v1.0.2  2026–27 Season

The Time You Didn't Spend Waiting

Every ski app can tell you how much vertical you skied. Only one of them knows how long everybody else on that mountain spent standing in line that day, which means only one can tell you how much of your day you got back. That is the headline of 1.0.2, along with fourteen new mountains, trail maps that finally draw the runs, and a lift list rebuilt around the only question that matters from a chairlift.

A stat nobody else can compute

Vertical is a solved problem. Apps have measured it for a decade, and yours is roughly the same whether you picked good lines or spent the morning in a forty minute queue at the base.

What PeakWait has that nothing else does is a crowd on the same mountain on the same day. That makes a comparison possible. A lap is a ride up, a run down, and whatever you stood in. Terrain and conditions are shared by everyone on that hill, so most of the difference between your minutes-per-lap and everyone else's is time spent not moving.

Three rules keep the number honest, and they are worth stating because a figure like this is easy to fake.

• We compare against the median, not the average. One person who quits after two runs at lunch has an enormous minutes-per-lap, and an average would let them hand everyone else a flattering number.
• It never goes negative. This is a time-saved figure, not a scorecard. "You were forty minutes slower than the mountain" is a true fact nobody asked for.
• It needs a real crowd. Below five other skiers on that mountain that day, there is nothing honest to compare to, and the day is set aside rather than counted as zero. The app tells you how many days are still waiting, instead of quietly making your season look smaller than it felt.

If we can't measure it, we don't show it. The whole card stays hidden until it has something true to say, because a card reading 0m saved would be the app arguing against itself with a number it hasn't earned.

Fourteen new mountains, and the Northwest fills in

Washington and Montana fill in around the four we already carried: Whitefish, Bridger Bowl, Red Lodge, Discovery, Montana Snowbowl, Blacktail, Showdown, Great Divide, Mission Ridge, White Pass, 49 Degrees North, Bluewood, Loup Loup and Mt. Spokane, joining Big Sky, Stevens Pass, Crystal Mountain and Mt. Baker. That brings PeakWait to 106 mountains, every one seeded with real surveyed lift coordinates rather than a pin dropped in the middle of the resort.

The maps draw the mountain now

This one was a genuine bug, and an old one. Thirty five resorts had their lifts but none of their runs, so opening the map gave you a handful of pins floating on a plain green field. Jackson Hole, Whistler, Revelstoke, Taos and Mt. Bachelor had all been that way since the day they were added.

They now draw 3,648 trails between them, coloured by difficulty.

One colour on a row, and it is always the wait

The lift list is where a skier asks the only question that matters from a chairlift: which lift do I go to. It wasn't answering. Each row carried two coloured chips of similar weight, an operational status beside a wait band, and nothing told your eye which one was the answer. A yellow On hold next to a red Long is two claims and no conclusion.

That is also why the screen needed a legend, and the legend's colours were a third system that matched neither. A row that needs a legend isn't finished.

Every row now says how old its report is, because a band without an age is a claim without evidence. Closed lifts recede and are no longer tappable: there is no wait to report at a closed lift, and offering the action is how a bad data point gets created.

A season worth keeping

Vertical and runs are the commodity half of a ski season. The half worth keeping is where it actually went, and almost nobody predicts that correctly about themselves.

Every section here omits itself when the number behind it is zero, so a skier one day into the season gets a shorter screen rather than a wall of noughts.

Your crew, without the paperwork

Adding the people you ski with used to mean typing a screen name, which is a strange thing to ask of someone adding their own family. Three changes:

• You get a name the moment you open the app. Two ski words and a number, yours to change. Nobody arrives as a question mark any more.
• Invite links add someone in one tap, and the app tells you plainly what happened rather than blaming a handle that was correct all along.
• You're told when a request is accepted, instead of finding out next time you happen to open the tab.

Your crew rows now also name the chair each person is on, not just what they're doing. Riding up is a state. Riding up, Pallavicini is a plan.

And the rest

• Settings are grouped into categories instead of one long list.
• Every state is spelled out. Section headers said Colorado and California, then MT and WA.
• Lift names read the way the mountain writes them. A handful carried raw map metadata: one chair was genuinely called "Chair 10 Bad Rock (Intermittent)".
• Wait colours are legible in bright sun. The short-wait colour failed its contrast floor in light mode, which matters on the one screen guaranteed to be read outdoors in glare.

On honesty: PeakWait never invents a wait. When we don't know, the app says so. Everything in 1.0.2 is built to the same rule, which is why the new season stat hides rather than guesses, and why closed lifts stopped accepting reports.