🌲 347 acres saved!

Good morning, Stoke Crew. Looks like we're back to cold weather for a couple days, but we could use the rain, hopefully the forecast delivers some moisture. I'm thinking about heading out on the first camping trip of the year, maybe hit up Moab and ride some bikes with friends. Sounds pretty ideal! Here's the report!! Yeeew :)

In today's report

• 🏜️ Arches drops timed entry
• 🌲 347 acres of land saved next to Red Rocks
• ⛷️ Vail Resorts skier visits fall
• ❄️ A super El Niño is on the table for next winter!!

Mountain Briefing

🌄 Arches drops timed entry

🏜️ Arches National Park has dropped its timed-entry reservation requirement for 2026, ending a four-year pilot that had become one of the most-watched crowd control experiments in the park system. Visitors can now roll up any time during operating hours, no advance ticket needed. The park service announced the change, framing it as expanded public access. Glacier and Yosemite saw similar pilots end as well.

• The pilot launched in 2022 after annual visitation jumped 73.6% in a decade, peaking above 1.8 million people. NPS reports from 2022, 2023, and 2024 each credited the system with reducing congestion and improving the visitor experience.
• The fallback now is waiting 3 to 5 hours when parking lots fill. Officials are telling visitors to fuel up, hit the bathroom, and bring snacks before joining the line.
• Grand County, where Arches contributed $312 million to the local economy in 2024, is pitching middle-ground fixes: a voluntary shuttle from Moab, an automated entry lane, and trail connections so people can hike or bike in instead of driving.
• Park staff are stretched thin. NPS has lost roughly 25% of its workforce since January 2025.

Why It Matters: The data showed the system worked. Less congestion, better visitor experience, steadier flow at Delicate Arch and Devils Garden. Walking that back without a replacement isn't deregulation, it's just handing the problem back to the rangers and the rocks.... we will see what happens this summer.

🏔️ The Forest Service just approved a plan that will bring paid parking reservations and shuttles to several of the busiest trailheads outside Breckenridge. The Southern Tenmile Recreation Access Plan covers Spruce Creek, McCullough Gulch, Blue Lakes, and Quandary Peak. Quandary already runs on this kind of paid system. The new plan extends it to the rest. Together, those trailheads see roughly 237,000 visitors a year.

• The Quandary system has been in place since 2021, jointly run by Breckenridge and Summit County. It charges $30 to $55 to park at the trailhead and $7 for the shuttle from town for non-residents. Hiker counts on Quandary, one of Colorado's busiest 14ers, dropped 46% from 2020 to 2024.
• Spruce Creek is the busiest trailhead in the project area and the gateway to Mohawk and Mayflower lakes. It will be rebuilt for about 78 parking spaces with a shuttle turnaround. Blue Lakes is slated for 45 spaces. McCullough Gulch gets a new 12-space upper trailhead.
• Construction could start this summer. The rollout is phased, and reservations at Blue Lakes and lesser-used spots won't kick in right away.

Why It Matters: The 46% drop on Quandary is the goal and the problem at the same time. Less crowding is real, but it's largely happening by pricing out the people who can't drop $55 on a Saturday parking spot or shuffle their day around a shuttle. Public lands stop feeling public when access runs through a credit card and shuttle lines.

Environment

🏜️ Land saved, hope on the horizon

🌲 Jefferson County Open Space has acquired the 347-acre Braun Ranch next to Red Rocks Park and Matthews/Winters Park, locking in a critical piece of foothills habitat that had been on the market for years and circling among developers. The price was $7.3 million. Great Outdoors Colorado kicked in $2.3 million. The Conservation Fund facilitated the deal.

• The parcel sits on the western edge of Matthews/Winters and tops out more than 1,000 feet above the Morrison Valley, with views to Mount Blue Sky 35 miles west. It connects two currently disconnected sections of the existing park.
• The land is a migration corridor for elk and mule deer, and includes habitat for several State Wildlife Action Plan Tier 1 and 2 species, including the Preble's Meadow Jumping Mouse and Hops Azure Butterfly.
• Jeffco Open Space draws roughly 10 million visitors a year across 27 parks. If it were a national park, it would rank second in annual visitation behind only Great Smoky.

