Every page of this site carries the same backdrop: a mountain range drawn as a single SVG strip, with snowcapped summits and a point of light that endlessly travels the ridgeline. It looks simple. It was not.
The range is a 1600-unit-wide silhouette anchored to the bottom of each hero, so small screens crop the sides — never the summits. Five peaks wear snowline zigzags, and one of them sits dead center so a phone always sees snow.
The traveling light rides one of two rails: the primary route and its exact complement, where every snowcapped peak flips between climbing over the summit and tunneling along the snowline itself. The split is chosen at random on every visit, and successive orbs alternate rails — so each pass over a peak takes the opposite route from the one before.
The hardest bug was the text muting. We wanted the animation to dim as it passes behind headlines. Our first approach painted a background-colored scrim (visible as a dark panel — rejected), the second used a masked backdrop-filter (silently broken in real browsers — masked backdrop-filters are unreliable in Chromium, and our screenshot 'verification' had just caught the animation in a dim phase). The fix that actually works: mask the ridge SVG itself, so the fade and the artwork can never disagree.
Finish it off with a base-to-summit gradient that gives the range mass, and a muted amber sun radiating from the top right, and the site finally looks like the place it's named after — sunrise in the Rockies.