There’s a new, free website service you can sign up for to get text alerts sent to your phone when snow drops on Mt. Bachelor: Cone Patrol. It’s a dead-simple service to use—all you need is a mobile phone with texting—and there are a couple of neat additional features.

You can select the snow threshold that has to be hit to trigger an alert; if you don’t care about 3 inches but want to know about 9 or more inches, no problem.

And, you can customize the text message you get; details are at this blog entry but basically, once you’ve signed up for an account you can configure the details you want to receive in your text alerts. That’s pretty slick.

Plus you can’t go wrong with free (well, minus what you pay for texting). If you ski or snowboard you should definitely check this out.