Everything we read, and who it belongs to.
Each outside source LiftLine AI reads, who publishes it, what we use it for, what we keep, and the credit it carries.
If our software reads a source that is not on this page, that is a mistake on our side.
What we read
| Source | Who publishes it | What we use it for | What we keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| MtnPowder | Alterra Mountain Company's MtnPowder feed, carrying what each resort publishes | Lift and trail status for the resorts we cover, read every 15 minutes, with the snow, weather and road notes the resorts publish alongside it. | Mapped fields only. No raw feed response is stored. |
| Open-Meteo | Open-Meteo, Zurich | Hourly and daily weather forecasts for every resort. | Forecast values, per resort per hour. |
| National Weather Service | NOAA / National Weather Service, United States federal government | Forecasts and alerts as a cross-check on Open-Meteo. | Forecast values, per resort per hour. |
| Apple WeatherKit | Apple | The weather the iPhone app shows at a resort. The app asks Apple directly. | Nothing. It is shown on the phone. |
| Public resort webcams | The resorts that broadcast them | A vision model on our own computer counts the people standing in lift lines. It is our only direct view of how long a line is. | A head count, a confidence and a timestamp for each frame we count, and some frames, kept to train and check the counter. |
| OpenStreetMap | OpenStreetMap contributors, via the OpenStreetMap Foundation | Lift lines, runs, lodges and resort boundaries: the skeleton of the mountain graph the simulation runs on. | A derived routable graph. Raw extracts are cached for rebuilds. |
| USGS 3DEP lidar | United States Geological Survey | The terrain itself: slope, aspect and elevation, at Mammoth to about one foot. | Derived terrain rasters and classifier features. |
| USGS The National Map imagery | USDA National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), served by the USGS | Aerial imagery for the terrain classifier and for map renders. | Derived classifications. Tiles are cached during a build. |
| Lift specifications | skiresort.com, liftblog.com, Wikipedia, and resort-published specifications | Carrier capacity, rope speed and rated riders per hour for each lift. Lift queues in the simulation form from these. | One record per lift, with the source cited on the record. |
| Skier crowd reports | Our own users | A reported wait at a lift, used as a second observation alongside the cameras. | The lift, the value, the time, and your account ID. No coordinates. |
| Ikon and Epic blackout calendars | Alterra Mountain Company and Vail Resorts | Blackout dates, as a sign of when crowds are likely. | The date ranges, entered by hand once a season. Nothing is fetched. |
Credit and licences
- Open-Meteo
- Weather data by Open-Meteo, CC-BY 4.0
- Apple WeatherKit
- Weather in the iPhone app: Apple Weather
- OpenStreetMap
- © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL
- USGS 3DEP lidar
- Elevation data: USGS 3DEP (public domain)
- USGS The National Map imagery
- Imagery: USGS The National Map / USDA NAIP (public domain)
Things people assume are sources and are not
- Caltrans. We have no Caltrans integration. Road notes come from the resort feed, and any credit we once gave Caltrans was wrong.
- Your location. Skier crowd reports carry no coordinates: the endpoint accepts none and the table has no column for one.
If a source stops
If the resort feed stops, or a resort's webcams go dark, the forecast for that resort gets worse or stops, and we would say so in the app rather than show a number with nothing behind it. Whether each resort's lift status is arriving on time is shown live on the overview and at https://status.liftlineai.app.