Kraig Snure knew something could go wrong, terribly wrong, with the wilderness camping reservation system at Mount Rainier National Park. The creaky old system relied on mail-ins and faxes and software developed by a volunteer 17 years ago – eons, technologically speaking.  

Snure had already put a team of four iSchool Informatics students to work on a replacement system when a fierce storm hit in early March, causing a power outage that crashed the park’s servers and fried the old reservation system.

“We hoped it would keep going until the new system was up, but Murphy’s Law was in effect,” said the Wilderness District Ranger, who has seen the number of requests for coveted camping permits more than triple in just three years.  “The timing of the crash was really bad. It happened just as we were starting to receive the tidal wave of requests for this summer.”

The park is now in damage control, scrambling to return unprocessed reservations even as it adds staff and gears up for long lines at ranger stations this summer. With the old system down, and the new one still in planning, hikers and climbers competing for overnight camping permits will have to show up at designated stations the day of or day before their planned excursion and hope for the best.

There may be some very unhappy campers when reservation desks open May 27. “If I didn’t have the iSchool team working on this, I’d be really upset,” said Snure, who relies heavily on donations and volunteers for operations at the park. “These iSchool students are really sharp folks. They really know their stuff.”

This time, they have to know their stuff. The new system is set to go public in March 2017 and it has to be fully functional. There’s no fallback, no window for failure, no Plan B. It’s all on the iSchool team, dubbed Team Trek. “This project is our future,” said Snure.

People are watching. When news of the park’s system failure hit the headlines in spring, the iSchool project was front and center in write-ups. Suddenly, the four Informatics students on the team were receiving emails from all over and media requests for interviews.

“I really believed in this project and thought it was cool, but not so glamorous,” said Team Trekker Alexis Gregerson. “Then, seeing all the feedback, I realized it is a big deal, that this is a meaningful system in our area and that people at the iSchool are taking it on and helping the community.”

With the can’t-fail mandate and the public scrutiny, the four Informatics seniors are under a lot of pressure to perform. But the hard-working team is unfazed. “It is pressure we’re used to. We can handle it,” said Informatics student Lit Phansiri, who is also an active-duty U.S. Marine in the Marine Corps Enlisted Commissioning Education Program.

Phansiri and his three team members have been together since they entered the Informatics program in the summer of 2014. Over the course of their studies, they’ve learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and how best to work together as a four-way team. “That is something we learn at the iSchool,” said Cassandra Beaulaurier. “Some schools foster competition, but this is a school that fosters collaboration and that makes it easy for us to support and work with each other.”

They already had their team in place when Snure posted his project proposal for a new reservations system on the iSchool’s iCareers site in December 2015, after waiting more than a year to get federal approval for the replacement.

The students were looking for a Capstone project to culminate their iSchool studies — a real-world project that would show off everything they’ve learned about designing, building, and securing systems — for their final presentation in May, before graduation. The park’s proposal clicked.

“Personally, I get really excited about the outdoors,” said Alexis Gregerson during a recent team meeting at a University Village Starbucks. “I reached out to Kraig and he was very communicative.”

“We were really impressed by how quickly he got back to us,” added Beaulaurier.  “His enthusiasm infected us.”

“And we liked the possibility of doing a project where we were building something tangible that was going to be used for quite some time,” said Emmanuel Gambliel.

The four had little idea of the challenges they would face when they signed on.  Conversations with rangers and a road trip to Mount Rainier National Park, where they took photos of the fax machine (a fax? In 2016?), illustrated some of the hurdles they’d be leaping.  

One was the sketchy bandwidth at Mount Rainier National Park offices.  “It’s close to dial-up speed,” said Snure. “I can’t even get my email in the summer. It loads one pixel at a time.”

He informed the iSchool team members that they would have to cut back plans for intensive gee-whiz graphics and other features that might not load at the park. “I felt like I kept throwing buckets of ice water on the students. ‘I really like your innovations, but we can’t support all that,’ ” said Snure.

Another challenge was the complicated nature of the system itself. Wilderness trekkers may be out two days or they may be out two weeks. They may drive between hikes or string together more than a dozen camping sites and make the entire 93-mile Wonderland Trek on foot, circling the mountain and taking in majestic views along this treasured route.

What happens if half the sites they’d planned on are already reserved? Is it possible to provide all these diverse users alternatives? How should the sites be allocated online? “This is not a simple hotel reservation system,” said Beaulaurier.

It’s not hotel-safe, either. Trees come down, snowmelt floods campsites, log bridges wash out – all events to be posted on the site with real-time park safety alerts, along with wilderness protection messaging such as “leave no trace” camping guidelines. Hikers have to be able to get safely from one site to the other, and their goals must be realistic, which is why rangers will continue to vet every camping itinerary. “People are going out into the wilderness and the wilderness is dangerous,” said Beaulaurier.

Creating the system is calling on every lesson they’ve learned at the iSchool, said Team Trek members. That includes ways to maximize user experience with a website. To test ideas, Team Trek designed paper prototypes that look like screens on a mobile phone. Volunteers – including some tech-wary moms and the entire parks staff at Rainier – tapped on the paper mockups and gave Team Trek feedback.  “We wanted to see what they clicked on, and how they experienced page flow,” said Gregerson.

The iSchool designers took all comments to heart. “That’s another thing we learned in class,” said Beaulaurier. “If you’re doing a user test and someone is confused, you can’t write that off just because they may not be tech savvy. Hundreds of thousands of other people may be confused, too.”

It was imperative that the new system be crash-proof, safe from natural disasters like the March storm. Gambliel and Phansiri, who are building the system’s database, worked on setting up a server at the iSchool that would mimic the one at a remote federal data center in Denver, where the new system will ultimately move. “It’s a virtual system, so they will have snapshots. If a system crashes, they can upload it using those snapshots,” said Gambliel.  

And that s-l-o-w bandwidth problem? This creative, roll-up-your-sleeves team is designing two website views that will work off the same engine. There is a quick and simple back-end system for park staff that will be text-based and a front-end system with graphics for site users. “The public will see all the fluff,” said Gambliel.  

The new system will not only benefit backcountry campers — who will be able to download trip planners and see red alerts for high-impact sites — but park administrators, who will have better backcountry user data for statistical analysis. That data, combined with information on impacts to the park’s resources, will promote well-informed decision-making for the park’s future.

For Snure, the experience with Team Trek marks the beginning of a wonderful new relationship, one he hopes is long-lasting. He has already hired an iSchool intern – graduate student Max Carsen, in the Master of Science in Information Management program – to help internally beta-test Team Trek’s system this summer. And he plans on putting more iSchool students to work at the park in the future.

“ISchool students really think outside the box,” said Snure. “They are brilliant students who are going to be important people in their field, and we have the opportunity to take advantage of that. They get the real-world experience, and we get a product that thousands of people will benefit from.”