Northern Outdoors Launches a New Home on the Web
After many months of design, development, and careful planning, Northern Outdoors — the legendary white water rafting and adventure resort in The Forks, Maine — has officially launched its brand new website. For those of us who worked on it behind the scenes, today is the kind of day you remember for a long time.
This was a big one. Northern Outdoors has been a fixture of the Maine adventure scene for 50 years, and has been using a solid backend reservation system for decades. The desire to modernize the front end booking experience to create a simpler flow for guests motivated the efforts, and resulted in a new, modern user experience which mirrors an Air BnB style booking flow.
A Word About the Designer
Before getting into the technical side, I have to give enormous credit where it is overwhelmingly due: Emily Wolf of Emily Wolf Designs handled all of the UI and UX for this project, and her work is the reason the new site feels the way it does.
Emily has an extraordinary eye. She understood, from the very first conversation, that Northern Outdoors is not just another resort — it has a personality, a history, and a community of guests who return year after year. The site she designed captures that spirit beautifully. It is warm, it is confident, it is unmistakably Maine, and at the same time it competes with the best modern hospitality and booking experiences on the web.
If you are looking for a designer who can translate a brand into an interface that actually works — who balances aesthetics with usability, and who genuinely cares about the end user — you should be talking to Emily. She is exceptional, and this project would not be what it is without her.
What Chaos Unlimited Built
Chaos Unlimited’s role on this project was the booking engine and its integration with Northern’s existing reservation infrastructure. Specifically, we built:
- A custom WordPress booking plugin designed from the ground up around Northern’s specific business model — rafting trips, lodging, cabins, packages, and the relationships between them.
- A full integration layer with AdventureRes, the backend reservation system Northern relies on. This meant working directly with the AdventureRes API, the underlying MSSQL database, and a companion services database to make sure availability, pricing, and bookings stay perfectly in sync.
- A modern, AirBnB-style booking flow built as Elementor widgets, so Northern’s team can continue to manage their site content the way they always have, while the booking experience itself feels current and frictionless.
- Business logic that mirrors how Northern actually operates — including the weekend lodging rules that have been part of their model for years, package combinations, group bookings, and the kind of edge cases that only show up when a real business meets a real reservation system.
A lot of careful work went into making sure the new system plays nicely with twenty years of accumulated business logic. The legacy system was not replaced lightly. Every rule, every pricing nuance, every workflow had to be understood, preserved where it still made sense, and modernized where it could be improved.
A Quiet Thank You
Projects like this only succeed when everyone involved is willing to do the careful, patient work of getting the details right. Thank you to the Northern Outdoors team for trusting us with something so central to your operation, and thank you again to Emily for setting the visual and experiential bar so high that the rest of us had no choice but to rise to meet it.
Go check out the new site. Better yet, go book a trip. The Kennebec is calling.