⛰️ 570,272 visits in one month

Good morning, Stoke Crew. So many cool things happening in the outdoor world right now! Today's sendition was a blast to put together. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did :) Stay STOKED - Tyler

In today's report

• 🏂 X Games and Aspen lock in 3 more years
• 🚲 Salida breaks ground on bike park
• 🌲 Yellowstone just logged its busiest May ever
• 🧗‍♀️ Janja Garnbret sends, making 15.5c history
• 🎿 FIS gets serious about climate
• 🚴 The Tour Divide rolls out of Banff Friday

Mountain Briefing

🏔️ A loaded week in mountain news :)

🏂 X Games and Aspen Snowmass have locked in a three-year extension that keeps the winter event at Buttermilk through the 2028/29 season. The coming winter will be the 26th straight year the X Games run at Buttermilk, and the January 2027 stop doubles as the launch of the new MoonPay X Games League, the first team-based global league in action sports.

• The 2026 X Games drew more than 50,000 fans over three days and 15.2 million viewers across ESPN and ABC, up 48% year over year, with the largest youth audience in five years.
• The new MoonPay league flips the format: city-based, co-ed teams of drafted athletes racking up points toward a season championship, alongside the usual individual medals.
• CEO Jeremy Bloom, the former Olympic moguls skier, kept it simple: "Aspen remains our crown jewel."
• Mark McMorris, whose 25 Winter X Games medals are the most in winter history, is one of the league's founding athletes.

Why It Matters: X Games weekend is one of the biggest economic moments of Aspen's winter, and for a generation of Colorado kids it's the one event where the best snowboarders and skiers on earth show up in their backyard. Three more guaranteed years of that is a win for the whole valley.

🚲 Salida Mountain Trails and the city broke ground June 8 on Phase 1 of the Salida Bike Park at the F Street Trailhead, hiring Santa Fe builder Rocket Ramps to construct progressive jump lines and skills features near the base of S Mountain.

• Phase 1 fully redesigns the 2024 pilot park, which got ridden 100,000 times in 2025. The new build brings prefab wooden jumps for consistent takeoffs, plus skinnies, rollers, drops, and a dedicated return trail to ease congestion at the busy trailhead.
• The site is the gateway to 30+ miles of Arkansas Hills singletrack that sees more than 300,000 uses a year, with trailhead traffic up 34% since 2023.
• The full concept, designed with IMBA Trail Solutions from community feedback, maps eight zones built in phases over several years, paid for through SMT fundraising rather than the city budget. Donations are open at salidamountaintrails.org.
• The finished park will give Chaffee County its first public, directional, bike-only trails. SMT executive director Jon Terbush: "Rocket Ramps is one of the best bike park builders in the country."

Why It Matters: Salida already punches way above its weight as a trail community, and it keeps quietly stacking the projects that prove it. A small town with a purpose-built bike park at the front door of its trail network gets me pretty STOKED! PS: I love biking, camping, and rafting in Salida! Such a great little town!

🌲 Yellowstone just posted its busiest May ever, logging 570,272 recreation visits, up 1% on May 2025's previous record and 20% on May 2021, the year that went on to set the park's all-time annual record of more than 4.8 million.

• The park is on a record pace through May with 773,653 visits year-to-date. Last year finished as the second-highest year ever at roughly 4.76 million visits, and that was with a 43-day government shutdown denting fall numbers.
• The crowds are landing on a National Park Service that has lost nearly a quarter of its permanent staff since January 2025, with the administration's 2027 budget proposing roughly 3,000 more position cuts.
• For summer 2026 the agency dropped timed-entry reservations at Yosemite, Arches, and Glacier to expand access. Rocky Mountain National Park keeps its timed entry from late May through mid-October.

Why It Matters: Run the math: record visitation, fewer permanent staff, and fewer reservation systems managing the flow. Something has to give, and it's usually the stuff you can't see on a day trip: resource protection, trail maintenance, and the rangers who keep people from petting the bison.

⛷️ Lindsey Vonn, Mikaela Shiffrin, and Eileen Gu made TIME's inaugural TIME100 Sports list of the most influential people in sports, published June 9. Seven winter and outdoor athletes made it in total, including Jessie Diggins, cross-country king Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, Paralympian Oksana Masters, and Alex Honnold, who earned his spot climbing Taipei 101 live on Netflix. Vonn was recognized for her comeback at 41 and the Cortina crash that followed, Shiffrin for her largest-margin-since-1998 slalom gold, and Gu for becoming the only action-sports athlete with three medals at each of two Olympics.

Why It Matters: Winter sports usually get one mainstream moment every four years. Seven snow and outdoor athletes landing next to LeBron and Messi on an inaugural list says this Olympic cycle actually moved the needle.

Climbing

🏆 Janja makes 5.15c history!

🧗‍♀️ Janja Garnbret just sent Bibliographie, the 114 foot 5.15c route at Céüse, France, on June 6, on a try she expected to be just a warm-up attempt. It's the first female ascent of the route, making the two time Olympic champion the second woman ever to climb a confirmed 9b+, and only the 6th person, period, to ever climb this route!

