Jackson Hole Mountain Resort has a promotional program called the Vertical Foot Club. People who sign up at Guest Services and successfully ski or snowboard 100,000 vertical feet in one week receive a certificate and one day’s free ticket for the following season. Lately, this is nothing to sneeze at because ticket prices are approaching $80.
This year, I went with just Ryan. Paul Burns, who was planning to come, stayed behind to prepare for his Chicago Fire Department Lieutenant’s exam.
The first two days, it snowed at the top of the mountain, with a great deal of wind. The new tram’s digital windspeed meter recorded 50 mph of continuous lateral wind. While we were
enjoying the rapidly depleting snow on the top half of the mountain, someone we rode up
Thunder lift with suggested that we try the
Hobacks, which we hadn’t done in years. The Hobacks are a large expanse of ungroomed, untouched terrain along the south half of the resort, and are famous for either having great snow or miles of impossible ice formations. We found the snow there to be pristine and spent much of two days on the Hobacks.
As the week progressed, it became warmer and conditions transformed into true spring slush, which drove us to the terrain park. This year marks the first time since the early ‘90s that I have dedicated a lot of time just to the halfpipe and terrain park, and I think we were beginning to see some results by the end of our trip.
On Thursday, we had our 7th 
Shrimp Festival on Ship’s Prow, an outcropping of rock overlooking Rock Springs Bowl.
We’d known about the Vertical Foot Club for years, but had never joined or even tried tallying our vertical feet. This year, we set out to see how much vert we shredded in a day. Ryan used his brand-new Garmin GPS, a gift from Tiffany, which kept very accurate GPS data throughout the day. 
From the GPS data, we were able to see how many times we took each lift and from these data we calculated our total: 156,506 feet in 6 days. Our highest total for a single day was 28,612’ on Day 5, and our lowest was was 21,816’ on Day 1. Other interesting GPS statistics: we did 18 Après Vous quad runs, 16 gondola runs, and 12 trams. Our maximum speed was 40 mph and, of all places, this was on the catwalk at the bottom of the Hobacks.
There was only one hitch. We never did go to Guest Services and enroll in the Vertical Foot Club, so I guess we won’t get our free tickets after all.
Derek Braun 