There are few things as useful to skiers as to truck drivers, as often used by tourists as by locals as the online weather reports and webcams that give up-to-date, firsthand information about conditions.

Tourists check to see if they’ll be able to cross-country ski in Sunriver or whether to trek down to Crater Lake for the view, skiers and snowboarders decide whether to head up to Mount Bachelor based on the view from the mountain’s webcam, drivers plot their routes based on which passes look the clearest.

For road conditions, people can tune to Channel 48 on their television for views of the 18 road cameras in Central Oregon maintained by the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT). For more information or to check other regions, drivers can log on to ODOT’s road report Web site, TripCheck.

On TripCheck, Web users can check out any of the more than 100 road cam’s statewide and get updated weather and road conditions anywhere in Oregon.

Employees at the Bend Visitor Information Center frequently log on to get the most updated information for travelers.

”They come in and say, ‘I’m going to Portland. What’s the safest way to get there,’ ” said Jolynn Ives, manager of the visitor center. ”So we’ll get on the Internet and look at Government Camp versus Santiam Pass, or let them look at the cams for themselves.”

Ives said she also gets a lot of questions about the conditions at Crater Lake.

”We just pull up the webcam and then we can tell them, it’s clear or no you’re not going to see anything it’s totally socked in,” she said.

At Jake’s Truck Stop on Third Street in Bend, general manager Lyle Hicks said that when there’s a storm, the drivers crowd around the television in the hall that shows the views from the ”pass cams,” trying to figure out which route to take.

”I usually just call my wife at home, she’s on the computer all the time,” said Clarence Benedict, a truck driver from Medford.

If the passes are icy and chains are required, Benedict said he’ll usually stay off the roads until conditions improve.

Waiting for their food at the Pilot Butte Drive In on Highway 20 in Bend, Richard and Louann Chalmers said they always check the road conditions on TripCheck before they travel to the coast to visit their kids.

A few weeks ago when they were going to Portland for Thanksgiving, they decided to drive through Government Camp instead of Santiam Pass, the route they usually take, because they could see conditions were better.

The couple are just two of the hundreds of thousands of people who log on to TripCheck every month. According to statistics from ODOT, the number of pages Web users looked at on the TripCheck site more than tripled in December 2001 compared with December 2000 from 2 million to 7 million.

Many of those visits are people who use the site regularly. But whether it’s repeat users or people logging on for the first time, the numbers just keep going up. The Web site even won a national award last year from the Intelligent Transportation Society of America for ”Outstanding Deployment to Improve the Quality of Life.”

But webcams can show more than just the weather.

Drexell Barnes, 33, a snowboarder from Bend, said he looks at the Mount Bachelor webcam before he goes up to the ski area.

”I check what the weather’s like and if they’re showing the lift house (at Pine Marten lift), you can see how busy it is,” Barnes said. ”If it’s really crowded or I can only see like two (lift) towers up, I usually don’t go.”

Trent Ludwig, 20, said he uses the webcam at Mount Bachelor to check the truthfulness of the snow report.

”It’s supergood to have it,” he said. ”Because the phone reports lie. Like when they say it’s lightly misting and you can look at the webcam and see that it’s totally wet.”

Melissa Bearns can be reached by calling 541-617-7829 or by sending an email to Melissa Bearns.