In a conversational interview, Tom Gellie and a guest discuss the history and nature of ski‑run difficulty markings. The guest reveals that the familiar green‑circle, blue‑square, black‑diamond system was invented by Walt Disney while planning a California ski resort near Lake Tahoe, leveraging his animation background to use simple colors and shapes for quick recognition. They note that there is no formal, numeric standard governing these symbols; instead, each resort assigns grades subjectively, leading to inconsistencies where a double‑black at one mountain might be a blue at another. The dialogue also mentions subtle variations such as darker‑blue squares and the occasional use of a single 20‑foot steep section to label a run black, highlighting the challenges skiers face in interpreting difficulty ratings across different locations.
Chapters
Green circle to double black diamond. It's just been a system that's, that's always been around. And I've only skied in North America, but I found out that it was actually Walt Disney that came up with that, that system. I was, I was pretty much mind blown. He was trying to start a, a ski resort in California, probably not far from Lake Tahoe. He needed a way to designate the, the runs and he came up with, yeah, green circle for easy. Blue Square for, for more difficult. And then it was just Black Diamond for most difficult. And then double blacks came on a little bit later, and then the triple blacks. Before that, it was kind of like a mishmash of, of, of— this is just your run names, just the run name. You just had to know, like, they would call, like, the easy run the Bunny Hill, the Bunny Run, and the more difficult one, and the most difficult one, they call it, like, you know, like Devil's Dive or something like that.
Because I always thought, oh, there's got to be some rule book of, like, a a blue square has to be within this degrees and has to be a certain— there's not. Totally.
There's no— Totally.
Yeah.
No, I couldn't find anything. There's a number of governing bodies and there was not one that said like from 0 to, you know, 12 degrees is a green and then from 12 to, you know, 18 is a blue and then up from there. No, it's totally just like you find out, okay, that's like the easiest run and you think like anybody can snowplow down that. Okay, we're gonna call that, call that a green. And then that's the hardest run on the mountain. So, you know, you have to be a super expert to be able to do it. Okay. That's a double black. And they just kind of like come up with, you know, the designations as you want. And it's possible that that, that double black could have been a blue at Revelstoke because we've all done that, right? We're like, what? This would be like, this would be a green at that mountain. Like, why is this a black? Like, this is, this is kind of ridiculous.
It must be tricky, right? Because some places. Something gets called a black just because of this 20-foot section. The rest of it's green, but you wouldn't send a beginner down there. So it's really tricky in, in, I guess, figuring that out. At some places they actually even deliberately make like the blue squares a darker blue. So it's like, that's not just a blue, that's a dark blue.
Oh really? Yeah, which I think is great because, go back, Walt chose that because he realized we can pick up on colors and shapes a lot more quickly than we can pick up on, on description. Like, and, and he recognized that from being in animation.