• The route was bolted by Ethan Pringle in 2009 and first climbed by Alex Megos in 2020 at a proposed 5.15d, then settled at 5.15c after Stefano Ghisolfi's 2021 repeat. It packs 80+ moves of steeply overhanging limestone around a crux that's roughly a V14 boulder problem.
• She first tried it in fall 2024, fresh off Paris gold. The send came on her 5th trip to Céüse, roughly 20 sessions and 30 total tries, just two days after she fell on the route's second to last hold.
• Her previous hardest route was 5.14d. She jumped straight from 5.14d to 5.15c, skipping two letter grades entirely.
• For scale, Alex Megos needed 60 days of projecting for the first ascent. "This route required me to be a different climber," Garnbret said.

Why It Matters: The old debate about whether comp climbers can perform on real rock is officially dead. The greatest competition climber ever walked outside and did one of the hardest routes on the planet in a fraction of the time the route usually demands. Megos needed 60 days for the first ascent. She needed about 30 tries.

Skiing

🎿 FIS hands athletes a climate playbook

♻️ FIS (International Ski and Snowboard Federation) just handed its athletes a climate playbook, releasing the Athlete Sustainability Guide on June 2. The 60-page manual gives the federation's nearly 40,000 licensed athletes a how-to for cutting their own footprint and using their platforms to push for bigger change.

• The guide covers calculating a personal carbon footprint, travel choices (the biggest emissions source for most athletes: carpool, take trains, skip flights where possible), cutting single-use plastics, and pushing sponsors toward durable gear. Per the guide, one pair of skis carries roughly 45 kg of CO2, and France alone discards about 263,000 pairs a year.
• FIS lays out the stakes plainly: at 2°C of warming, more than half of Europe's ski resorts face severe snow shortages without artificial snow. At 4°C, it's 98% of them.
• The backdrop matters. FIS has taken real heat on climate, including a 2023 open letter eventually signed by 420+ athletes, Mikaela Shiffrin among them, calling its efforts insufficient. The guide arrives under the federation's IMPACT Programme and its pledge of net zero by 2040.

Why It Matters: It's easy to roll your eyes at a federation that flies a traveling circus around the planet all winter handing athletes a carpooling guide. But remember, the athletes demanded this. 420 of them, in writing, three years ago. This is a small turn in the right direction!

Biking

🏁 Race week, two very different clocks

🚴 The Tour Divide rolls out of Banff at the Grand Depart Friday morning, June 12, sending roughly 200 riders south along the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route to Antelope Wells, New Mexico: about 2,700 miles and 158,000 feet of climbing down the spine of the Rockies, self-supported, with a clock that never stops.

• There's no entry fee, no prizes, no officials, and no formal registration. Riders email a letter of intent, carry SPOT trackers so dot-watchers can follow along on Trackleaders, and police themselves on the rules.
• The bar is Robin Gemperle's 11 days, 19 hours, 14 minutes from 2025, the fastest time ever recorded on the route. The Swiss rider was the first ever under 12 days, won by a 300+ mile gap, and did it with a 140-mile wildfire detour in New Mexico.
• The race has been running since 2008 and is widely considered the halo event of bikepacking, with riders facing everything from June snowfall to desert heat to the infamous peanut-butter mud.
• Defending women's champ is France's Nathalie Baillon at 16 days, 10 hours.

Why It Matters: In an era of $200 entry fees, lottery systems, and prize purses creeping into gravel, the Tour Divide stays free, unsanctioned, and self-policed. No officials, no aid stations, no excuses. It might be the purest test left in cycling, and that's exactly why the best ultra riders keep showing up.

🥇 Downhill World Cup racing hits Leogang, Austria this weekend, round 3 of 9, with finals Saturday and a genuine first: the elite women will close the show, racing after the men for the first time in World Cup downhill history. Hometown hero Vali Höll, a perfect two-for-two this season, could drop in as the very last rider of the day at her home race.

• The men's overall has a surprise American leader: Luca Shaw, sitting on 285 points after taking his first career World Cup win at Loudenvielle by 0.127 seconds. "It's been 14 years trying to do this," said the 29-year-old North Carolinian.
• Five-time world champ Loic Bruni is out roughly three months after emergency wrist surgery following a training crash at round 2, shaking up the title picture.
• American Asa Vermette became the first rider ever to win on debut at an elite World Cup at round 1 in South Korea, then got disqualified at Loudenvielle after tangling with a course banner. Zero series points, everything to prove.
• Reigning World Champ Jackson Goldstone did not even qualify for finals last event, so we will see how this all shapes up this weekend!

Why It Matters: American downhill hasn't had this much juice in years. Shaw leads the overall, Vermette made history in round 1, Tyler Waite went fifth at Loudenvielle, and Anna Newkirk is a real women's podium threat. Set the early alarm Saturday, this is worth watching live.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

What is the top speed of a Yellowstone bison?

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Answer!

35-40 miles per hour, roughly 2.5 times faster than you