🌲💰 $34 million dollars of new land!

Good morning, Stoke Crew. Long time no see. It's good to be back, and I apologize for missing almost a month of newsletters. I went to Canada for a bit, got back to Colorado and got caught up with life! Sometimes chasing the dream is a bit challenging.

I'm committed to not missing a newsletter for the foreseeable future. Thank you all for the support. It means the world to me :)

Okay, as usual, let's get into the cool mountain news! And as always, stay STOKED! - Tyler

In today's report

• 🌲 The Maroon Bells added 530 acres
• 🌌 Frisco is now a certified Dark Sky town
• 🏔️ K2 shut out every single climber
• ❄️ A record super El Niño is brewing
• 🥇 Leadville 100 recap!
• 💧 Update: Colorado River rights

Local Stokelight

⛰️ New wilderness & Dark skies

🌲 The Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness is about to get its biggest addition in four decades. Pitkin County commissioners voted unanimously to sell Snowmass Falls Ranch to the Forest Service for $34 million. When the deal closes, targeted for the end of the year, 530 acres fold straight into the wilderness, the most since 1983.

• The county and the Wilderness Land Trust teamed up to buy the ranch in February 2024 for the same $34 million, taking it off the private market with the plan to hand it straight to the Forest Service.
• The Perry family had owned the place since 1943. The sale terms retire the old cabins, keep water rights with the county, and call for the new Snowmass Trailhead to wrap up around November.
• Hikers already know this ground, the route into Snowmass Lake crosses ranch land on its way to the wilderness boundary.
• Not a done deal quite yet. County land sales need approval at two separate public meetings, and the unanimous yes was only round one. The final vote lands August 26, though with the money already banked, it should be a formality.

Why It Matters: Pitkin County gets its $34 million back, pays off GOCO, and walks away having permanently protected 530 acres without eating the cost. Big win!

🌌 Frisco is now a certified Dark Sky community. The designation landed August 19 after a three-year push that started when a group of locals walked into town hall and asked. That makes two in Summit County, with Breckenridge certified last summer, and it commits Frisco to a full decade of lighting changes.

• Main Street and South Summit Boulevard got the first upgrades, shielded and dimmable streetlights installed in 2025. Every town-owned light must comply by March 2031, and private homes and businesses have until 2036, or sooner if they remodel their exterior. The town is looking at ways to help owners cover the swap.
• This isn't a set-it-and-forget-it plaque. The campaign came with stargazing nights in the Historic Park and STEM lessons in local schools, staff measure sky brightness quarterly and keep a monitor running around the clock near 1st and Main, and Mayor Rick Ihnken says the work is about "preserving the magic of a night sky in the mountains."

Why It Matters: Between Breck and now Frisco, Summit County is quietly turning into dark-sky capital, and that raises the bar for every other I-70 town! There is something special about a night sky lit up with stars.

📚 The country's first public nature library opened August 8 in Thornton. The new 33,000-square-foot branch lets you check out books alongside more than 650 pieces of outdoor gear, snowshoes, camping kits, birding setups, free with a library card and with a goal of growing toward 1,500 items. The $43.4 million building has indoor climbing boulders, a starry dark room, and a mud pit, all on a 15-acre campus bordering Thornton's Aylor Open Lands, with trail connections coming by 2027!

Mountaineering

❌ Zero summits on K2

🏔️ Not one person stood on top of K2 this year. The Karakoram's summer season wrapped with zero summits on the world's second-highest peak, one year after 41 climbers topped out. Gasherbrum I got shut out too, and of the 200-plus climbers who came chasing the range's 8,000-meter peaks only four expeditions succeeded anywhere, all on Broad Peak and Gasherbrum II. (Four peaks sit in this range: K2, Broad peak, Gasherbrum I & II)

• The season fell apart on July 30. The skies had barely cleared after a week of storms when an avalanche released on Broad Peak, killing all ten climbers on the summit push. The news hit K2's Camp 3 by satellite message that night, and teams staged for their own summit pushes turned around at first light to join the search instead.
• The weather never gave anyone a chance. July snow buried the upper mountains and made fixing lines up K2's Abruzzi route a losing battle, then early-August heat cooked the snowpack loose and sent rockfall flying down the mountain face. Expeditions spent weeks at base camp waiting on windows that never held.

Why It Matters: Outfitters in the range say the weather patterns they've planned expeditions around for decades aren't holding anymore. When the reliable windows stop being reliable, the risk math changes for everyone, and seasons like this may stop being outliers. My condolences to everyone affected by the Broad Peak avalanche and their families. Truly tragic.

