💰 $105 million for Yellowstone!

Good morning, Stoke Crew. I really do love everything about this time of year, cold mornings and crisp air. Then the sun dips before 6:30 and I take it personally. Short days are my least favorite part about winter but I guess that's what makes winter winter. Here's the report :)

Stay STOKED - Tyler

In today's report

• ❄️ Summit County is making snow
• ⛷️ Ski racing starts this weekend
• 💰 Big money for Yellowstone
• 🚧 Glenwood rebuild waits for 2028
• 🥇 Asa sweeps every Hardline venue
• 🚵 Telluride gets new bike trails

Skiing

🎿 Winter’s on deck

❄️ Machine snow is flying. Keystone, Loveland, and A-Basin all started blowing snow the night of Oct. 14, while a storm dusted Summit County. Copper got going that same night, and Winter Park, Vail, and Breck have joined since. Nobody has named an opening day.

• Keystone’s online store already lists lift tickets dated Saturday, Oct. 24, at $124 for adults. A Keystone rep says the ticket date isn’t a hint about opening day.
• Last fall, Keystone opened on Oct. 25 and beat A-Basin by a single day. It was Keystone’s first win in the race since 1997.
• The race is maybe a bit unfair? A-Basin chases the title with about 20 guns, Keystone has more than 600!
• Loveland is making snow for the 60th season. In 1967-68, Loveland beat every other big Colorado hill to snowmaking, running its guns on diesel compressors pulled from the Eisenhower Tunnel job.

Why It Matters: For me, winter really starts when I'm skiing fresh pow pow. But...if you’re itching to ski, keep an eye on the websites, not the ticket calendar. These openings got called on short notice last year. The cold decides this race, and so far the cold has shown up!

It's kind of funny how much coverage opening day in Colorado gets. The second a resort spins its lifts, the news shows up on every platform you can think of. And yeah, I'm guilty too, since here I am writing about it. But it goes to show how much Colorado loves its skiing. It's a huge part of the culture here.

⛷️ Sölden, Austria is good to go. FIS signed off on Sölden’s snow on Thursday, Oct. 15, and that locks in the start of the 2026-27 World Cup season. Saturday’s women’s giant slalom kicks it off on Austria’s Rettenbach Glacier, with the men’s GS a day later.

Quick Beta on snow control. An FIS inspector takes depth readings around the course, roughly a week before teams show up for a tech race. If there’s enough snow, crews keep hardening and shaping it.

• A recent cold snap let crews run the guns, but the real base is old snow. Sölden saved about 60,000 cubic meters from last spring.
• The injury list started before the first gate. Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, who’s engaged to Shiffrin, went down hard at a Chilean downhill camp on Oct. 14 and came away with a ruptured Achilles. His comeback from the 2024 Wengen crash wasn’t even finished yet.
• Canada’s Valérie Grenier hurt her knee Oct. 17 while getting laps on the opener’s own course. Her surgery is Oct. 23. She won the last GS of last season at World Cup Finals.
• Shiffrin hasn’t officially confirmed she’ll start Saturday, but she’s been training there and is expected to race.

Why It Matters: If you’re a Shiffrin fan, Saturday just got heavier. She’s chasing a bigger GS season while Kilde starts yet another rehab back in Innsbruck. Set an alarm and root hard, because the women’s first run drops at 2 a.m. Mountain time.

🚧 UDOT’s Little Cottonwood towers got a tune-up on Oct. 19, and UDOT closed a chunk of backcountry while crews worked. These are the towers UDOT fires by remote. Mount Superior got the first batch in 2024, taking over from an old howitzer that shot over Alta. Crews fire them from a safe distance, and each one drops a charge to kick off the slide. About 20 are up now, with charges restocked a few times a winter. About 15 inches of snow and mixed precip has hit Snowbird and Alta over the past 10 days. Snowbird targets Nov. 26, six days after Alta opens Nov. 20.

🔥 The STOKE VOTE

Environment

🦬 Yellowstone’s $105 million check

💰 Big money just hit Yellowstone. It’s $105 million, and it comes from Tallgrass, a Blackstone-owned pipeline and energy company. The park set up the fund with its fundraising nonprofit, Yellowstone Forever. The Park Service says no private donor has ever handed it a bigger single gift. The deal was announced Oct. 19.

• The headline project is at Norris Geyser Basin, where $35 million will build a new visitor and education center.
• Another $50 million is earmarked for science and conservation. The final $20 million becomes an endowment-style pot to get Wyoming kids and their families to the park.
• The Park Service keeps the final say. Anything the fund pays for has to line up with federal rules and the park’s own goals.
• For scale, the Park Service pegs Yellowstone’s maintenance backlog at $1.2 billion.
• The donor is worth knowing. Tallgrass is a pipeline company first, with over 10,000 miles of it. Its next big build is a gas-fired power plant outside Cheyenne to feed a Google data center. Some Laramie County residents fear the project will cost them their views and taint their water.

