"Bunny hill" symbol, used in America for signaling ski pistes for novices

Shawn Steele Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Thu May 28 17:06:59 CDT 2015


What is the image?, curiosity killed the bunny ☺  I expect that it’s limited to a single ski area or maybe region.

From: verdyp at gmail.com [mailto:verdyp at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Philippe Verdy
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2015 3:01 PM
To: Shawn Steele
Cc: Doug Ewell; Unicode Mailing List
Subject: Re: "Bunny hill" symbol, used in America for signaling ski pistes for novices

The rope (or other barriers) are also present in Europe, but they are considered true "pistes" by themselves, even if they are relatively short. In frequent cases they are connected upward to a blue piste (not for novices) but there are "slow down" warnings displayed on them and the regulation requires taking care of every skier that could be in front of you.

Various tools are used to force skiers to slow down, including forcing them to slalom between barriers, or including flat sections or sections going upward, and adding a large rest area around this interconnection.

The European green pistes for novices are also relatively well separated from blue pistes (used by all other skiers and interconnected with mor difficult ones: red and black): if there's a blue piste, it will most often be parallel and separated physically by barriers, this limits the number of intersections or the need for interconnections (the only intersection is then at the station itself, in a crowded area near the equipments to bring skiers to the upper part of the piste).

But my initial question was about the symbol that I have seen (partly) documented without an actual image for ski stations in US. May be the "bunny hills" symbol is specific to a station, not used elsewhere, or there are other similar symbols used locally. I wonder if this is not simply the symbol/logo of a local ski school...

2015-05-28 23:44 GMT+02:00 Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com<mailto:Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com>>:
Typically we have “slow” zones with include both “novice” areas and congested areas.  Additionally the “novice” part of a slope often has a rope fence delineating it from the rest of the slow.  However on the maps, etc, its usually just off to the side of a green run and doesn’t have a special symbol.

From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org<mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org>] On Behalf Of Philippe Verdy
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2015 2:26 PM
To: Doug Ewell
Cc: Unicode Mailing List
Subject: Re: "Bunny hill" symbol, used in America for signaling ski pistes for novices

2015-05-28 22:59 GMT+02:00 Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org<mailto:doug at ewellic.org>>:
Looks like a green circle is the symbol for a beginner slope. (The first
link also shows that "piste" is the European word for what we call a
trail, run, or slope). There is no difference between a "bunny slope"
and a "beginner" or "novice" slope.

The difference is obvious in Europe where the "novice" difficulty is marked as green pistes (slopes are below 30% or almost flat), and the "beginner/moderate" difficulty is marked as blue pistes (slopes about 30-35%).

Even America must have this "novice" difficulty, with areas mostly used by young children (with their parents not skiing but following them by foot, and a restriction of speeds); these areas are protected so that other skiers will not pass through them. In fact if you remain on these novice areas you cannot reach any speed that could cause dangerous shocks: you have to "push" to advance, otherwise you'll slow down naturally and stop on the snow.

These areas can be used by walkers, and randonners using "raquettes".



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