Crested Butte Hikes

Travel Crested Butte had a problem: they had a ton of great content about hiking in the area, but it was all over the place. They wanted to turn it into a printed guidebook, but they didn’t have the system to make it work.

The content was all there. It just needed someone to build the system that made it usable.

When I got into the project, there was a lot to work with and not much organizing it: routes with varying complexity, a large set of photos, copy, maps, and metrics, all without a clear logic for how they’d live on the page. Some routes were simple out-and-backs. Others had alternate legs and multiple trailheads. Before I could design anything, I had to figure out how to make a single system hold all of it together without forcing anything into a shape that didn’t fit.

The template had to stretch from a single tight spread to three pages with alternate legs and cross-references, all without the book feeling inconsistent. Instead of designing each route from scratch, I built a set of components that could be arranged based on what the trail actually needed. Simple routes stayed clean and compact. Complex ones got room to breathe, with page references to guide readers between sections.

The intro section is what pushed it from trail document to actual book. History, community context, leave no trace: it gave readers something to sit with before they ever hit a trail. Without it, the guide would’ve started on page one of the routes and read like a trail list.

The guide launched through local shops and online, promoted by Travel Crested Butte and their partners. It sold out fast enough that a second edition followed within weeks, with minor revisions. That part wasn’t in the original plan.