I'm new to colorado skiing (not sure if you can call never taking lessons as a kid but
having my dad rent me skis and send me down the bunny hills in Tahoe skiing), but I-70 might have some of the worst ski traffic in the country. It seems like you have to either leave obscenely early and probably wait in the parking lot for at least an hour before resorts open or take the afternoon ski shift and risk the mountain being already skiied off.
Since we've been having a good snow year already, I'm trying to get stoked for the traffic-ridden drives by revisiting how last year I started tracking traffic patterns for the local Boulder resort (Eldora) for fun. Eldora has a smallish parking lot and issues a road block if the lot gets too full. I tracked what time the block was enforced and lifted (from their twitter) and the previous 24 hours snowfall from OpenSnow.
I plotted the previous 24 hours of snow by date and the block time by date:
You can tell they look pretty similar-- the longest blocks coming after the most snow for the most part. However, in a regression model where I controlled for day of the week (allowing day to have its own intercept or starting point in the model), the amount of snow did not significantly predict the block time.
I think this is probably because there was hardly ever a road block on a weekday, so that effect likely goes away when we control for day.
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