🎿 11 Olympic venues, Freeride still blank

Good morning, Stoke Crew. If you've ever stood on a trail in the mountains during fall and just stopped for a second to take it all in, you understand! There's nothing quite like it.

Oh and hello to all the new subscribers that came over from instagram. Thank you for the support, I hope you enjoy! Here's the report :)

Stay STOKED - Tyler

In today's report

• 🎿 Eileen Gu drafted first overall
• ⛷️ 2030 Olympic venues locked in
• ⏰ Resorts fight for morning light
• 🌤️ NOAA's October outlook leans wet
• 🌡️ St. Mary's Glacier is gone
• 🌌 Golden Gate Canyon goes dark

Skiing

🏅 X Games Draft + Olympics

🎿 Eileen Gu went first overall. The X Games League held its first winter draft on September 16 in Los Angeles, and XC (X Games Club) Golden State GM Jonny Moseley selected Gu with the top pick. Mark McMorris went second to XC New York, Yiming Su third to XC Park City, and Megan Oldham fourth to XC Whistler. Forty athletes from 14 countries were drafted over five rounds. The youngest, Patti Zhou, is 14. The oldest, McMorris and Scotty James, are 32.

Quick refresher from the 9/15 letter. X Games contests and individual medals don't change. The league layers a team points race on top. Each club carries five women and five men across ski and snowboard, and when a club sends two athletes into the same discipline, only its top finisher banks the points. So the GMs were drafting for coverage across every event, not just star power.

• The order came out of a lottery, then ran as a snake format. Golden State, New York, Park City, Whistler in round one, then the reverse, which let Whistler grab Mac Forehand right after Oldham.
• Alex Hall, seven X Games golds, waited until pick 28 before his hometown Park City club called his name. Kelly Sildaru, who owns more X Games hardware than any woman skier but one, went 38th of 40.
• The pool ran past 180 names, so 140-plus went undrafted. They can still show up this winter as free agents.
• The season runs Buttermilk in Aspen January 29-31, Calgary February 19-21 (X Games' first Canadian stop in 31 years), and the final in Ruka, Finland, April 9-11. Events are superpipe, slopestyle, big air, and knuckle huck.

The notable names on the rosters:

XC Golden State

• Eileen Gu (23, China), ski, No. 1
• Luca Harrington (22, New Zealand), ski, No. 8
• Scotty James (32, Australia), snowboard, No. 12
• Lainey Steen (14, USA), ski, No. 31. Summit County kid, from Silverthorne.
• Lily Dhawornvej (17, USA), snowboard, No. 40. Another Colorado draftee; Copper Mountain is her home hill.

XC New York

• Mark McMorris (32, Canada), snowboard, No. 2
• Mia Brookes (19, Great Britain), snowboard, No. 7
• Kirsty Muir (22, Scotland), ski, No. 9
• Finley Melville Ives (20, New Zealand), ski, No. 16

XC Park City

• Yiming Su (22, China), snowboard, No. 3
• Cocomo Murase (21, Japan), snowboard, No. 6
• Mathilde Gremaud (26, Switzerland), ski, No. 10
• Birk Ruud (26, Norway), ski, No. 15

XC Whistler

• Megan Oldham (25, Canada), ski, No. 4
• Mac Forehand (25, USA), ski, No. 5
• Liam Brearley (23, Canada), snowboard, No. 11
• Gaon Choi (17, South Korea), snowboard, No. 14

Why It Matters: Forty roster spots are forty paychecks that didn't exist a year ago, plus 140 free agents with a reason to keep showing up. Most athletes in this sport live contest to contest on sponsor money. A team deal with a season attached changes the math for everyone! Pick a club now, because there's a season-long team race to follow this time, not just one weekend of medals. I'm leaning Golden State. Let's gooooo!!

⛷️ The 2030 Olympics finally have a map. The IOC (International Olympic Committee) signed off on the venue masterplan for Alpes 2030 on September 16 after three days of site visits in Lyon. Alpine racing splits between two Savoie heavyweights. Courchevel takes the speed events (super-G, downhill, and the team combined) on L'Éclipse. Val d'Isère gets slalom and GS, men on the Face de Bellevarde and women on La Joseray, which has never hosted an Olympic race.

• The ice sports land in Lyon, which wasn't in the original plan. Nice had them until its new mayor, Éric Ciotti, wouldn't let the city's soccer stadium be iced over for the Games. Hockey goes to the Décines-Charpieu arena and Halle Tony Garnier; short track, curling, and figure skating share Eurexpo.
• Long-track speed skating leaves France entirely, for Thialf in Heerenveen, Netherlands, a cost condition the IOC attached to the award. All told, 11 competition venues across five clusters.
• Freestyle and snowboard go south to the Briançon cluster: aerials, moguls, and big air at Serre Chevalier; pipe, slope, the cross events, snowboard PGS, and skimo at Montgenèvre. Nordic lands at Le Grand-Bornand (biathlon) and La Clusaz (cross-country).
• Freeride, new for 2030, still has no venue. It needs real terrain and real snow, so organizers are holding off. Serre Chevalier, host of a 4-star Freeride World Tour stop last year, is the obvious candidate.

Why It Matters: You don't book a pow day four years out, and the IOC just admitted the same thing applies to freeride. No fixed course, no fake features, just whichever mountain is holding real snow when the window opens. It's the one honest call in the whole masterplan! PS: I'm Super STOKED to see freeride in the olympics, gonna be sick!

