While you’re out skiing in the woods — or hiking and cycling in the near future — if you’ve got an iPhone or Blackberry, Deanne Steven of Tourism Rossland suggests you track your route with a simple, free, downloadable application, and then post your trail on everytrail.com.
“It’s really cool,” Steven says about the app that can be downloaded from everytrail.com. “It will geotag photos, so while you’re going you can take photos of things and it shows up on the map. It also shows your altitude, your speed, and your distance.”
There were a lot of tracks uploaded by bikers in the Rossland Range over the summer, and now Steven wants to see more cross-country and touring ski routes too.
“We’re trying to get people to use this app as much as possible,” she said. “Just go ski it, come back, upload, and it goes directly onto the Internet.
“A visitor can then download it onto their phone if they want to do it too, and see where they need to go or how to get to that trailhead,” she said.
Tourism Rossland has put a lot of effort into marketing Rossland’s cross-country ski trails, including the recently published nordic ski maps.
“We sent them out to every Nordic store in B.C. and we’re working on the cross-country ski clubs,” Steven said. “It’s a big opportunity for us. On the map, we’ve included Paulson too, because Paulson is actually the same distance to Rossland as it is to Castlegar.”