Fresh Tracks: Reimagining Ski Da UP from the Ground Up

Several years ago, I found myself answering question after question about skiing here in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the Midwest Skiing Facebook Groups. I said to myself, “Self, why don’t you put all of this information somewhere where people can find it instead of repeating it over and over?” 

From this, I decided to launch a project called Ski Da UP which of course is a play on regional skiing marketing like “Ski the East” or “Ski the Rockies” combined with the Yooper dialect as seen in the iconic “Say Yah to da UP, eh!” stickers which itself is a play on Michigan’s former tourism slogan of “Say Yes to Michigan!”

My goal was to start a blog where I could put all of that information plus also some type of repository of information I have found about UP Ski Hills.  Then, I also thought I could make some shirts with the nifty logo I created and maybe other designs I felt like whipping up. This would allow me to complete a fun project and also share my love of skiing with others.

I initially set this up in my spare time pretty quickly just using Beaver Builder to quickly get it going and adding a WooCommerce store connected to Printful for print-on-demand gear. Then for a little added fun, I decided I would make the repository of ski hill information focused on a map of all of the ski hills… because I love maps!

Did you know, you could say there are 19 ski hills in the UP? (If you count Mt. Bohemia and Voodoo Mountain cat skiing as two and the now combined Snowriver as two).  This goes from the big names like Bohemia, Snowriver, and Pine Mountain to small community rope tows like Crystella in Crystal Falls, the community Ski Hill in Covington, and Chatham Ski Hill/Hiawatha slopes over in Chatham.

Michigan is home to the second most ski areas in the country with 40 as of the NSAA’s 2024 report, just behind New York’s 52, and the UP does its part. I also include places like Whitecap just over the border in Wisconsin because it’s a huge part of the Big Snow Country area and Keyes Peak in Florence, WI to be fair since it is also just a few miles from the border.

For the map, in my first version, I created a WordPress plugin housing all of this information in Custom Post Types and used ACF for the fields.  I whipped up my own little map using Leaflet and mostly vanilla JavaScript then brought users to a tabbed interface with information on each ski hill.

As many projects go, I had big plans and then life happened.  I wrote a few blog posts and put up a bunch of information on the ski hills.  But, I always wanted to make a more robust mapping system that would be flexible for new applications and wanted to build a better theme and design for the blog and store.

Starting Back Up

This year, I decided it was a good time to bring this back to life after a few years of stagnation.  I opened the merch store again and started sharing information to the socials.  I looked through my plans for content I wanted to create and tried to lay out what I could work on.  The site, itself, still was not up to what I wanted it to be in a technical aspect.

Through the years, as I have applied for new positions as a web developer many ask for code examples or portfolios of your work. I’ve always had some trouble with this because the bulk of my good work has been for agencies where I do not have or am not allowed to share the code that I worked on.  I started thinking that maybe Ski Da UP was also a perfect place to showcase some of my development chops as well as my love for skiing.

So, I got to thinking and planning.  I looked into how I wanted to build this in relation to both showcasing my current development skills and the positions I may be looking for and trying to help myself learn a few new things along the way.

My Plans

As a developer with experience mainly in PHP and JavaScript looking mainly for positions with relation to those fields, I decided to go with the familiar tools to me of WordPress and Laravel to power this project.  I would keep the blog and ecommerce separate as a WordPress install with WooCommerce and then build a Laravel app to house the ski hill directory powering the map.  This would also then allow me to easily create an API that I could use for future things like a possible mobile app.

The information I was sharing on the site was always for the community and I decided it would also be best to share my progress and code through public GitHub repos with open source licensing.

Let’s break down the goals:

The Ski Da UP Website

• A place for stories, history, updates, and other information.
• An ecommerce store to allow sales of Ski Da UP branded merchandise.
• A clean design and well structured website with easy navigation and bright visuals.
• Built using modern WordPress technologies like the block editor and full site editing.

Ski Da UP Ski Area Directory

• Detailed profiles on all ski hills including hill maps, stats, images, contact info, etc.
• Structured data for accurate representation and future-proofing.
• An interactive map to visually show locations of the ski hills across the UP.
• A filterable view to compare ski hills based upon key statistics and information.
• An easy to use management dashboard for updating information.
• Clean UX and design for easy navigation.
• A public API for future projects like a mobile app or other integrations.

Quick Technical Overview

This may change some as I progress through the project, but I want to lay out my the tech stack that I plan to use.

Ski Da UP Website

• WordPress as a CMS Platform
• WooCommerce for ecommerce
• Printful integration for print-on-demand
• Custom WordPress block theme
• Custom plugin for specialized functionality
• Other plugins as needed

Ski Da UP Directory

• Laravel
• Filament for admin dashboard
• An API-first design
• PostgreSQL
• Leaflet for mapping
• Livewire or React for the front-end
• Tailwind CSS
• React Native for future mobile app

What’s Next?

I’ve set up the repos on GitHub (skidaup-site & skidaup-directory) where you can follow along and I plan to document my process here as blog posts. I’ll try to document my decisions and thought processes, what alternatives I may have considered, and my approaches. I can’t guarantee I will update all the time, but if I don’t you have my permission to bug me asking why I didn’t write.

For the next thing up, I will set up my local environments and tackle the WordPress theme first, as I’d love to get that off of Beaver Builder and looking a lot better. I’ll go through my process in the next post.

Feel free to leave comments here or on the socials with any questions or suggestions.  I’m open to all new ideas and would love to learn from you.  This goes for both the development and design related and the skiing related aspects of this project.

Get on the chairlift with me as I rebuild and reimagine Ski Da UP as a place I can showcase my love of both skiing and web development. I hope this project can be a go-to for information on skiing here in my home of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  And if you are up this way and want to make some turns, let me know.