Double Digits

Just like your high school English papers, the process starts with a rough draft. Gary gathers information from satellite imagery, existing maps, and photos to create the first version of the new map. His focus in this stage is to create the base layer from the vantage point that best orients the viewer to understand the layout of the entire resort. Upon our review of this draft, our feedback was used to determine how much background to show, which lifts needed to be removed, and how the two mountains should be shown in relationship to one another. 

After the base layer is approved by our team, the process continues with the addition of labels for runs, lifts, buildings, and landmarks. In this stage, we start to get a better feel of how the map will be used for navigation, which guides us in fine-tuning the various shapes to portray the mountain in a way that feels right from a skier's perspective. In some cases that means diverging slightly from reality, to ensure that the steep sections truly look steep and the fall lines are exaggerated enough to come across in print. This is where the true art of the process comes out. Gary interprets our feedback to clearly portray the way the mountain feels to skiers and riders. Rather than simply creating a flat, exact copy of a satellite photo, he uses shadows and color variation to evoke the correct sense of place unique to our terrain. 

The design process is very iterative, requiring a lot of back and forth between Gary and our on-site team here at Snowriver. This screenshot shows an example of one of the images we sent back to help refine the updated layout of the trail system. Areas highlighted in blue represented areas where changes to the wooded areas were necessary, yellow the areas that needed to be thinned to show glading that is being done and the red numbers correspond to specific notes we'd written.