🚠 Alta has a new boss, and only its fifth ever. Dave Hirasawa takes over at Alta on October 19 as just the fifth general manager across 89 years of operation. He replaces Mike Maughan, who retires after 36 years at the ski area, the last nine running it. Hirasawa comes from Boyne Resorts, where he ran accounting and finance as a senior VP, and before that put in nine years at Grand America, the company behind Sun Valley and Snowbasin.

Wharton grad, ex-investment banker, two decades in the ski business. The search ran through 19 candidates, and the hiring committee's statement leaned on "independence" and "authentic skiing experience."

Will he finally let snowboarders ride there? Of all the quirks in the ski industry, Alta's snowboard ban is the one I find both hilarious and annoying. Some of my all-time favorite days on a board have been right next door at Snowbird.

Business

🌅 How Daylight Saving Time Affects Your Ski Day

⏰ The ski industry wants to keep changing the clocks. Five ski-industry trade associations plus Alterra and Powdr asked 19 U.S. senators in a September 10 letter to reject the Sunshine Protection Act, the bill to lock the country on daylight saving time year-round. The signers speak for 115 ski areas across 10 states, including Colorado Ski Country's 20 members.

Permanent daylight time buys an extra evening hour of light year-round and costs one in the morning. In December, Colorado, Utah, and Vermont wouldn't see sunrise until after 8 a.m., and it gets later still as you move west, past 9 a.m.

• The morning shift is the problem. Patrol, lift mechanics, groomers, and snowmakers are on the hill hours before a 9 a.m. open. Avalanche control, lift inspections, and sweeps need real daylight. Colorado's explosives rules already require surface blasting in daylight, so post-storm control work has to wait for the sun.
• Not everyone on the hill is worried. A 30-year Telluride patroller called it "not a big deal," since resorts already shift hours with the season. Deer Valley mountain ops VP Steve Graff disagrees. Patrol and lift checks can't happen without natural light.

Why It Matters: Dawn patrol becomes lunch patrol. The 9 a.m. hour is when locals ski before work and when the corduroy is untouched. Move that to 10 and the local habit breaks, and every coffee shop and local business built around the current rhythm feels it.

🔥 The STOKE VOTE

Environment

❄️ Snow hope, and a snowfield gone

🌤️ NOAA's October outlook finally leans our way. The Climate Prediction Center's monthly forecast, issued September 17, tilts Colorado and the Four Corners toward a wetter-than-normal October, with no temperature lean over the interior West. After a season that closed with the statewide snowpack at just 22% of median on April 1, that's the first genuinely good signal in a while.

Refresher from the 9/15 letter: a big El Niño pushes the winter storm track south, which favors the southern Rockies and the Sierra and tends to dry out the Northwest.

• The temperature call was a coin flip. El Niño history says cooler for the interior West, the physics models said warmer, so forecasters labeled the region equal chances. Above 10,000 feet, neutral is fine. It leaves the door open for cold nights and snowmaking.
• The El Niño itself keeps building. CPC puts 75% odds on it becoming the strongest on record (back to 1950) for October through December, and better than 90% odds of at least very strong.
• Rain or snow is the open question. A wet October at 10,000 feet only helps if it's cold enough, and a monthly outlook can't say. What it can do is recharge dry ground before the snow guns fire.

Why It Matters: Wet dirt matters more than people think. Snowmaking sticks better to cold, damp ground, and natural snow lasts longer when it isn't landing on hot dust. After a winter that left the state at 22% of median in April, the ground needs a reset before November as badly as the snowpack does. October can do that even if it rains.

🌡️ St. Mary's Glacier melted out. All of it. (Not Stoked). The year-round snowfield above Idaho Springs, the closest summer snow to Denver and the Front Range's turns-every-month spot, is gone, entirely, for the first time anyone can document. A 1938 photo shows it intact, and it even outlasted the 2002 drought.

CSU glaciologist Dan McGrath's flyover on September 9 found a five-foot patch of dirty ice. A week later, nothing. Cause of death was the worst snowpack in state records and a summer 3.4 degrees hotter than normal.

Snow will refill the gully this winter, but the old ice underneath is spent, and rebuilding it takes a run of big winters back to back.

🌌 Golden Gate Canyon went dark on purpose. DarkSky International certified the state park as Colorado's first Urban Night Sky Place on September 18, the designation for places that protect the night while sitting in a city's glow. 96 light fixtures got swapped out or retrofitted, programming was rebuilt around dark-sky principles, and staff started regular star parties, with Gilpin and Jefferson counties, Golden, and CU Boulder helping on the application. Jackson Lake was the first Colorado state park DarkSky recognized, back in 2020.

What else is going on

• Mont Blanc's youngest summiteer is now nine-year-old Lelio Massimo di Roccasecca, who climbed with his K2-veteran dad amid online backlash.
• Crested Butte's 50th Pearl Pass Klunker Tour took 100-plus riders, one on a 1940 Schwinn, 38 miles to Aspen.
• Red Bull dropped footage of Andrzej Bargiel's June 30 first: skiing 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat top to bottom without oxygen.
• Major Metzger earned a Carnegie Medal at 10 by gripping a 6-year-old friend hanging off their chairlift for four minutes.
• Grand Canyon's second flash flood in 18 days struck September 16, damaging repair crews' housing while Phantom Ranch stays closed.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

A city won a Winter Olympics bid and then voted to hand the Games back. Which one, and which Games?

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Answer!

Denver, the 1976 Winter Olympics. The IOC picked Denver in May 1970, then on November 7, 1972, Colorado voters passed Amendment 8 by more than 59 percent, banning state funding for the Games.

Denver withdrew on November 15, and the IOC handed 1976 to Innsbruck in early February 1973. Still the only time a host has turned the Olympics down.