Remarkably, it is often difficult to quantify what might seem obvious. For example, how many visitors come to the Valley every month? How much money do they spend? Are they traveling from far away, or are they in a secondary home? How much of an impact do visitors even have on the local economy? Those questions, which have long been difficult to untangle through traditional methods such as surveys and limited studies, have now been answered by mining data from cell phones. Setting aside the fact that so much personal information can be used by large technology companies to answer economic inquiries, we now have a much clearer picture of what powers the local tourism economy. The Colorado Tourism Office partnered with a company called…