SmartMountain Expands: Enhancing Ski Patrol and Incident Management

Many of you are already familiar with SmartMountain, which began as a tool for avalanche tracking and resource management. It later expanded into incident management at the request of ski patrols who wanted to use SmartMountain for their everyday duties. Since most ski areas in North America are not avalanche-prone, many were unaware of SmartMountain’s full capabilities. Recognizing this, Steep Management—which was already selling MountainOffice—decided to add a ski patrol incident management solution to its offerings. After evaluating various programs, Steep found that SmartMountain, developed by Earth Analytic, was the best dispatch and incident management system available. Steep then worked for several years to become the official representative for SmartMountain.

During this period, Steep and Earth Analytic noticed that ski area demand was shifting toward waiver access for incident management, driven by the needs of risk managers and insurance lawyers. Other incident management systems had already partnered with POS providers to integrate waiver access, creating a challenge for SmartMountain. While ski patrols wanted better tools for their work, management prioritized waiver management.

SmartMountain responded by developing solutions to provide access to waivers from any POS or storage system, allowing ski areas to include waivers in any incident as needed. As the POS market diversified, SmartMountain created protocols to facilitate waiver retrieval, offering both digital and automated systems depending on the ski area’s IT resources and preferences. A key advantage is that ski areas retain ownership of their databases, which they can maintain in ArcGIS even if they discontinue using SmartMountain.

In addition to the waiver solution, SmartMountain now features a Workers’ Compensation module that enables automated processing of claims from injury notification through OSHA reporting. An experienced ski area risk manager with advanced Esri ArcGIS expertise played a central role in developing this module and guiding the waiver solution.

Today, SmartMountain stands out as the leading platform for ski patrol and risk management. Built on Esri ArcGIS, it offers powerful data management capabilities, allowing users to generate reports and analyze data correlations independently. SmartMountain provides ski areas with the tools to manage incidents, waivers, and workers’ compensation efficiently and effectively.