By Carli Johnson STAFF WRITER
For Benjamin Sands, Big Sky isn’t just a favorite ski destination—it’s a place that has shaped his family’s traditions for more than two decades.
“It’s always been a place that I’ve loved,” said Sands, a junior at Upper Perkiomen High School in Pennsylvania. “It’s been cool to see the place grow, and Bozeman grow, because we fly into Bozeman, and it started much smaller than it is now.”
This spring, Sands turned that connection into an ambitious woodworking project, creating a 47-by-24-inch relief map of Big Sky Resort’s trail system using laser engraving, CNC machining and hand-filled epoxy resin. The project, completed through his school’s X Lab program, took roughly three months to finish.
The idea grew out of his family’s long history in Big Sky.
Sands said his grandfather first visited Big Sky during a business trip in the early 2000s and quickly fell in love with the area, prompting the family to purchase a home there before Sands was born.
“My grandfather kind of fell in love with the place,” Sands said. He first skied in Big Sky when he was four or five years old, and since then, it’s become a yearly tradition. “We get out there in the winter a few times every year,”Sands said.
The project also reflects the encouragement Sands found in the classroom.
He credited his X Lab instructor, Dan Moyer, with helping students transform their ideas into reality.
“He’s a great teacher,” Sands said. “He’s very good with us kids and making our ideas and our creativity come to life, which you don’t really get in high school in a lot of other classes.”
After first creating a laser-cut Moonlight Basin logo, Sands decided to take on something much larger.
“I had this really cool idea,” he said. “This is a huge trail map with so many trails and so many places that I feel like my family knows so well. I was like, ‘Well, how can I do something in this class to kind of replicate that?'”
The first challenge was finding a piece of wood large enough for the project.
“We somehow were able to find a piece of wood that was pretty much identical and only took very little trimming to get the size,” Sands said of the 47-by-24-inch board he discovered in the school’s shop.
The first stage involved engraving the mountain’s terrain using a Boss laser cutter before transferring the board to a CNC router, which carved each ski trail into the wood. The engraving alone took about 6 1/2 hours, making it the largest project the school’s laser cutter had ever handled.
“We actually had to go in and delete, I think there was 180 old projects on there that were taking up memory,” Sands said. “We had to delete all of them just for this to work.”
The next hurdle came when the trail file failed to line up correctly on the CNC machine, leaving more carving to be done later on.
“It routed out the trails about half an inch low,” Sands said. After several class periods troubleshooting the issue, Sands and Moyer corrected the alignment and moved on to what became the most painstaking phase of the project.
Using colored epoxy resin and a syringe, Sands filled every ski trail by hand, matching Big Sky Resort’s trail difficulty colors.
“The hardest part was figuring out how to fill the trails without having the color overlap into the other trails,” Sands said. To keep colors from bleeding, he inserted thin strips of styrofoam between adjacent runs before pouring the resin.
The first solution created another problem.
“When I tried to take the styrofoam out, the styrofoam just broke off, and it was stuck in there,” he said. After each color, Sands had to use a hand router to individually route out the rest of the styrofoam. The resin work ultimately consumed about two months of the three-month project.
“It was very time-consuming,” Sands said.
As a finishing touch, he laser-cut and painted a vintage-style Big Sky Resort logo, adding a black border to make the colors stand out.
“We figured just the old-fashioned colors kind of fit the project,” he said.
Although the trail map began as a school assignment, Sands said it has become something much more personal. The completed piece will hang in his family’s new home in Pennsylvania, a property where his father grew up and that the family has spent the past several years restoring.
“It’s kind of just a place that we all love,” Sands said. Like the Pennsylvania home, the Big Sky map preserves a piece of the Sands family history. “We always had these ideas of making it how it used to be for my dad, but putting a modern twist on it. They always had pictures and signs hung up and flags, so I thought this would be a perfect fit for our family.”
