Garmin marks parts of a ski activity as lift rides. Strava attempts to remove the lift rides from some parts of the data. I understand that many people find this incredibly important, as the idea of matching a lift segment is very stressful for them.
However, the present implementation of this completely removes that data, resulting in maps that look horrible. Here are maps of my skiing yesterday.
Strava:
As you can see, on Strava the GPS track jumps from the bottom of the lift to wherever Garmin decided I was moving again on each run. This results in lift lines that go all over the place, looking wonky and obscuring more of the map that is necessary. The Garmin (and also Slopes, but whatever) solution of drawing the lift lines in a different color is super, but even just drawing the map with the full set of GPS points would be an enormous improvement. (I should say that there are many things preferable about the Strava map -- it seems to be drawn with the GPS at higher resolution, the backing map is really nice, the 3D option is obviously super cool.)
When I contacted support about this, I got this response:
Garmin recently made some changes with the way that they record lift rides for alpine activities, like skiing and snowboarding. When that change was made in mid December our system was still using the old logic for lift rides, so it caused some alpine activities to still include lift rides.
We pushed an update to our system on the 14th of February to align our logic for lift rides on skiing and snowboarding activities from Garmin, so all activities going forward should remove lift rides as it had before the change.
This is such a weird misunderstanding of the problem! I would give so much to go back to "lift rides match weird uphill segments, but the maps look good."
This is more of a personal thing, but I also think the downhill-only elevation chart looks unsettling, and prefer one that has lift rides in it. That's probably more individual taste. But surely no one likes a map with straight diagonal lines going all over the place.
If you can finagle it so that lift data isn't matched on segments and speeds and whatnot, but is drawn on maps, that would be amazing. If not, preferring sane maps to ignoring lift segments seems wildly preferable to me.
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