Turns All Year 2.0
The Turns All Year 2.0 website was created to continue the great work of Charles Eldridge who started turns-all-year.com to first consolidate and organize backcountry trip planning resources (weather, telemetry, avalanche forecast, etc.), then to record his personal trip reports, and finally to eneable others to post their TR's. Later on, Charles turned the site management over to Marcus Engley who then passed the torch on to Chris Mosetick.
We are grateful to these TAY'ers for keeping the flame burning, and excited to build upon their legacy by re-creating an online space that can serve skiers and riders in the PNW and beyond. Frankly, the door is open to all who want to engage in a friendly and productive conversation with others, or to contribute useful or fun information.
Site Capabilities
"So what can I do around here now that I've signed up?" you may ask. Here's a brief overview of the capabilities currently available, and we promise to keep enhancing the site per our users' feedback. Speaking of which - got a recommendation? Why not post it in the forum here.
Trip Reports (TR's)
Oh yes, first and foremost - we hope you'll read and reply to trip reports posted by others, and also post your own so all can benefit from the collective wisdom among the touring community. We expect this to be the beefiest part of the site, and look forward to continually getting stoked by reading many awesome TR's from y'all!
Resources
We're hoping to provide links to resources one may find useful when planning a backcountry trip, including weather and avalanche forecast. Please check out the Resources section (see the global navigation), and drop us a note if you have a suggestion for including a new item.
Community and Private Messaging
Here you can search for and message other TAY community members. We plan to enhance this area so it's easier to look for and find touring partners, etc. Stay tuned : )
Blog
Got something awesome to share? Took a great trip, and brought back a bunch of incredible photos and memories? Or have learned a valuable lesson while in the backcountry you believe others could benefit from? We'd love to read all about it, and others would too! Please contact us if you'd like to submit a story for the TAY blog.
"So what's the difference between a TR and a blog post? There's no clear line between the two, but we think of the TR's as shorter, more quickly consumable content while a blog may be longer in nature. Also non-TR topics can land in the blog, e.g. avi evaluation info, suggestions for touring, suggestions to folks new to touring, ideas for community engagement or traveling to amazing touring destinations just to name a few.
Forum
The Forum is the catch-all part of the website, i.e. items that one can't find in any of the above sections could find their home in here. Once again, if you'd like to see new categories added, you know what to do ... yup, shoot us a note.
Walk Down the Mory Lane
The "About" page content from the original turns-all-year.com website:
This web site grew out of frustration with using the NOAA Washington mountain telemetry data web pages, and an idea that a better way to navigate through those pages could be created. The mountain telemetry data can be incredibly useful to the backcountry skier because, with some practice, one can learn to make good predictions about the likely weather, snow, and avalanche conditions in different areas of the mountains, and thus make a good choice about a destination for a backcountry outing. With NOAA's navigation scheme, a lot of backtracking is required (using the dreaded "back" button), going up and then down menus to get to all of the current and archived telemetry data pages.
A "frames" version of the telemetry pages was created, and it seemed to work well; it was easy to zip through a lot of telemetry pages and quickly get an idea of what was going on, weather-wise, in the mountains. But then new ideas kept popping up. Why not add weather forecast so that they wouldn't have to be pulled from the browser bookmarks? What about satellite and radar images? Why not mountain road and trail links that are so useful during spring and summer? Then, why not add some photos? And so on.
Along the way, a need for a place to post backcountry ski trip reports arose, so in 2001 a Trip Reports section was added to the site. At first, all posting of trip reports was done manually: e-mailed trip reports were added to a monthly page, which was then uploaded to the server. After a while, this became a bit tedious, so in 2002 an electronic bulletin board (forum) was set up so that people could not only post their trip reports themselves, but also respond to trip reports posted by others. This has turned out to be a great addition, saving time and spurring more people to send in useful backcountry skiing information. As of March, 2006, there are now over 2500 backcountry skiing and snowboarding trip reports, organized by month for easy browsing and searching. Along the way additional boards have been added in response to user suggestions: lift-assisted (non-backcountry) reports, partners wanted, and gear for sale or wanted to buy.