 When I last seriously snowboarded about a decade ago, the only technology I had with me was a third generation iPod. Since then, technology has hit the mountain in a big way. People make every run with their smartphones in their pocket, and there's gear everywhere, from Google Glass-like devices to Bluetooth gloves. But the thing you see most on the slopes now is action cameras. GoPro and others made it possible to capture every move, every run, and show it all to the world. And everybody got on board with that. One skier using action cameras to his full advantage is also at the top of his game. Tom Wallisch is a professional skier with gold medals in the X Games and the Winter Dew Tour, and he probably would have been an Olympian in Sochi if it wasn't for an ACL injury. Wallisch was originally discovered in 2007 thanks to a home video competition called the Super Unknown. He filmed that with a Sony VX2100, a big, expensive camera that used digital videotapes. Now he uses nothing but the newest and greatest, the GoPro HERO4 Black Edition. We headed out to his home mountain in Park City, Utah to see how a real pro uses a GoPro. It's progressive sports, because it used to be ski and snowboard movies would come out every fall, and you'd have to watch it, see it in the fall, and be like, oh, that's what trick he learned last year. Now it's instantaneous. You know, you'll see pro snowboarder will be out here. He does a cool trick. He filmed it himself. It's on YouTube, the next run. And some guy in France at the same time can be snowboarding and be like, oh my god, I can't believe that guy just did that. I'm going to learn it right now. The progression of it is just so fast. I want to take a look at how you set up filming a run with these GoPros you got here. Definitely. So why don't you walk me through what you got? OK, well, I got a handheld mount in my pocket. I love this three-piece design for getting your friend, capturing footage of your friend, or capturing a little selfie, getting a little photo of yourself, video of yourself. I keep that in my pocket for whenever I'm skiing, just bust it out. But kind of my most important camera definitely is the helmet cam. It's the one you'll see the most of on the hill. Everybody's got something on their helmet. I'm going to set one up here. I got a sticky mount. I got a lighter in my pocket. It's a little trick of the trade I've learned over the years. And if you heat it up a little bit, even your helmet and the sticky, you're going to have a much better chance of getting it to stick on there because it's just a little warmer. It's cold out here. We're snowing. You want that stick to stay on there. You got to really push it on there. It's where all those big muscles I've been working on come into play. Get my camera back out. Might I borrow that too? I'm going to try the same thing. Yeah, yeah. Give it a run. I'm not a fan of those skiing muscles, but those tech journalist muscles, these are those keyboard muscles. Walk me through what's the first thing that you do once you get on the lift and you have some time. Connect and control the GoPro. Get in there. We got the preview coming up. Now you can kind of see what we're seeing with it, see what our shots are like. Then you can open up and just look through and check out all your shots. There's me grinding, spinning. I'm pretty stoked with that. I'll save it. From there, I could get that right up on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. We got 28, 30 seconds remaining and it's like a 174 megabyte file. It's pretty crazy how fast the wireless is. The amount of stuff that you're posting and how easy it is for people to see all this. People know who you are. You've won a lot of really big competitions. How does that affect your day to day here on the mountain? With social showcasing where you are, what you're doing. Maybe somebody's not skiing at Park City that day and they see that you're there. They see this photo immediately and they're like, I got to go. I'm over at the canyons, but I got to go to Park City. They come over and see you. Our sport especially, skiing and snowboarding. People aren't really training at these closed off facilities. If you go to the park, you're going to see me. That's what makes it so cool. You see all these pros and everybody out there. It's accessible. You can go shake hands, get an autograph, get a photo with the person, get it on your social. I see it then. Everybody's so interconnected. It's crazy. Do you usually pump some music while you're working or do you like to just ride and let the scene take over? I just like to ride. I'm mostly no music and listen to the sounds of nature kind of guy. Do you have any go to's when you do listen though? A lot of hip hop. I'm a big 90's hip hop fan. I don't know. I bounce all over the place. I don't know. Could be the new Beyonce track that me psyched that day. Who knows? Maybe that'll inspire you to get that extra half rotation. I don't know. Yeah. Just get a little funky with it. We'll see. Action cameras are expanding the social interaction on