What wants to be noticed up here?
A summer experience masterplan for Vail and Heavenly mountain resorts — rooted in place, alive with discovery.
Developed while Joel Krieger served as Chief Creative Officer at Second Story
CLIENT
Vail Resorts
LOCATIONS
Vail, CO & Heavenly, Lake Tahoe
PROGRAM
Epic Discovery
Vail Resorts came to us with an honest and ambitious question: how do we make summer as compelling as winter? The gondolas still ran. The mountain still waited. But without the snow, there was no obvious reason to come — and no story to tell.
The instinct, common in this industry, is to import entertainment: build rides, install novelties, stack attractions until something sticks. We argued for a different path entirely. The mountain itself — its ecology, its history, its layered silences — was already the most extraordinary thing up there. Our role was not to compete with it. It was to help people notice it.
What wants to be noticed up here, and how do we design the conditions for that noticing? This became the animating question for everything that followed.
Beyond the winter business. Into the living mountain.
SCOPE OF WORK
Research & Strategy · Charrette Workshops · Experience Masterplanning · Concept Design
A distributed wilderness of discovery.
EXPERIENCE MASTERPLAN
The masterplan for Vail was organized around a hubs-and-spoke model, with Eagle's Nest, Wildwood, and Mid Vail serving as primary interpretive destinations — each offering rich, standalone discovery experiences. Between them, connective experiences threaded through the hiking trails and across Adventure Ridge, so the mountain itself became a continuous learning environment.
The approach was deliberately layered: guests who wanted depth could go deep. Guests who wanted play could play. The mountain spoke in as many languages as the people who came to hear it.
At Heavenly, the design challenge was spatial as much as experiential. Guests arriving by gondola at Adventure Peak needed immediate orientation — and immediate wonder. We planned the experience not just as a set of activities but as a sequence: a passage through space that gradually attuned visitors to where they were and what surrounded them.
// Trailside
Wildlife Exploration Trail
A trail dedicated to the extraordinary abilities of local wildlife. Look through scopes to see the compound vision of a butterfly, walk a narrow beam like a bighorn sheep, or match your stride to a lynx's tracks pressed into the path. Understanding through the body, not the mind alone.
Seven ways to see a mountain differently.
Some highlights from the experience concepts.
// Exit Point
Donation Designation
Every guest's 1% contribution becomes a tangible choice: drop a stone into whichever bin you want your contribution to go. The act of choosing — touching a physical object and placing it somewhere deliberate — turns a financial transaction into a moment of agency and care.
// Eagle’s Nest
Eco Totems
A kit-of-parts totem where each component represents a living organism or ecological process — and only parts with true relationships in nature can fit together. Building the totem is an act of learning. You cannot fabricate connections that don't exist.
// Adventure Ridge
Story Stakes
A constellation of pole-like structures scattered between activities — peepholes that reveal surprising facts when you press your eye to them, rings you spin to align food chains, flap-panels hiding hidden stories. The mountain speaks in fragments. These are the listening posts.
// Eagle’s Nest
Gifts of the Forest
A treasure hunt developed with the US Forest Service asking visitors to notice what the forest actually gives: clean air, water, medicine, beauty, serenity, food. At each cache, collect a rubbing and sign a pledge to protect that gift. Visitors leave as stewards, not merely tourists.
// Eagle’s Nest
Storm Theater
When weather rolls in, Eagle's Nest transforms. Rather than a reason to retreat, a sudden Vail summer storm becomes the main event — an immersive film that shows the storm as spectacle, raw energy, a dramatic expression of the mountain's promise: like nothing on earth.
Where the forest becomes the curriculum.
“"We gather in the open, where the wind can rearrange our thinking and the land can get a word in."
- Joel Krieger, on YONDER’s Field Workshop Philosophy