Powderhorn Basin

The first Powderhorn, built in July, was a scroll down one mountain at night. It looked good on a large screen and read as a dark gradient on a phone. Worse, it never answered the question that keeps a first-timer from booking: am I good enough, or will I hold the group up? Operators cannot know that until they ski with a guest, so they sort everyone on the first morning. The rebuild puts that sorting on the website.

The idea came from the guides' 5:45 meeting, where the snow gets read and every guest has a seat on the group board. Find your group offers four plain lines. Pick the one that sounds like you and the board chalks your seat from the operation's own data: Cat Three for a first week, Cat Two at a steady pace, Cat One for the fast group. Each seat carries its lead guide, its runs a day, a sample run list, the weeks with room and the price with tax. The site also says the guides confirm every seat on the first morning, and anyone in the wrong cat moves at no cost.

Further down, Your run paints your group's line down the painted tenure map, with each run named, its trail mark shown and the altitude falling from 2,610 metres at first light to the creek road at 1,540. Before anyone picks, it shows Cat Two's list from the same morning, so the page never sits empty.

The practical answers are built as tools, because a guest planning a big trip wants a number, not a paragraph. The whole bill builds a week line by line, with GST and lodging taxes in the total and the tip shown beside it. The storm calculator asks what the weather did and shows what comes back: a heli day refunded in full, half a cat day back under four runs, credit or 60% cash for a day the cats could not run. The open-weeks board lists every week of the winter with one word for how full it is.

Then I cut it back. The rebuild first showed seat counts for every group in every week. It also carried a dated snow report and last winter month by month. A family operator would have to update all of that by hand, and they never would. So every figure on the site now has to be one that someone at the lodge can keep true. Prices, dates and policies change once a year. The board says Open, A few seats or Full. Last winter gets one line, the 109 of 113 days the cats ran. The nav went from eight links to five, and the header now carries the badge's own mark and the name, set large enough to read.

The look moved from night to day: a snowfield ground with blue shadows, chalk on a slate board, a painted map and League Gothic poster capitals over IBM Plex. The hero film and the photographs are generated, the guides' portraits included, and every page says the operation is a concept. On the guides and safety page, a visitor probes Dev's study pit by scrolling, from the new snow to the full 260 cm. Each layer says how hard it is in plain words, soft, firm or hard, because "hand test" means nothing to a first-timer.

In the jury's last certification, the home page scored 9 for design and 9 for creativity. Three debts stay open, all due on October 10: a screen reader pass, one journal guide and a page-weight check. Every route passed the readiness battery, layout shift measured 0, and the headline's contrast over the film was checked on every frame. For a real operator, the same site runs on the real tenure, the real guides and the real open weeks.