a bit disingenuous since precipitation totals are notoriously
hard to predict. There should be a huge sigma for each value, making it
impossible to guarantee that the 28" forecast at a location will exceed the
27" forecast elsewhere. Accumulations will also vary after the clouds have
gone, as wind transport can shift the distribution significantly, leading to
that one side of the mountain that seems to be permanently scraped off or wind
crusted.

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blklane
Ah thats pretty cool! I made [https://snow.watch](https://snow.watch) that
gives 10 day forecast snow reports via SMS.

Wanted to do a second angle on it, see you did travel which is pretty sweet. I
assume those are affiliate links, wonder what % are buying flights?

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Gaussian
Thank you. Flight buys: Not a big percentage. Very small. This was more about
making something useful that I wanted for myself, which I did, and I did it
just for Chicago. It emailed me every morning. I finally got around to
building a page around it, however, and added other metros.

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JamesChevalier
This is cool! I built [https://blizzalert.com](https://blizzalert.com) a while
back which does part of this - sends an SMS with snowfall alerts for mountains
that you're watching. I didn't think to match it up with flight costs. Nice
job!

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rbritton
Out of curiosity (if you're willing to share), did you actually find a decent
source for ski condition data, or did you end up having to scrape and parse?

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toast0
Onthesnow / mountain news has good data and APIs, but I don't know how easy it
is to get access (you have to go through a contact form), where I was using
it, the contract had been setup many years before I joined.

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rrhyne
Cool, but you could improve the user workflow. I have 2 airports tops I could
leave out of here in San Diego. It doesn't help me at all that there are fares
from Seattle to xxxxxxx. I recommend you ask me to enter my location and show
me only relevant results.

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Gaussian
Good idea. One issue I have is that I'm limited on the number of queries I can
make to ITA for free. Google keeps jacking up the rates.

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aaronmu
Anything like this for Europe?

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griffinkelly
I've been following the site a while. Great to see a new feature addition and
get me coming back before we're missing the snow. Would be cool to have a
comparison between train/flight/drive per ticket/extrapolated cost and time,
and see what would get me there the quickest and cheapest.

Pending I can actually find an affordable fare lets see if I'll be on the
mountain one last time this season.

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awareBrah
Nice page. Was thinking of building something like this for my own use, but
then I saw yours and it was pretty much what I wanted so that's great.

Glad to see whistler on that list! I'll be there next week if anyone wants to
hit some runs, ping me

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grogenaut
You have it finding flights from SEA to YVR. That's basically pointless, it's
180 miles and I have a car if I drive up. Or train.

Cool otherwise.

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lavezzi
Isn't this approach going to end up being expensive all round? It doesn't
factor in any of the other incidentals.

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kafkaesq
An interesting arbitrage. Quite likely generalizable, too.

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kevinSuttle
Literally the whitest post ever

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Kapura
Ah, finally. A tool that will serve the needs of the common man. Just the
other day I was talking to a bus driver at a bar and he was telling me that he
wanted to be booking last-minute flights to ski at a day's notice, but that he
wished there were a tool to help him out.

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IanDrake
In a world where Snapchat just IPO'd, do you really want to ride the high
horse on this one.

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foobar1962
It's already dropped below issue price.

