🏔️ A new Mont Blanc record!

Good morning, Stoke Crew. Not gonna lie, this one's a banger lol! This is the kind of news that reminds me why I started THE STOKE REPORT in the first place... to get all the coolest stuff from the outdoor world in one place and bring it straight to you :). Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Oh, and there's a poll at the end... I'm genuinely curious where you all land on this one!!! Yeew, cheers, and love ya! Go do something fun this weekend outside!! - Tyler

In today's report

• 🏔️ New FKT on Mont Blanc
• 🧊 Khumbu Icefall finally opens
• 🌲 California: wildlife and recreation
• 🚲 UCI World Cup Starts

Stoke Story

⏱️ Two French alpinists, one Mont Blanc record

🏔️ French alpinists Mathéo Jacquemoud and Samuel Equy set a new ski mountaineering Fastest Known Time on Mont Blanc, finishing the round trip from the Chamonix church to the 15,771ft summit and back in 4 hours, 41 minutes, and 24 seconds. The duo covered roughly 17.4 miles and 12,140 feet of vertical, beating William Boffelli's 2025 record by just two minutes.

• The line ran up via the Jonction, Grands Mulets, and Vallot, then back down the North Face. Equy tagged the summit in 3 hours 41 minutes, with Jacquemoud arriving seconds behind, before a 1 hour 40 second descent back to the church.
• Jacquemoud, 35, is a French mountain guide and two-time Pierra Menta winner who held a previous Mont Blanc round-trip record back in 2013. Equy, 29, races on the French national ski mountaineering team and won the 2026 Patrouille des Glaciers earlier this spring.
• For context, Kilian Jornet's foot-only Mont Blanc round trip from 2013 still stands at 4 hours, 57 minutes, 34 seconds.

Why It Matters: The headline number is the time, but the real story is the trend line. Mont Blanc has been the proving ground for ski mountaineering speed for decades, and the record keeps falling in two-minute slivers. That is what the FKT era looks like now: gear gets lighter, athletes get more specialized, and the "ceiling" turns out to keep moving.

Climbing

⚠️ 19 days late (Everest)

🧊 Rope-fixing teams finally opened a route through the Khumbu Icefall on Tuesday, April 28, ending a 19-day delay and officially kicking off the 2026 climbing season on Everest. The path runs directly beneath a massive, fractured serac that Icefall Doctors spent weeks waiting on, after two alternative routes were scouted and rejected as more dangerous.

• The serac measures roughly 118 feet wide and 98 feet tall, with multiple visible cracks and a real risk of collapse at any time. Icefall Doctors first paused work on April 8 to see if it would crumble on its own. Part of it did. Most of it did not.
• More than 400 climbers and a large support team have been waiting at base camp for permits across Everest, Lhotse, and Nuptse. Nepal has issued 425 Everest permits this season.
• Rope fixers also explored a vertical route over the serac that would have required around 10 ladders on unstable ice next to active rockfall. They opted to route below instead, with mandatory rules now in place: move fast through the section, only one person on a ladder at a time, harnesses clipped on both sides, and lighter loads for high-altitude workers.
• The Khumbu Icefall has a deadly history in this exact zone. A 2014 serac collapse killed 16 Sherpa guides and shut down that season. Three more Sherpa died in a 2023 icefall avalanche near the same area.

Why It Matters: A 19-day delay compresses an already tight summit window for 425 permit holders, which means more people moving faster, with less margin, on the most dangerous stretch of the mountain. Crowding under a fractured serac is exactly the scenario that turned 2014 into a tragedy. The route is open. Safety first is always the right call! Good luck to all the Climbers!

Environment

🌲 Wildlife and recreation: the year of more

🏔️ California's national parks set record attendance in 2025, drawing nearly 12 million visits across the state's nine parks and surpassed the 2019 record. Visits were up more than 800,000 from 2024. That happened during a 43-day federal shutdown, the longest in U.S. history, and a year of deep staffing losses at the National Park Service.

• Nationally, the system logged more than 323 million recreation visits in 2025, with 26 parks setting all-time records. Yosemite alone pulled 4,278,413 visits, and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area was one of the most visited NPS sites in the country at 15.7 million. (Golden Gate National Recreation Area isn't a single park, it's roughly 80,000 acres of protected land stitched together into one NPS unit. The collection of parks, beaches, headlands, and historic sites spans three Bay Area counties: San Mateo, San Francisco, and Marin!)
• Joshua Tree took roughly 2.9 million visitors and Death Valley about 1.3 million, even with reduced staffing and concession-only operations during the shutdown.
• For 2026, Yosemite has dropped its timed-entry reservation system entirely, leaning on real-time traffic monitoring and active parking management instead. Spring visitors have already hit two-hour entrance waits on peak weekends.
• The Trump administration has proposed cutting the National Park Service budget by more than 25% for fiscal year 2027, which would eliminate nearly 3,000 more positions on top of the roughly 25% of the permanent workforce already lost over the past year. This is super Lame!

Why It Matters: Demand for public lands in California is not slowing down. Nine parks pulled almost 12 million visitors during shutdown chaos. That is a mandate to fund the National Park Service, not a reason to gut it. Dropping Yosemite's reservation system without backfilling staff is going to make that math hit visitors directly this summer.

🐺 California's gray wolf population now has 12 known packs and roughly 90 wolves, up from a single pack less than a decade ago, per California Department of Fish and Wildlife's March 2026 update. All of them descend from lone wolves that began crossing the Oregon border in 2011. Four new packs were recognized in 2025 and early 2026, while the Beyem Seyo pack was lethally removed late last year after at least 88 cattle kills in Sierra Valley, the first state-led wolf killing in modern California history. A young female briefly walked into Los Angeles County in February, the first wolf there in over a century.

Biking

🏁 World Cup season opens in Asia

🚲 The 2026 UCI Mountain Bike World Cup season opens this weekend at Mona Yongpyong in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the first-ever Asian round of the Cross-Country Olympic and Cross-Country Short Track World Cups, and the first UCI Downhill World Cup on the continent in 25 years. Racing runs May 1-3 on a brand-new venue built into the resort that hosted alpine skiing at the 2018 Winter Olympics.

• The downhill course is short, fast, and freshly cut: roughly 1.15 miles of technical forest, high-speed sections, and big jumps. The cross-country track leans on the natural terrain with steep climbs, off-camber descents, and multiple line choices, the kind of course that should reward the more technical riders in the field.

Why It Matters: A first-ever XCO and XCC World Cup in Asia is overdue, and Korea inheriting an Olympic-grade venue is the smart way to do it. New venues are how the World Cup grows beyond the same handful of European hills, and a brand-new course also resets the playing field. Nobody has track time on this thing, which means the early-season form sheet is wide open. As always my money is on golden boy Jackson Goldstone!

📚 Trailhead Trivia

What is the most visited National Park in the united states?

🔥 The STOKE VOTE

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Answer!

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is consistently the most visited national park in the U.S., welcoming over 11.5 million visitors in 2025