Apple Watch Now Offers Some Pretty Awesome Tools for Skiers
Beyond the convenience of on-your-wrist text messages and meeting reminders, perhaps the most compelling reason to swap out your analog timepiece for something smarter is Apple Watch’s physical activity tracking features. Reaching daily activity goals with the help of the watch almost makes exercise fun, but there were some notable omissions from the trackable activities in Watches past. The Series 2 filled in a number of these gaps when it was released in 2016, including the ability to now count your laps in the pool. And on February 28, the Series 3, first released last fall, added two more conspicuously missing activities: skiing and snowboarding.
Even without the new ski-tracking software, the Apple Watch comes in handy for a day on the slopes—it’s more accessible and convenient than taking out your phone on the chairlift to check weather updates and text messages. But the built-in activity tracker—which uses an internal altimeter, accelerometer, and GPS—can now also keep tabs on your physical exertion on the slopes. Coupled with newly compatible third-party ski and snowboard apps, this allows users to record runs, see their vertical descent and other nerdy stats, and track calories burned.
I spent a day skiing at Squaw Valley in Tahoe to test out a couple of the new apps and the watch’s features. The Squaw Alpine app, specific to Squaw Valley Ski Resort, tracks your stats but also allows you to find your friends on the mountain and get real-time mountain condition updates, meaning you can finally get first tracks on that opened-minutes-ago run and beat the lines when your favorite chairlift opens.
The Slopes app also works with the Series 3 to track your stats, detect wipeouts, and combine this info with your photos to let you relive your best ski day through your phone. Over cocktails, you can find out where exactly you took a tumble on that double black by watching your runs drawn out in 3D on an interactive map, that also brings in photos you took that day. The Slopes app works anywhere, too, so whether you’re heli-skiing in Alaska in December or riding glaciers in Austria in June you can track your progress day-to-day and over the course of a season. (Slopes has a $19.99-a-year premium version, but I found the free one did the job just fine for the recreational skier.)
In less than a half day using these apps, along with the Apple Watch Series 3’s internal trackers, I found that my speed maxed out at 42 mph, that I burned more than 400 calories, that I trekked an equivalent of seven flights of stairs, and covered 16 runs on the mountain—enough to feel justified in an après beer (or two) before the sun had even set.
