In 2009 Charley Willett, the marketing director of Showdown, along with friends and coworkers Ben Haugan and Kyle Cunningham created Into the Snow to provide online information for all the businesses in the area. However, not long after they realized that not only business information that was lacking in the area, but all information. Because of the low population of the area, the state does not send this area much money for tourism. However, this area is amazing. Showdown ran Into the Snow for 2 years before realizing it was not something they could support on their own.
In 2012 Charley and web developer and friend Josh Plachy began creating Into the Little Belts (Version 1) . The main purpose was to help bring more people to the Little Belts by providing accurate information to the public for free! This philosophy allows them the freedom needed to truly display the greatness of the area. What was created was a user friendly website to help tourists and locals discover the Little Belts and the other island ranges nearby.
After the first year or so, Josh and Charley’s schedule got busy and Into the Little Belts fell to the back burner. By early 2015, it was nearly dead, but then Charley married his wife Allyson and by the end of 2015, it started picking up steam! Focusing primarily on social media and primarily Facebook, the fan base grew and by 2016 we had doubled our fan base. At this point, we reached out to Josh Plachy again for web development expertise and he agreed, and with that Into the Little Belts v.2 was reignited!
In 2017 we have seen a bountiful amount of interest towards the services we offer. Into the Little Belts will soon be a 501(3)c in order to take donations to keep the project moving forward. Up until this point, this project has been funded exclusively by its founders. This is good and bad. Good in that they have the freedom to do what we want, bad in that they do not have the resources needed to be effective enough to truly make a big difference in our economy. Regardless if we receive finding or not, this project will continue. We will always explore the Little Belts and we will always want to share it with the world!
Our Family
Between Ally and I, we have 5 children ranging from 6-12 and our main activity is just going out and playing in the outdoors! We love hiking, spelunking, climbing, skiing, and any kind of adventure. The Little Belts are nothing short of heaven to us! It can be pretty interesting at times, but we always leave the Little Belts refreshed and happy! Our kid’s are a vital part of what we do for this project, you might even say the inspiration. We encourage everyone, with or without kids to interact with the outdoors as much as possible. And for all the times you can’t, we hope to fill a part of that void for you.
Often my wife and I feel like we need a semi-truck to just get ourselves around to different areas! With 5 kids, a dog, camera gear, bags full of food and water, camping gear and ourselves, we use our “Tetris” skills to the max. No matter how hard it is to get to where we are going, we never forget to have fun but also connect with our surroundings.
