We're Ash and Jiselle, the two people behind Slopeside Design.

Ash is Australian. Jiselle grew up right here in Kimberley, BC, and is a qualified journeyman electrician. We mention that because people sometimes hear "husband and wife business" and picture an artist and a supportive spouse. That's not us. We're two people who are good at building things, who chose to build something together.

How we got here


We first met on a ski trip at Big White nearly ten years ago. We lost touch, reconnected, and started dating again just before COVID hit, which left us stranded on opposite sides of the world. After months of navigating paperwork, immigration offices, and shifting restrictions, Ash managed to make the move to Canada during lockdown. He landed in Kimberley, a small ski town tucked into the BC Rockies, and never looked back. We got engaged that winter, and married on a frozen lake next to the ski hill, both in our ski gear. We didn't realise it at the time, but it was a sign of where things were headed.

How it started

Before Slopeside, Ash spent about ten years in Ningbo, China, working in manufacturing. Designing products, building custom production equipment, running factory floors. Not from a design degree. From doing it. The kind of work where if something doesn't function, it doesn't ship, and nobody cares how clever the idea was.

He learned a lot. It also quietly wore him down. Factory work is surprisingly stressful, and when your creations disappear into shipping containers by the thousands, it's easy to lose any connection to the work. Eventually, the question became unavoidable: why not spend the one life you've got building things you're deeply passionate about?

A lot of people feel that way. Taking the leap is another story. Ash nearly didn't, but Jiselle backed the idea when it was still just a rough concept, and then backed it with a lot more than words. In the early years, she was working at a mine in Sparwood, getting up at 4am for shift work to keep things afloat while Ash developed the process in our garage.

That's the part people don't see in the finished maps. Without Jiselle's belief in the thing, and those night shifts at the mine to fund it, there is no Slopeside Design.

Today we both run the business full time, building everything out of that same garage workshop in Kimberley. Every decision, every direction, every map, that's the two of us.

What We Make

We make two kinds of wooden trail maps.

  • 2d Etched maps

    The 2D maps are precise, clean, and accurate. Every run, every lift, every treeline.

    They’re the kind of piece that makes people stop and start pointing. Where they learned. Where they crashed. The run they still think about.

  • 3D Collectors Maps

    The Collector’s Edition 3D maps are something else entirely.

    Hundreds of pieces of stained and etched birch plywood, hand-assembled. Tens of thousands of individual wooden trees. Stainless steel lift tower assemblies.

    Each one takes dozens of hours to build and is produced in a limited edition for each mountain. That’s not a marketing decision. It’s simply how many we can make and assemble by hand, before moving on to the next mountain.

How They’re Made

In the beginning we used resort trail maps, but we've since developed our own cartography pipeline. Using GIS data, satellite imagery, and elevation models, we build a full 3D representation of each mountain, positioning every run and ridgeline where it actually sits. From there, the terrain is carefully reshaped, not to distort it, but to try and make it work as a single, continuous piece while preserving how the mountain reads, how the runs connect, and how it feels to move through it. Many resort maps rely on callouts or disconnected sections to stay accurate and legible. We've deliberately tried to avoid that, to keep each mountain as one continuous piece of terrain.

From there, a custom software pipeline slices the terrain into layers and places individual trees in their correct positions across the mountain. Change one parameter and the entire design recalculates in real time. We even modified the laser cutter with a custom 4th axis on the head so tree slots are cut at the actual angle of the slope. It's obsessive. No one asked for these details, but they matter.

The process is patent-pending. Which still surprises us, honestly.

  • Lifts, runs, heat maps, street maps and terrain overlays are all combined for accuracy

  • An extreme example of adjusting the 3d terrain to suit a wall map, whilst keeping ski runs connected.

  • Quality control layout of the hundreds of wooden tree pieces before assembly

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Layered laser art has been evolving for years. Artists like Eric Standley, Gabriel Schama, and Phil Roberts pushed the medium forward long before we started. There were wooden ski maps before ours too, and they have their place. And we couldn't avoid being influenced by James Niehues, who shaped how millions of people see ski mountains.

But we kept coming back to the same question: what if it went further? What if a ski map had real three-dimensional depth? What if the trees were wood and placed where they should be? What if it felt less like a map and more like standing on the mountain and remembering?

That's what we're trying to make. We're not finished. Each new mountain is still an experiment, and there are many ideas we still haven't tried yet.

The thing that keeps us going isn't the process or the materials. It's watching someone walk past, glance, then double back and stop. Completely absorbed.

A guy on crutches pointing to the exact spot where he crashed. An older gentleman recognising terrain he hadn't thought about in years. People noticing what's changed. Lifts that are gone, runs that were renamed, lines they used to ski without thinking.

They're not looking at a product. They're remembering where they were, and who they were with.

Most people who buy one already have a connection to that mountain.

That's what the maps are for.

Not decoration. Memory.

Built By Hand

Every map is made by the two of us, start to finish. Raw wood, measured, cut, dyed, assembled, framed, signed, and shipped. We limit each Collector's Edition to a handful of pieces. Not as a strategy, just the reality of what the work requires.

Not mass-produced. Not outsourced. Not scaled.

Just built properly.

Our daughter Joy is growing up watching all of this happen in that same garage workshop in Kimberley. We hope it shows her that it's worth having a crack at building something you love.

If your mountain is on our list, or you think it should be, we'd love to hear from you.

Ash + Jiselle

Slopeside Design, Kimberley, BC 🇨🇦