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Jackson Hole's Vertical Leaderboard Will Go Away, Here's Why

Originally posted on Powder | By Ian Greenwood | Last updated Jan 7, 2025 5:45 PM ET

Jackson Hole Mountain Resort (JHMR), Wyoming, will remove the vertical foot leaderboard feature available in its JH Insider app.

The leaderboard feature allows users to track the amount of vertical feet they skied in a day, week, month, and season at JHMR.

The feature won’t persist because, according to a letter issued by JHMR’s CEO Mary Kate Buckley on January 2nd, it "was deemed to potentially promote fast skiing.”

The decision follows the death of Peter Wuerslin, who was killed in a skier collision at JHMR last year. Laurie Thal, a friend of Wuerslin, asked JHMR to remove the vertical feet leaderboard feature after his death.

“It's horrible that it took the death of Peter to create these changes,” Thal told KHOL. “But if making some of these changes will save one other child or one other person, I am grateful to make any contribution to that.”

(According to Buckley’s letter, JHMR’s ratio of skier visits to collisions has historically matched the industry average, including the 2023-2024 ski season.)

As of today, January 7th, the JH Insider leaderboard only shows skier days when viewed from an iPad rather than also including vertical feet and the number of lift rides.

The end of the leaderboard isn’t the only safety-related change JHMR has made.

This season, the resort added “Family Zones” to its beginner and highly congested areas. Buckley explained in the letter that these zones were designed to “promote slower, more controlled skiing and riding.” Additionally, JHMR implemented seven rest areas, allowing skiers to take a break without standing in the middle of a run.

JHMR has also seen an increase in the number of safety enforcement actions compared to last winter. While the resort doesn’t share many specifics of these numbers to protect the identity of the skiers involved, Buckley noted that, in one day alone, JHMR ski patrol issued 24 pass suspensions for closure violations.

“Feedback from guests indicates that the increased presence of Speed Wranglers and Ski Patrol, as well as visible enforcement, has positively impacted perceptions of safety on the mountain,” Buckley wrote. Founded during the 2014-2015 ski season, the Speed Wranglers are a branch of JHMR’s mountain operations team responsible for managing signage, patrolling congested areas, and addressing reckless behavior.

Local pro skier Kai Jones has teamed up with JHMR to help push the safety message at the resort.

“Although there’s all this really good steep and gnarly terrain, there’s time and place to send it, and that’s not in the slow zones,” he said in a video shared by JHMR last winter. “When you’re in the slow zones, make sure to keep it chill.”

This article first appeared on Powder and was syndicated with permission.

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