🏃 2,650 miles, no crew

Good morning, Stoke Crew. Hope everyone is doing well and happy National Park Week! My favorite national park in the US is probably Redwood National Park, one of the most unique places I've ever been. Outside the country, I'd have to say Torres del Paine National Park.

What's your favorite national park? Reply and let me know!

Also, just want to say hello to our 25 new subscribers. Thanks for checking us out and giving it a shot. Hope you enjoy! Okay lets get into the mountain news, today is a good one! :) Stay STOKED - Tyler

In today's report

• 🏃 The fastest PCT time ever
• 🎿 Crested Butte gets new avalanche tech
• ⛷️ World Cup races coming to Beaver Creek
• 🐟 Navtive fish conservation
• 🌲 Snowmass Falls Ranch clears its last county vote
• 🏛️ The Roadless Rule is on the chopping block

Today's Stoke Story

⏱️ 57 miles a day, new record!

🏃 The fastest Pacific Crest Trail time ever now belongs to a hiker with no crew. Nick Fowler, a 38-year-old from Oklahoma, left the Canadian border southbound at 3:47 a.m. on July 8 and hit Mexico on August 22, covering the 2,650 miles in 45 days, 17 hours, and 47 minutes. No one has ever done it faster, in any direction, in any style. He did it solo and self-supported, restocking from boxes he shipped ahead.

• The record he was chasing changed while he walked. Aurélien Sanchez locked in the supported mark in July, full crew in tow, when Fowler was already weeks into his own push.
• He got there on volume and sugar. Most record chasers keep 16 moving hours a day; Fowler held 18, downing 12,000 daily calories. "I was moving slower but I was moving longer."
• His resupply boxes doubled as a pit crew, with replacement shoes staged every 180 miles, clean socks every 100, and shorts he'd pre-cut with vents against chafe. The trail still charged him around 15 pairs of shoes, 15 pounds, and one wrecked toe.

Why It Matters: FKT culture splits every route record by style for a reason. Supported athletes outsource all of it, meals, camp, recovery, and just walk; self-supported means the whole operation rides on your back. Fowler won the harder category and beat the easier one in the same push. The assumption that a crew buys you the record just died on the PCT. He covered almost 60 miles a day for 45 days straight! Absolutely f*cking insane!

Skiing

❄️ Avy tech & race season

🎿 Crested Butte is going remote on avalanche work. The resort announced it's installing remote avalanche control systems at two spots on the hill, with crews breaking ground now and working into the fall. The systems let patrol set off avy work from a safe distance instead of skiing hand charges into loaded start zones, and the resort says the payoff is getting "our most coveted expert terrain" open faster after storms.

• The timing fits. This winter is the mountain's 65th anniversary season, and the resort is leaning into the milestone. Some terrain will close while crews work.
• The resort hasn't named the systems or the exact terrain, but its announcement signed off with a toast to another season in the Extremes. Read into that what you will.
• CB has company in the remote-control club. Arapahoe Basin has asked the Forest Service to sign off on an estimated 17 Wyssen towers across the East Wall and Montezuma Bowl, as ski areas keep retiring hand charges and artillery in favor of remote systems.

Why It Matters: Remote systems are becoming standard equipment at serious mountains, and the safety math is simple. Every tower is a route a patroller no longer has to ski with explosives on their back in the worst conditions of the year. The tech doesn't replace patrol, it stops asking them to gamble.

⛷️ Winter racing has a date. We're 99 days from World Cup races at Beaver Creek, December 3 through 13, the biggest Birds of Prey ever staged and the most racing the venue has hosted since World Cup skiing first came to the course in 1997. The men's weekend stacks two downhills, a super-G, and a giant slalom; the women answer with two downhills and a super-G of their own, the first women's speed races of the season.

• Women only started racing this course in 2024, and now they're up to a full three-race weekend. The second women's downhill was added back in May, and the expansion doubles as a statement about where women's speed racing is headed.
• General admission is free, same as always. VIP packages with heated everything are available, Beers of Prey returns, and the women take training runs December 9-10 before racing starts.
• Want the best seat in the house? Volunteer registration opens September 11 for the Talon Crew (on the course) and Raptor Crew (everything else)!

Why It Matters: Watching downhill on TV does not survive contact with the real thing. Standing at Red Tail while someone hits 70-plus mph is a core memory, it costs nothing, and this year there's twice the chance to catch it. If you've been meaning to go, this is the year. Yeew!

Environment

⛰️ Native trout & wilderness wins

🐟 Rocky Mountain National Park closed the Colorado River Trail, the Grand Ditch, and everything in between through August 30 for round two of the Poudre Headwaters Project. Biologists are treating 14.3 miles of the Grand Ditch and the creeks that feed it with rotenone to knock out brook trout, the setup work before greenback cutthroat, Colorado's state fish, go back into the Cache la Poudre headwaters where they started.

• The brookies have to go because they crowd out young greenbacks and eat them. Crews ran the same treatment last August and it mostly worked, but surveys turned up a few holdouts, so this year is the mop-up round.
• Stocking created this mess. Non-native fish were dumped into these waters starting in 1886, decades before anyone weighed what that would do to the natives, and the practice didn't end inside the park until 1968.
• The endgame is worth the hassle. The full multi-agency project runs another 10 to 12 years and, when finished, will link up more restored native trout water than anywhere else in Colorado.

Why It Matters: Native trout recovery is slow, unglamorous, and measured in miles of creek, not time. The greenback nearly vanished from the state entirely, and the fact that Colorado can now rebuild whole watersheds for it is a cool win in conservation!

🌲 It's official, and it's permanent. Pitkin County commissioners gave final approval Wednesday to sell Snowmass Falls Ranch to the Forest Service for $34 million, removing the last county hurdle between the 650-acre inholding and the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness. When the sale closes, targeted for the end of the year, 530 acres fold into the wilderness immediately, the biggest expansion since 1983. The remaining 120 acres will be managed as recommended wilderness or dispersed recreation!

Why It Matters: Read the room at that meeting and you see something rare. Nobody argued about whether to protect the ranch, only about which form of protection would hold. When a community's biggest land fight is over how permanent the win is, the valley's priorities are in a pretty good place! Pretty STOKED about this one, the Maroon Bells Wilderness is probably my favorite place to backpack in Colorado!

Protect our lands!

🌲 45 million acres on the line

🏛️ Colorado's roadless shield holds. The state's 4.2 million acres of protected roadless forest aren't on the table as the Forest Service moves to scrap the 2001 Roadless Rule, the 25-year-old protection covering about 45 million acres of undeveloped national forest nationwide. Colorado negotiated its own state-specific roadless rule years ago, finalized in 2012, and the agency says that deal stands, same for Idaho's.

• The proposal dropped August 18. The pitch is wildfire management and local control. Right now one national rule blocks new roads across about 45 million acres of undeveloped forest, same standard everywhere. Dropping it builds no roads and sells no timber but it makes both possible.
• Critics counter that the real prize is access, new roads that put drilling, timber, and mining on the menu in some of the wildest country outside designated wilderness.
• The comment window closes at midnight September 21.
• To Take action and protect our Public Lands sign this petition :)!

Why It Matters: Roadless areas are the backbone of the West, the elk habitat, the clean headwaters, the country between the trailheads. Colorado's herds and rivers don't stop at the state line, and neither do Colorado's skiers, hunters, and anglers. A rollback next door has an effect on all of us.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

Telemark skiing is named after a place. Where is it, and who's credited with popularizing the turn?

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Answer!

The Telemark region of Norway. Sondre Norheim, from Morgedal in Telemark, is credited with showing off the turn in the 1860s.