Should you pause tracking while riding a ski lift?

The short answer

It depends on whether you want the day's numbers to describe the skiing or the whole day out, and either choice is reasonable. Leave a track running through a lift ride and its climb gets added to elevation gain in full, and its minutes get added to moving time in full, for the same reason a lunch break would not: a lift is actually moving and actually climbing, so there is no noise for the app to filter out and no ambiguity for it to resolve. Pause for each lift ride instead and neither number moves during that stretch, the same way neither moves during any other pause. Most people land on pausing through lifts once they realise what leaving it running actually adds, but the honest answer is that both are correct descriptions of different things.

Why this is not the usual kind of GPS confusion

Most of the strange numbers a GPS track produces trace back to noise — a receiver's altitude reading wobbling a few metres while you stand still, or its position drifting slightly while you wait at a junction. A chairlift is the opposite situation. It carries you upward at a steady rate for minutes at a time, covering real distance and gaining real altitude the entire way, which means a receiver watching it has nothing to filter out and nothing to second-guess. The climb it records is not a false positive dressed up as elevation gain. It is a completely accurate account of how high the chair actually took you, which is exactly what makes it worth thinking about on purpose rather than assuming the app will sort it out for you.

What leaving the track running adds to each number

Elevation gain sums the upward difference between one recorded point and the next, all the way through a track, with no distinction between a metre gained by your legs on a skin track and a metre gained sitting on a chair. A day built from several runs and the lifts between them will show an elevation gain figure closer to double what the runs alone produced, since the lifts put back nearly all of the height the runs gave up.

Moving time works the same way, from the other side. It counts ground covered, not effort spent covering it, and a chairlift covers ground continuously for as long as the ride lasts. Those minutes fold into moving time exactly as if they were spent skiing, which is also why average pace for the day ends up describing neither the runs nor the lifts particularly well — it sits somewhere between a skiing speed and a lift speed, a blend that was never really the number either was after.

Three ways people actually record a ski day

• One continuous recording, lifts included — the whole day comes back as a single route with nothing left out, useful if what you actually want is a record of everywhere you went, lift lines and all, rather than a figure describing only the descents.
• Pause for every lift ride — elevation gain and moving time settle down to something closer to the runs themselves, at the cost of remembering to tap pause and resume several times an hour, all day, with a missed one on run fifteen quietly letting that lift's height back into the total.
• Stop and start a fresh recording for each run — each run comes back as its own clean entry with nothing but skiing in it, but the day is then several separate recordings rather than one, and totalling the day's distance or elevation means adding them up by hand afterward rather than reading one number off a single route.

None of the three is more correct than the others. They are answers to slightly different questions — the whole day, the skiing only, or each run on its own — and the right one depends on which of those questions you actually wanted answered when you looked at the numbers afterward.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam has no automatic stop-detection guessing at your speed on a lift or anywhere else — a route pauses only when you tap to pause it, and only paused time is kept out of moving time, the same rule that applies to a lunch break or a photo stop. Skiing is one of the built-in activity types with its own colour on the map, and replaying a saved route afterward draws the whole day back out exactly as it was recorded, lift sections included or not depending on what you chose at the time. TrailCam is free to download.