Why It Matters: A $1.2 billion backlog tells you the regular budget hasn’t kept up, and private money is starting to fill the gap. That can work, as long as the Park Service really does keep the final say on what gets built. It’s public land, and it should stay run by the public.

Recreation

💸 Paying for the places we play

🚧 Glenwood Canyon’s next big rebuild can wait until 2028. On Oct. 15, every member of the Colorado Transportation Commission backed moving the roughly $101 million Phase 8 job out of 2027. It also set aside another $5 million to cover a year of rising costs.

• Blame Aspen’s airport. ASE shuts down completely from April 4 to Nov. 19, 2027. The closure lets crews rebuild the runway to FAA spec and break ground on a new terminal.
• All those travelers need another way in. Eagle County Regional Airport’s summer schedule goes to 112 flights a week next year, up from 46 in summer 2026. Others will drive from DIA instead. That all adds up to more cars in Glenwood Canyon headed for the Roaring Fork Valley. Pitkin and Eagle county commissioners both wrote in to back the delay.
• A lot of Phase 8 is about keeping the canyon open. Crews will put debris fences and ditches on the slopes over the Hanging Lake Tunnels so slides stay off the highway. They’ll also pull the last of the Grizzly Creek Fire debris from the river. The rest is fresh concrete (inside the Hanging Lake and No Name tunnels too), bridge deck repairs, and new guardrails across 16.5 miles of I-70.

Why It Matters: It’s rare to see two giant projects get scheduled around each other instead of on top of each other. CDOT and both neighboring counties lined up on this one. A year’s wait and $5 million is a fair price to keep I-70 from turning into a worse experience lot while Aspen’s runway is torn up.

📉 Not STOKED. Colorado’s land contractors took a 31% hit in 2025. Forest Service and Interior spending with Colorado firms fell by $189 million, and the state ended the year with about 110 fewer firms on those contracts. Small businesses normally get most of that money. The drop landed in the same year Colorado lost 1,753 public lands jobs, more than any other state. Wildfire suppression contracts in Colorado fell $14 million, and construction and upkeep outfits lost over $67 million.

Why It Matters: Fewer staff and fewer contractors in the same year means less hands-on work on our public lands, and we’re the ones who’ll notice it on the trail :(.

Biking

🔥 Hardline history and Telluride dirt

🥇 Asa Vermette swept Hardline. The 19-year-old from Durango won Red Bull Hardline BC on Oct. 16. That’s three Hardline wins straight, first person to do that. Finals ran on Friday instead of Saturday because of weather. His winning margin over Lachlan Stevens-McNab was 2.62 seconds, world champ Jackson Goldstone crashed while leading. BC’s Gracey Hemstreet topped the women for her fourth Hardline title.

Why It Matters: Asa just had the season of a lifetime. He won two World Cup races and the World Cup overall, then capped it off by winning Hardline BC. He’s only the second American ever to take the overall, and only the second rider to do it as a rookie. He’s also the first rider to win at all three Hardline venues. All at 19! It’s sick seeing a Colorado kid out there f*cking crushing it on a mountain bike, I can’t wait to see what he does next year!!

🚵 Telluride’s trail map is growing. The Forest Service signed off Oct. 8 on the Telluride Mountain Club’s plan, which adds about 8 new miles and rebuilds 5.5 older ones. First up in 2027 is the 1.8-mile Mountain Village to Valley Floor Connector. Three local groups have put up more than $180,000 for it. All in, the club expects to spend about $2 million. It took the club close to 10 years to get here.

What else is going on

Shaun White's Snow League names 60 halfpipe riders, including Eileen Gu, with its first stop at Buttermilk January 7-9.

Forecast maps show 45 inches near Silverton across three storms by November 2, plus a shot at Denver's first snow.

Adam Ondra sent Italy's Exodia, Elias Iagnemma's proposed V18, in four days, then pitched a V17 downgrade.

A dog survived Yellowstone alone for 34 days before a trap baited with her family's belongings caught 10-year-old Luna.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

In 1891, a power plant just outside Telluride became the first in America to send what type of electricity to run a mine?

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Answer!

Alternating current (AC). The Ames plant ran a Westinghouse generator off a 320-foot drop of water, then sent 3,000 volts 2.6 miles uphill to run the Gold King Mine's ore-crushing stamp mill. It fired up on June 19, 1891, and a Tesla-patented motor got the mine's big motor spinning. DC would have needed so much copper wire that it wasn't worth doing.