Eleven white domes are scattered through a sea of evergreens, a wavy walkway connecting them on a snowy meadow. Warm light glows from the skylights atop each one and snowy hills rise in the distance. It's a woodsy dreamscape with luxurious modern style, utterly different than anything I've seen in Washington state.

But it isn't real. 

To be fair, the promotional photos for the Oculis Lodge aren't supposed to pass as real; the overhead view is styled to look like a model made by a skillful miniaturist, and the interior photos have the computer generated sheen of a Sims video game. They are clearly renderings meant to display a future plan, not physical reality. Still, the images helped the 2022 Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for Washington's Oculis Lodge raise $1,219,668 from about 1,750 backers who wanted to stay at the resort-to-be. It was the website's most funded lodging project ever.

A few years later, the Oculis Lodge finally exists IRL...sorta. There's a single off-white dome down a dirt road in the town of Glacier, about 30 minutes west of Mt. Baker Ski Area. Just like in the photos, it's an igloo shape with a skylight, a sleeping loft, and a hot tub outside. But the other domes, the walkway, the meadow? None to be found. 

At the end of March, as reported by the Seattle Times, Oculis Lodge owner Youri Benoiston sent an email to the Indiegogo backers saying he was ending the project and putting the single dome up for sale. On the Indiegogo page, backers posted messages demanding refunds and discussed legal action. One commented "SCAM SCAM SCAM SCAM."

I remember when the igloo renderings first popped up in my Instagram algorithm. I'm familiar with Glacier—one of my favorite ultra-tiny Washington towns—and I was puzzled about the likelihood of a glam resort there. It's a rural area with few services. It gets snow in winter, sure, but snowfalls come and go in the damp forest; it's not quite a meadow-filled, pine-dotted wonderland. On a vacation to Glacier in 2023, staying in a nearby Airbnb, we had to bring our own drinking water because of bacteria levels in the local supply. Few restaurants are able to make it there for more than a year before shuttering.

I drove by the Oculis site on that trip, turning my SUV down the unpaved road and avoiding the large, roaming dogs from a neighboring home whose barks were fierce and loud. The site was a wedge of tangled underbrush and dense trees just off the highway. It was hard to square with the beautiful renderings.

Yet the Oculis and its promising vibe had already hit travel media. I saw it on Outside magazine's "The 36 Best Places to Visit in the US for Adventure," and Travel + Leisure raved about the "stargazing resort that will be set deep in the Cascade Mountains." Glacier, a town that gets more than 60 inches of precipitation a year, is lovely but not exactly famous for clear skies.

Reports said that "Permitting and construction delays" held up the Oculis project, and a Seattle Times story noted that Whatcom County code could limit how many dwellings could access public water and sewer. However, even in his closing announcement last month, Benoiston claims the septic system was set up for 30-plus guests. Regardless, Oculis never approached resort size or status.

But does that make it a "scam scam scam," per the online complaints? A PNW Fyre Fest? Not necessarily. Every stunning, Instagram-ready vacation spot probably once went through a phase where it looked like a dumpy construction site. The Indiegogo page, still up, notes that the money already paid by backers "is not a donation and will be good for life for the buyer," even though Indiegogo itself notes that the site does not offer a guarantee. Benoiston's latest email suggests that refunds may still happen. The property was listed for sale in late March but was quickly removed from listing sites; only a few of the 1,750 backers have had the chance to stay at the lone dome.

For some, the promise did deliver. One of my acquaintances secured a reservation for the single dome when the biggest backers began to access their promised stays, and she didn't mind the lack of an igloo village.

"Honestly the place itself was great," she texted me, despite "definitely a few kinks to work out." (Like water pressure, which was "nonexistent," she says, and the hot tub didn't work.) Those two dogs that roamed the road around the dome were loud, yes, but friendly. "I don’t feel like it was far from the renderings," she added.

Travel is rife with marketing that could be described as, if not deceptive, maybe euphemistic. Aspirational. Showing the good side only. Since the days of paper brochures, hotels have been photographed from just the right angle to make them seem scenic or remote, while the loud interstate or the T.J. Maxx next door never quite make the shot. 

In 2023, a scientific paper in the Humanities and Social Sciences Communications journal studied the use of photography in marketing hotels; it noted that "under the effect of high-quality product photo images, customers’ buying decisions may often lack self-control and be impulsive." Not like that's new information. In 2015 Today.com warned travelers to be wary of hotel photos (and also, hilarious, to watch for "sexy models, which can make a place seem glamorous. The reality might be quite different!"). And that was before generative AI made it even easier to create a false reality.

And imperfect humans tend to fill in carefully placed blanks with our own expectations. Recently a friend asked if I'd heard about the private ski area coming to Washington, and I pictured something akin to Montana's luxe Yellowstone Club, where Ben Affleck and Bill Gates enjoy private gondolas. But the Alpine Lakes Mountain Club, a development I've seen advertised on a billboard near Woodinville and across my Instagram, proposes a few rope tows over 100 acres (meaning less than 4 percent the size of Crystal Mountain) and about two dozen home sites. It's not a lie to call it a "private ski area," but it's also not Aspen 2.0. 

Had Oculis Lodge been fully built to its original specs, it still wouldn't have looked like the renderings. But most customers probably wouldn't have cared that the surrounds were a little less wilderness-y than advertised, given that the area has real, fully realized charms—the breakfast burritos at nearby Wake 'n' Bakery, the spectacular ski slopes of Mt. Baker Ski Area, and so on.

Still, there's more to creating a luxury destination than just a pretty picture. Logistics and local zoning will always matter more than vision, and vibes won't always translate. The more I travel, the more I examine photos and read promotional copy to figure out what is suggested but not explicitly promised. I look for independent reviews with poorly lit photos, since they tell me more than the glossy perfection and wide-angle lenses from the pros.

But I also hope that some of the unusual, cool ideas out there do come to fruition. I know it wouldn't have looked like the photos, but I would have loved to visit that igloo village.