🏜️ 3 Million Acres, Gone → take action!

Good morning, Stoke Crew. Rent's expensive but sleeping in your car at the trailhead is free. Priorities. Here's the report. Stay STOKEDDD - Tyler

In today's report

• 🚠 Monarch's 15-year master plan
• 🚲 Silverton lands $1.1 million for new trails
• 📈 A record 183 million Americans got outside in 2025
• ❄️ Vail Resorts bets its comeback on guest experience
• 🏜️ Two of Utah's most treasured protected landscapes get cut by 90 percent (take action)
• 🐻 The feds propose grizzly management back to the states

Local Stokelight

🏔️ Big plans for small mountains

🚠 Monarch's next 15 years are on paper. The Forest Service formally accepted the ski area's 2025 Master Development Plan, a 108-page roadmap covering every lift, building, and parking lot the hill hopes to touch into the late 2030s. Accepted isn't approved (each project still needs its own environmental review), but nothing outside this document can be built.

• The work comes in three phases: near-term basics like a covered conveyor, a rope tow into No Name Basin, and a 381-seat lodge at Pano Flats, then mid-term lift replacements plus 1,122 added parking spots, and a decade-out horizon with a summit hut, a Nordic center, and three more lift swaps.
• The marquee project is the Divide Express, a base-to-summit detachable quad that would be the first high-speed lift Monarch has ever run. Today's fleet is all fixed-grip, and some chairs have been spinning for 30 to 60 years.
• Monarch has run on 100 percent natural snow its whole life and intends to keep it that way.
• Context: the hill has been independent for 87 years, sits on zero megapasses, and paid cash for the 377-acre No Name Basin expansion that opened last winter. Around 230,000 skiers came through in 2024-25.

Why It Matters: The all-natural-snow commitment is the gutsiest line in the document IMO, especially one winter removed from a historically dry season. Every other resort treats snowmaking as insurance. Monarch is betting its perch on the Divide keeps catching storms for another generation.

🚲 Silverton just funded its next ten miles of singletrack. The Silverton Singletrack Society stacked up $1.1 million in grants to build Phase 2 of Baker's Park: 11 new trails on BLM land a half mile from downtown, with dirt moving this summer.

• Baker's Park is the first purpose-built trail network San Juan County has ever had. Phase 1's seven-mile loop opened in fall 2024 and drew nearly 3,900 users in its first season, in a town where the riding used to be dirt roads or expert-only mining relics.
• The money: a $750,000 anchor grant from GOCO, a second $250,000 from CPW's trail program (matching its Phase 1 award), $100,000 from the BLM's national foundation, and smaller local money down to $7,500 from the power co-op.
• IMBA Trail Solutions designs and builds, with Southwest Conservation Corps crews and volunteers digging alongside.
• The new mileage skews friendly: over half intermediate, real green options, and a directional, bike-optimized black. Seven trails go in this summer, the last four in 2027. Class 1 e-bikes are welcome.
• The full vision is 30 miles wrapping the Storm Peak terrain above town, eventually topping out near 13,000 feet, which could make it the highest purpose-built system in Colorado. The society figures it needs about $1 million more to finish the job.

Why It Matters: Silverton's economy has always leaned hard on winter. Purpose-built singletrack a half mile from Greene Street changes the shoulder-season math, and locals are already noticing more bikes rolling into town on visiting cars (I'm sure some locals don't like that).

🔥 The STOKE VOTE

Business

💼 Growth and growing pains

📈 More Americans played outside in 2025 than in any year on record: 183.2 million people, 59 percent of everyone age six and up, and the fourth straight record year. Dig into the numbers, though, and the story gets more complicated: the crowd keeps growing while the average person shows up less.

• Growth has cooled to 1.1 percent a year, and the average participant now gets out about 65 times annually, down from 87 in 2012.
• The growth is broad: women hit a record 53.4 percent participation rate, Hispanic participation jumped 6.5 percent, kids 6 to 12 rose 5 percent, and the 65-plus crowd added 800,000 people in a single year.
• Hiking still rules at 63.6 million participants, with running, fishing, camping, and biking rounding out the usual top five. All of it feeds a $1.3 trillion outdoor economy.

Why It Matters: Every crowded-trailhead complaint has a flip side: 183 million people now have skin in the game on public lands. This could be the biggest group of people who care about protecting nature that our country has ever had... but only if someone can bring them all together!

❄️ Vail Resorts wants a do-over on the guest experience. The company announced Epic Experience on July 14, a multi-year plan to upgrade food (not a high bar), rentals, lessons, and its app across the portfolio. For 20 years Vail focused on buying more mountains and selling more passes. This plan is the company admitting, without quite saying it, that the ski day experince itself got ignored along the way.

• What's in it: upgraded cafeteria food at 15 destination resorts with no price increases beyond normal inflation, plus chef-driven dishes at the flagships.
• The timing is on par. Skier visits fell 12.5 percent last season, a drop the company has never matched, and early pass sales are off 10 percent, the roughest start since the Epic Pass debuted in 2008.

Why It Matters: The Epic Pass model was built to lock in revenue before a single flake falls, and it worked so well the product itself got neglected. This is the first time Vail has formally said the next era is about experience, not acquisition.

Environment

🏜️ Take action to protect our lands!

🏛️ Two of Utah's most treasured protected landscapes just got shrunk to a tenth of their size. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante are national monuments: public land a president has given extra protection with a signature. On July 13 that signature worked in reverse. Both monuments were cut by about 90 percent, pulling protection from roughly 3 million acres of canyon country.

The land is still public and still federally owned, but in 60 days the cut areas open to new mining claims, and the coal and uranium underneath are the obvious targets. Tribes and conservation groups are suing over one simple question: the law clearly lets a president create a monument, but does it let one shrink it?

TAKE ACTION HERE

🐻 Grizzlies are staying protected, but the states are getting more say. Grizzly bears have been federally protected since 1975, which means the feds, not the states, decide when a bear can be moved or killed. A new proposed rule would let Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho sign agreements to handle more of that themselves, as long as bear numbers stay healthy. To be clear on what this is not: it's not a delisting, there are no hunting seasons, and the bears keep their protected status.

The recovery behind it is real, from a few hundred bears in 1975 to about 2,000 around Yellowstone and Glacier today. Conservation groups plan to sue anyway, arguing the rule makes it easier to kill bears and hands authority to states that tried to open a hunt the last time they had it. A December court deadline forces the bigger decision, keep federal protection or end it, later this year.

🎣 CPW stocked 300 rainbow trout in the Monarch Park ponds on July 13, capping a two-year rehab that dredged out decades of sediment, rebuilt habitat, and added an ADA-accessible dock.

What else is going on

• Grand Canyon rafters, about a dozen this year, contracted a mystery illness now under NPS investigation.
• Klamath River's dam removal, the biggest ever completed, just won engineering's top national honor: the Grand Conceptor award.
• Copper Peak's $20 million renovation in Michigan will turn North America's only ski flying hill into a year-round training mecca.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

This is the official state fish of Colorado can you name it?

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Answer!

Greenback Cutthroat Trout