Over a year ago, we started on a journey with Travel Oregon, Washington State Tourism, and National Geographic to discover the best geotourism locations in the Central Cascades. We began by building a site that allowed people to submit geotourism locations to be considered for National Geographic’s Central Cascades MapGuide. With over 1,100 submissions, the Central Cascades team narrowed down the final locations and the National Geographic MapGuide hit the presses at the beginning of 2010. With the release of the MapGuide, it was time to evolve the site from a submissions-gathering source to an information source. This resulted in the relaunch of the Central Cascades website:
TheCentralCascades.com
The printed MapGuide is a great resource for the selected geotourism locations, but there were so many terrific locations that simply couldn’t fit on the printed piece. The website now acts as an evolving geotourism resource, providing information on hundreds of different locations across Oregon and Washington’s Central Cascades mountain range.
The highlight of the relaunched site is the interactive MapGuide.
We’ve done a fair amount of map work on Ride Oregon and Oregon Bounty, and on the Central Cascades map we had the opportunity to rethink how the map experience could work. Instead of record paging and showing a certain number of results on the map at one time, we designed out an interactive display to scroll through all locations, show “active” and “preview” locations on the map, and allow people to filter map results.
Beyond an interactive experience, the site supports some of the initiatives that Oregon and Washington are working on to build local economies based on travel and tourism. By providing resources like TheCentralCascades.com to direct travelers to “off-the-beaten-path” destinations, we’re helping to channel tourism dollars to rural communities, providing new opportunities for sustainability from a business perspective.
The other benefit of working on projects like this is having the opportunity to attend the launch event up at Timberline Lodge. When there’s no difference between work and play, you’ve got to take advantage of that.
Clockwise from top left: Erin in snow gear / Timberline Lodge / the sun over the mountains / Cory shreds the slope / Todd, Erin and Cory receive snowboarding instructions / the reception / Timberline Lodge at night / David, Cory and Erin at the reception / David and Stephen on the lift / the food and map at the reception / Erin’s feet / the snowy, empty runs // full photo set up on Flickr
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