🌵 A new National Park!

Good morning, Stoke Crew. Hope you’re all doing well! Today's report was a fun one to write :) If you've ever wondered what Vail and horse racing have in common, the trivia question and its bonus answer have you covered. Let's get into it!!

Stay STOKED - Tyler

In today's report

• 🌵 Say hi to national park No. 64
• 💼 Vail ties billionaire to Oasis fight
• 📉 Fox shakes up its front office
• 🎿 Wolf Creek clears 6,000 trees
• 🎉 The Legend throws an 80th party
• ❄️ Snow that lasted all summer long

Environment

☀️ National Park No. 64 is in Arizona!

🌵 Meet national park No. 64. It’s Chiricahua, down in Arizona’s Cochise County. President Trump’s signature on Oct. 20 moved it from national monument to national park. The last park to join the list was New River Gorge in West Virginia, back in 2020.

• The timing is awkward. The Park Service has shed a lot of staff. Chiricahua is one of many parks where officials have pushed maintenance down the list as "low priority."
• The law keeps the same boundaries (about 12,000 acres) and moves the monument’s existing funding over. Tribes also get protection for sacred and cultural sites inside the park, plus guaranteed access for traditional uses.
• The rocks are the draw. An eruption about 27 million years ago left balanced rocks and rhyolite spires by the thousands.
• Arizona now has four national parks. Chiricahua joins Saguaro, Grand Canyon, and Petrified Forest.

Why It Matters: A new name doesn’t hire rangers or fix trails. The law carries over the same budget and the same boundaries, and it lands while the Park Service is shedding staff. If the new title draws bigger crowds, Chiricahua will need real resources, not just new signs.

Business

🔄 Shakeups across the industry

💼 Vail points fingers at Matthew Prince. In a preliminary proxy filed Oct. 19, Vail Resorts told shareholders that Prince introduced two of Oasis Management’s board nominees to the hedge fund. Prince is the Cloudflare CEO who has spent well over a year trying to buy Park City Mountain. Vail says that’s "raising questions regarding potential conflicts of interest."

Quick refresher. Oasis owns about 9.6% of Vail and wants four of its picks on the board. Shareholders settle it at the annual meeting, usually in early December.

• Two of the picks are Olympic champ Picabo Street and VC Bryce Roberts. Street disclosed the link herself. She and Prince are friends, and she asked his advice about the nomination.
• Vail goes harder at Roberts. It says he left the Prince introduction off his questionnaire and only brought it up in his interview. In 2021, he posted a photo with Prince on X and called him an "old friend."
• The filing never claims Prince and Oasis teamed up.
• Prince answered in an email that opened with "Nope." He puts the number of people he suggested at about a dozen, and Street and Roberts were on that list. He also says "I had no influence over who Oasis put forward."

Why It Matters: If you ski Park City, this is the part to watch. Prince wants the mountain, but CEO Rob Katz has said Vail runs it on a 300-year lease and can’t sell it. A board shakeup doesn’t change that overnight.

📉 Fox needs a new boss. Mike Dennison gave up both the top job and his board seat, Fox Factory said on Oct. 16. He ran the suspension maker since 2019. Fox brought in a headhunter to find his replacement. Until then, the interim CEO is Doug Grimm, a Fox director since March.

• The same announcement came with a lower forecast. Fox had been aiming for as much as $1.47 billion in 2026 sales. Now the ceiling is $1.38 billion.
• For the quarter that finished Oct. 2, Fox expects somewhere between $336 million and $340 million in sales. It had told investors to expect $355 million to $380 million.
• Bikes weren’t the main culprit. Fox said bike sales hurt only "to a lesser extent." The bigger drags were a supply disruption in its Powered Vehicles Group, upfit problems in its aftermarket unit, and Marucci, the baseball brand it just unloaded.
• That baseball detour was expensive. Fox paid $572 million for Marucci in 2023 and sold it on Sept. 25 for $225 million.

Why It Matters: If you’ve got Fox on your bike (and a lot of us do), nothing changes on your fork tomorrow. But a company cutting its forecast and paying down debt has less room to spend. Buying Marucci for $572 million and selling it for $225 million is a $347 million lesson.

🚠 Doppelmayr went big in Utah. The Austrian lift maker’s new Salt Lake City headquarters opened Oct. 19, just east of the old building. Gov. Spencer Cox spoke at the opening. It’s 160,000 square feet, close to twice what Doppelmayr had before. The factory floor now shares a building with the engineers, the parts warehouse, the service shop, and a training center.

