The trail map in your jacket pocket is a painting. Not a map in the cartographic sense — a painting, and usually a magnificent one. For half a century, resorts have commissioned panorama artists to compress a three-dimensional mountain onto one sheet: entire massifs bent around sightlines that don’t exist, valleys widened, peaks rotated, so that every lift and run faces the viewer at once. The greatest practitioners — James Niehues in North America, Pierre Novat in France — painted hundreds of resorts each, and their work is genuinely beloved; Niehues’ maps have hung in art museums.
Two things follow from trail maps being art. First: they’re gloriously distorted. A panorama is a diagram of an argument (“here is how our mountain fits together”), not a chart you could navigate by bearing and distance. Second, and decisive for an app: they’re copyrighted artwork, commissioned and owned. A subscription ski app can license them; a free app with no revenue cannot bundle hundreds of paintings, and shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
So Alpy had a choice every small ski app faces: fake it (sketchy clones of resort art — legally gray, honestly worse), skip trail maps entirely, or find a third way.
OpenStreetMap contributors have spent two decades mapping ski areas: every marked piste as a coordinate chain with a name and difficulty, every lift with its stations, refuges, area boundaries. The geometry is real — surveyed from GPS traces and imagery, not bent for a viewpoint — and it’s open data under the ODbL license. Zermatt alone carries 134 km of named piste geometry; across OSM we count 3,652 named ski areas worldwide.
Real geometry means an app can do things a painting never could: draw your live position on the network, match your GPS line to a named run, measure piste kilometres honestly. The trade is visual: raw OSM rendering looks like engineering output, not a mountain. The answer was to design our own cartography on top of it — twice.
The schematic chart is Alpy’s homage to the paper map’s spirit without copying anyone’s painting: the real OSM network drawn as a clean diagram on a warm paper ground — runs colour-coded by difficulty in the European convention, lifts as dashed lines with terminal dots, the longest named descents labelled in small haloed capitals. North is simply up; geometry is simply true. It loads instantly, reads at arm’s length in glare and gloves, and while you’re tracking, a small red dot on it is you — the one feature every paper map has lacked since 1936.
The 3D terrain view goes the other direction: the same piste network draped over real satellite imagery and elevation, free to pitch and rotate. This is where a painting’s job — “feel how the mountain fits together” — gets done by actual terrain instead of artistic license. It’s also where your day replays: your recorded line drawn down the real mountain, a chase camera flying behind your marker, your ghost alongside.
Chart for orientation and planning; terrain for understanding and reliving. A painting tries to be both at once, which is exactly why it has to bend the mountain.
Three rules keep the system clean. Credit: OSM data is credited on-screen and in the listing — ODbL isn’t just a legal license, it’s two decades of volunteers who deserve their line. No guessing: where OSM is thin (notably parts of Japan, where famous resorts carry unexpected tags), Alpy shows what exists and says so, rather than hallucinating runs — and anyone can fix the source by mapping, which improves every OSM-based app at once. Etiquette: piste geometry is fetched once and cached for thirty days per resort, because the Overpass servers that answer these queries are volunteer-run infrastructure, not a free CDN.
The painted panorama isn’t the enemy — it’s a beautiful solved problem for the chairlift pocket. But a phone knows where you are, where you’ve been, and how fast you went, and honoring that takes a map that’s true rather than merely gorgeous. We’ll take true, and make it as handsome as we can.
Both map views are free in Alpy for 3,652 OSM ski areas — schematic chart by default, 3D one tap away, your position live on both. The app · More from the blog.