Skiing

🌧️ Super El Niño meets opening day

❄️ A monster winter pattern is taking shape in the Pacific. El Niño just means a stretch of ocean along the equator runs hotter than normal. That extra heat shoves the jet stream, the highway winter storms travel, farther south, aiming more storms at the southern half of the West. The hotter the water, the harder the shove.

The Pacific is already 1.8 degrees Celsius above average, forecasts see a late-fall peak near 4 degrees, hotter than any El Niño on record, and NOAA gives better than 90 percent odds of a very strong event, with a 69 percent chance it tops everything since 1950.

• Meteorologist Alan Smith expects a strong southern storm track and fewer blasts of arctic air, which for Utah and Colorado reads as above-average snowfall but warmer storms, denser snow, and valley rain paired with upper-mountain dumps.
• Colorado splits. Neutral territory covers Vail, Aspen, Steamboat, and the Summit County hills, while the best odds sit south with the San Juans and the rest of the southern mountains. Up in the Pacific Northwest the storms should still arrive, the question is whether they fall as snow, with rain a real risk at lower elevations.
• Temper the hype. The last super El Niño, 2015-16, underdelivered (Utah and Tahoe finished near average), while 1982-83 and 1997-98 buried the West. And above average can mean 20 extra inches, not a season for the record books.

Why It Matters: Last winter was the worst on record for a big chunk of the West, and entire town economies took the hit alongside the skiers. A pattern that tilts the odds back toward a snowy year is great f*cking news for all of us! LET IT SNOW Yeeew!

🚠 Vail Resorts dropped its 2026-27 opening dates.

• Keystone aims earliest, promising "as soon as possible" in October after last year's October 25 start edged A-Basin by a day
• Breckenridge opens November 6th
• Vail Mountain on the 13th
• Beaver Creek and Crested Butte on November 25th

Elsewhere it's Whistler Blackcomb, Park City, Heavenly, and Northstar on November 20, then Kirkwood and Stevens Pass December 4. After a 12.5 percent visitation drop in last year's dud winter, the company is leaning hard on El Niño optimism and a decade of snowmaking upgrades.

Events

🏁 Leadville 100 Recap!

🏃 Running

Adrian Macdonald won his third Leadville 100 Saturday in 15:47:23, pulling away from Hope Pass onward on a course rerouted around the Willow Fire burn, the first change in race history. The new line skipped Sugarloaf and Powerline, ran 99.7 miles, and kept both crossings of 12,600-foot Hope Pass.

On the ladies side, McKendree Hickory won her Leadville debut in 19:39:12 after erasing Ailsa MacDonald's 30-minute lead in the final quarter; Jacquie Mannhard and local Emma Wood claimed second and third.

🚵 Biking

Keegan Swenson won his sixth consecutive Leadville 100, tying Dave Wiens all-time record, and it came down to a sprint: he and Matthew Wilson finished together in 5:20:26, Swenson by a wheel with a pass inside the final 25 meters.

On the ladies side, Melisa Rollins overcame an early crash for her second title in 5:58:43, the only woman under six hours!

Environment

🏛️ New rules for a shrinking river

💧 Colorado keeps its full share of the Colorado River, for now. The feds finalized the river's operating rules Friday, a two-year plan plus a 10-year framework that gets renegotiated every two years through 2036. The Lower Basin states take the hit, a combined 1.25 million acre-feet per year of mandatory cuts in 2027 and 2028, while Colorado and the rest of the Upper Basin face no required reductions.

• Under the split the three states proposed themselves, Arizona absorbs 760,000 acre-feet, California 440,000, and Nevada 50,000, and the plan asks them to voluntarily bank another 700,000 acre-feet over the two years.
• The backdrop is bad. Powell sits at 21 percent full and Mead at 27, both fresh off record lows, and Powell starts the water year barely above the elevation where Glen Canyon Dam's turbines quit, a line it could hit by early 2027.
• Arizona is already talking lawsuits. Its lead negotiator formally rejected a framework that leaves up to 3 million acre-feet of future cuts on the table, a fight that could land at the Supreme Court.

Why It Matters: A framework that gets renegotiated every two years is an admission that seven states couldn't agree on anything longer. It buys certainty through 2028 and schedules the next fight for 2027. The structural problem, a river that doesn't carry the same amount of water that it used to...

📚 Trailhead Trivia

What was the world's first International Dark Sky City, and in what year did it earn the title?

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Answer!

Flagstaff, Arizona, in 2001