the main slopes, but there's still a whole other side of the downhill winter sports world that stays away from the lifts, back country skiing. Out in the wild, the biggest worry isn't sharing your sickest trick. It's staying alive. Keeping yourself safe can be a tedious process, but Avatec is a company that's come up with a smart way of helping you make sure it happens. The company, born out of MIT, has created a product that can measure the snowpack in the back country and can instantly share the data to a network called Avanet. Access to that kind of knowledge can literally mean the difference between life and death. It's really a communication device. We're trying to get people to talk to each other and share information. We're out here in the snow and beautiful day, but we really can't see beneath the snowpack. But if you take some tests and share that information broadly, it'll help people make better decisions. And how does this device get that information out to other people? It's web connected, so Bluetooth syncs to your phone. It's also GPS enabled, so as you're putting it through the snow, it basically is just measuring all the hardness and also measures slope, aspect, and then geotags it and then sends that live to our web platform. So now your fellow community can see a lot more information very quickly, and the head of snow safety can be looking at the computer, overseeing a map, and seeing where the people are at. Okay, so obviously we're at an early season snowpack here, which is often the most dangerous time of year. What we're looking at is about six centimeters of a very, very hard, hard layer here. It's been baked in the sun and it hasn't snowed in a while here. And then you kind of go into a little softer and then sugar. And this is what we're looking for. This is why we're not over there skiing that. It's because the snow is sliding on the very old snow that fell in October. What you want to look for is, do I have a hard layer over a soft layer? Do I have something that is going to shear off and cause some instability? If you see a very light layer, you know that you have a problematic situation. On the other side of that, what would be an ideal situation that you could look at with this device and say, okay, we're good to go here? We're looking for knee deep powder. We're looking for a nice soft layer and gradually getting harder to the base. There's been a lot of great evolutions in technology and we've been, you know, skis are lighter and we have incredible ways to stay on top of an avalanche, how to breathe underneath an avalanche, how to dig people out of avalanches. The fact of the matter is that's after mistakes were made. And how do you survive an avalanche isn't the end result. How to avoid an avalanche is what technology should be working on. So now I've seen how a pro uses the same action cameras that many of us already own and how creative hardware mixed with social networking can help save lives. Now, how do I apply some of this new tech myself? I started by downloading some apps. They use your phone's GPS and accelerometer to gauge your speed, altitude and vertical jumps if you're good enough for that. Apps like Trace Snow, Snow Crew and even Run-Tastic's Winter Sports all track your path just like a running app does. But most of them can apply it right to the specific run on the mountain that you're visiting, which lets you compare against your friends or strangers, things like who hit the fastest speed or who made it down in the shortest amount of time. There's tech in almost everything you wear on the slopes too. Most helmets now come with audio inserts and can be connected via Bluetooth or an aux cord. And to control the music, there are a number of Bluetooth accessories, my favorite of which were the Beartech Bluetooth Gloves. They're not cheap, but they work really well. Just tap the power button on your thumb to unlock them and your thumb becomes a remote. Each finger has different controls like play, pause, fast forward and rewind, and it can even answer calls. But the most impressive thing you can take with you this ski season comes from Recon Instruments, ski goggles with a heads up display. They work almost exactly like Google Glass except the battery lasts longer, the colorful display sits below your vision, and the experience is tailored to show you information you want on the mountain. You can check your speed and altitude in real time, follow detailed resort maps to see what run you're on or find the nearest chairlift, see the notifications from your phone and even locate your friends if you're all hooked up through the same app. It all works through a remote that you can stash in your pocket or hook to your helmet strap, and it is by far the coolest tech you can bring with you on the mountain. Every part of your day can be captured and analyzed, just like the rest of your life. Purists will say it all ruins the experience, that too many people are skiing distracted or care too much about taking a selfie during a run. I didn't mind at all and I can't wait to see what comes next.