Why It Matters: This is exactly the kind of foothills connector parcel that almost always gets lost. It's right against the urban edge, it's flat enough to subdivide, and the only thing standing between it and a cul-de-sac is somebody moving fast when the market opens a window. Credit to Jeffco, GOCO, and the Conservation Fund for actually doing it! xoxo

🏔️ Colorado just wrapped its worst snowpack year on record. Most major ski areas finished below 60% of average, with Beaver Creek at 39% (126"), Breckenridge at 43% (155"), and Telluride at 45% (135"). Statewide snow-water equivalent hit 22% of the 30-year median on April 1. A March heatwave set seven straight days of record heat and pushed Colorado to an all-time March high of 99°F. The state climatologist confirmed it beat 1976-77 and 1980-81 as the worst on record.

Why It Matters: Snowpack is the water in every reservoir, the flow in every river, the line on every wildfire forecast. At 22% of median with record-fast March melt, everything downstream gets harder this summer: rafting outfitters, agriculture, towns on restrictions, fire crews, the Colorado River that feeds water to the 7 basin states. But next winter is tracking to look good...hopefully!!

💧 A super El Niño is likely setting up for next winter, and for the first time in years, the odds tilt in Colorado's favor. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center put the chance of El Niño emerging by June at 61%, with a 25% chance it strengthens into a "very strong" or "super" event by next winter. Pacific Ocean temperatures over 2°C above average define the super category, which only hits roughly once a decade.

• El Niño pushes the jet stream south, which historically favors the Central Rockies and Southwest (Utah, southern Colorado, northern New Mexico) and dries out the Pacific Northwest.
• The last super El Niños were 1997-98 and 2015-16. Both correlated with above-average snow in Colorado, but only five strong El Niños have occurred since 1950, so the sample size is thin.
• Forecasts also point to an active monsoon season this summer, which would help dampen wildfire risk in western and southeastern Colorado.

Why It Matters: After back-to-back La Niña winters and the worst snowpack year ever, Colorado needs the system to flip. El Niño is a real shot at that, especially in southern Colorado and the San Juans. It's not a sure thing, but going from "expect another dry year" to "odds now favor a wet one" is the best news the state's water and ski crowd has had in a long time.

Business

📉 A rough season for the industry's giants

⛷️ Vail Resorts' skier visits in the Rocky Mountain region fell 25% this season, the company told investors last week, as record-low snowfall and historically warm temperatures hammered the western U.S. ski industry. North American visits across all 37 of the company's resorts dropped 14.9% year over year, with lift revenue down 5.6%, ski school revenue down 12%, and dining revenue down 11.7%.

• The 14.4 million total North American visits is the lowest since 2017-18, when Vail owned just 13 ski areas. It's only 6.7% above the COVID-shortened 2019-20 season, which ended in mid-March.
• Vail Mountain closed April 8, 11 days early. Beaver Creek closed March 29, two weeks early. Breckenridge shut down April 19 instead of in May.
• CEO Rob Katz called it "one of the most challenging winters in history" across the western U.S., citing March conditions "well outside of historical norms."
• Vail's Rocky Mountain region also includes Park City Mountain Resort. Colorado's other resorts are privately held and don't disclose visit totals; statewide numbers come from Colorado Ski Country USA in June.

Why It Matters: The pain rolls downhill. Ski school down 12%, dining down 11.7% means fewer hours for instructors, lifties, and restaurant staff in towns where housing is already brutal. Early closures cost workers two to three weeks of paychecks they were counting on. Bad snow years aren't just a corporate earnings story, they hit the people who make the resort function.

🏛️ REI workers nationwide voted to authorize a boycott of the co-op's biggest event of the year, the May Anniversary Sale, after contract talks collapsed in late February. A final decision is expected by May 1. On April 18, supporters hung a 25-foot "Time's Up, Fair Contract or BOYCOTT" banner outside the Denver flagship at Confluence Park. The union represents 11 of REI's 195 stores, none in Colorado. REI says it bargained in good faith. The company has filed net losses every year since 2022 and laid off 428 workers in early 2025.

Why It Matters: REI's whole brand is the co-op structure and the gearheads behind the counter who know their stuff. A boycott of the year's biggest sale, organized by those exact people, cuts directly at the story REI tells about itself. The math of working there isn't working anymore.

What else is going on

• Arapahoe Basin closes May 3 after 194 days, Colorado's longest season despite historic low snowpack, with $39 lift tickets and closing weekend concerts.
• Yosemite's 500 black bears emerge from hibernation hungry, requiring visitors to secure all food and scented items in bear-proof storage, with speeding top bear killer.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

Arches National Park contains more than how many documented natural stone arches?

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