• Salt Lake can now build conical towers. Those are the tapered steel tubes holding up D-Line and Uni-G lifts. Until now, they crossed the Atlantic in shipping containers from Doppelmayr’s plant in Wolfurt, Austria.
• Yellowstone Club gets the first U.S.-built one for a new lift going in during summer 2027.
• Heavy parts are the whole idea. Big steel pieces cost a ton to ship across an ocean, so Salt Lake is focusing on those, and it builds them with U.S. steel.
• Doppelmayr’s first U.S. home base was in Golden, Colorado. Vail bought four of its detachable quads in 1985, and that order put the company on the map here.
• Between Salt Lake and new plants in China and Quebec, Doppelmayr says it’s spending $150 million.

Why It Matters: You don’t nearly double a factory for a market you think is cooling. Doppelmayr is betting North America keeps buying lifts for years. Building the heaviest parts here also takes an ocean crossing out of the supply chain, which is good for the company’s carbon footprint!

Skiing

🏔️ Colorado gets ready for winter

🎿 Timber!!! at Wolf Creek. All told, 6,000 trees came out this summer, flown off the hill by helicopter. The family-owned ski area on Wolf Creek Pass says the logging bill topped $2 million. Less timber means less fuel for a wildfire. It also means tree runs with room to turn that still ski well on a thinner base.

• This was the plan going into summer. Back in April, Wolf Creek flagged the Waterfall and Alberta Peak areas for logging.
• Flying timber out is nothing new there. Wolf Creek pulls beetle-killed trees off the hill by helicopter every summer, and lifting them out keeps the soil intact.
• Opening day is still TBD. On Oct. 15, CEO Davey Pitcher said the crew is "ready to pull the trigger" once there’s enough snow on the ground.

Why It Matters: If you’ve skied Wolf Creek’s trees in a lean year, you know how it goes. Logs, stumps, and a lot of sidestepping. More space between trunks means real turns in there sooner. With a strong El Niño on the way, those glades could be holding some very deep days!

🎉 A-Basin is turning 80. The resort opened in 1946, and the big birthday weekend runs from Friday, Dec. 4 to Sunday, Dec. 6. Lift tickets cost $80 all three days, plus every Wednesday of the season.

• Larry Jump and Sandy Schauffler started the place. Both were 10th Mountain Division vets, and they put up $25,000 of their own savings to open it with one rope tow.
• Saturday night is the birthday dinner at Black Mountain Lodge. A-Basin will debut a new film on its 80 years and bury a time capsule. You need a reservation, and retro ski outfits are very much invited.
• Friday kicks off with Uphill and Chill, a pre-lift breakfast for anyone who climbs up to the mid-mountain lodge to earn it. Demo gear is free Saturday and Sunday.

Why It Matters: Independent hills don’t stay independent by accident. A-Basin made it through the merger years, including a brief stint under Vail, and came out as its own place. 80 years in, A-Basin still feels like the same scrappy hill that started with one rope tow. No new village, no real estate push, just good terrain and a beach. Honestly, that’s why so many of us love it!

❄️ April snow, skied in October. That’s what Aspen pulled off this year. In April, crews at Snowmass and Buttermilk shoved what was left of last season’s snow into big piles. The insulated covers that went over the top came from Snow Secure, a Finnish company. Then came the hottest summer in Colorado’s recorded history. By the end of August, about 85% of the snow was still there.

The Beta: Snow farming is basically a giant cooler. Pile the snow up, cover it with good insulation, and most of it makes it to fall. Aspen’s version uses 82-by-32-foot panels that connect into one big cover, the whole setup runs on zero power.

• Aspen liked the results enough to buy more blankets. Snow Secure says it has signed up more than 10 North American resorts over the past two winters. Aspen One sustainability head Chris Miller calls it "a highly effective, and quite simple and low-tech tool."
• Snowmass pulled its covers on Oct. 1 and threw a free rail park that weekend. Buttermilk’s pile stays covered for now. Crews will tap it for park builds and early-season terrain.
• In snowmaking terms, the saved piles equal roughly 3.4 million gallons of water.

Why It Matters: Snowmaking is the expensive, thirsty part of opening early. If a resort can bank snow in spring, it needs fewer gun hours in a warm fall. With one study projecting Colorado could lose 23 to 34 ski days by 2050, every tool like this matters.

🔥 The STOKE VOTE

📚 Trailhead Trivia

Vail's longest run is named for an Italian ridge that 10th Mountain Division troops climbed at night in February 1945. Can you name it?

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Answer!

Riva Ridge. On the night of Feb. 18, 1945, about 700 ski troopers climbed the icy ridge in Italy's northern Apennines, a face the German army figured couldn't be climbed. Fog helped hide them, and by daybreak they had the top.

Vail's founders were Camp Hale guys, and they gave the name to one of the original runs, about 4 miles long.

Bonus: a Vail skier named her racehorse after the run, and that horse won the 1972 Kentucky Derby. That vail skier was Penny Chenery, also the owner of legendary racehorse Secretariat!