Three years ago, Nature Valley granola bars began their Preserve the Parks program to support physical restoration projects and organize fundraising efforts. This year, they asked us to think of new ways to tackle the challenge of national park preservation on a larger scale and help them engage with their customers in an authentic, meaningful way.

The basic idea was simple: To share the beauty of the national parks with as many people as possible, we’d create a Street View experience on backcountry hiking trails for the first time ever. To do that we built a customized backpack camera and GPS rig that allowed us to capture beautiful 360-degree imagery along the trails. We then integrated that footage with topographic map data to design an interactive platform built on the Google maps API.