This past week I had the pleasure of spending two days at the lovely Northstar at Tahoe ski resort. This is a place I have fond memories of, and given recent family events a nostalgic run or two down Logger’s Loop seemed appropriate. Skiing is best done for the intrinsic pleasures of the activity; the beauty of the environment, the bite of the wind on your cheeks, the roll of the hill under your feet, the chats with strangers on a lift. It’s all good. Expensive, but good.

Normally when you go to the mountain, you purchase a lift ticket in the form of a sticker or cardboard print-out that you hang from your jacket or pants. The lift operators know you paid and let you right on by. This year, the first time I’ve been to Northstar in a while, they handed me a RFID card with my name and a numeric code printed on it. “Just put it in your pocket and we’ll scan it for you,” I was assured. Indeed, there were dedicated staff posted at the gondola with scanner guns of some sort, ready to process the guests like we were in some winter wonderland of the Cyberpunk dark future. OK, fine, that makes sense. Then there were more at the first proper lifts at mid-mountain. OK, just making sure I wasn’t sneaking a ski day when all I might have paid for was a Gondola ride. Then there were more scanners at the Comstock lift (up the hill from the mid-mountain lodge), and again at both of the backside lifts. What the heck?

When I got back home, I checked out the website referenced on the RFID card and discovered that lo, I was participating in an alpine Foursquare of sorts. Each time I rode a lift, my card was scanned and they knew how many vertical feet I’d ski by the time I hit another lift and was scanned again. They even had pins, just like XBox Live and Steam achievements. I was surprised to learn that in one morning I’d traveled the equivalent of the Golden Gate Bridge in vertical feet, that midway through my second day I’d traveled over five miles in vertical feet, and midway through my last run I had descended the equivalent of the full height of Mt. Everest. I’d also earned a Festivus pin and a “brown bagging” pin for having skiied on December 23rd and during lunch hour respectively. What an odd way to encourage people to do things they already wanted to do.

This system is available at several resorts scattered about, some of them in Tahoe, others elsewhere, and allows folks to share all their little victories via outside social networks and set up ladder competitions. I suppose in an age where people habitually post hog many miles they jog each day, this was inevitable.