⛰️ Big air, big lifts, low water

Good morning, Stoke Crew. Well, winter has officially arrived. Hopefully this is a sign we’re off to a hot start and this season’s snowfall delivers. Fingers crossed, skis waxed. Here’s the report.

Stay STOKED - Tyler :)

In today's report

• 🚠 Ski resort upgrades!
• 🇨🇦 Hardline hits the North Shore
• 🦌 Largest wildlife overpass
• 💧 Lake Dillon keeps dropping :(

Skiing

❄️ Resort Upgrades: Whats new?

🚠 Aspen Mountain’s new chair turns a 21-minute haul into an eight-minute ride. Gondola Plaza is the bottom of Nell Bell, Bell Mountain’s summit is the top, and that trip used to take two separate chairs. Now it's one, and Aspen wasn't the only Colorado mountain getting an upgrade this summer!

• Winter Park keeps swapping in smarter, more mobile snow guns that get more out of every gallon. On Lower Hughes, the upgrade should double how much snow they can make.
• Keystone added underground heat to the plaza at the River Run Gondola, so the walk to the gondola should be a lot less slick.
• Steamboat used leftover dirt from a nearby dig to sculpt Maverick’s Halfpipe. Building it now takes 60% less snow, so the pipe should open earlier.
• Breckenridge put two Wyssen towers in Peak 7 Bowl this summer. Which will allow them to do remote avalanche detonation!

Why It Matters: On a storm day, avalanche control decides when the good terrain opens. Remote towers keep patrollers out of a loaded bowl while they do that work, and Vail Resorts pitches them as a quicker way to get skiers into the big terrain up high. A-Basin was already looking at the same kind of system this summer. Expect it to spread.

🎿 Snowland’s getting a real lift. The nonprofit hill in Utah’s Fairview Canyon came back last winter running a single rope tow. Now it holds a new Forest Service permit, and construction on a 2,450-foot surface lift starts this month.

• Meet the Ridgeline Express. It opens up 107 acres and will run alongside the Main Street rope tow. Snowland wants it spinning in December, assuming winter plays along.
• Last season was bare-bones. Snowland had 25 acres, four runs, roughly 500 feet of vert, and no snowmaking. Tickets were free with a reservation. Opening day only had 50 of them, and they vanished in about an hour.
• This is an old hill coming off a long nap. It opened in 1967, then pricey insurance and a permit mess killed public skiing in 1980.
• Locals kept skiing it anyway, with a buddy and a car standing in for the lift.
• Utah put up a $1.46 million grant for the lift. Day passes this winter are $20 for ages 13 and up, and kids 12 and under ski free.

Why It Matters: For more than 40 years, this canyon ran on car shuttles and stubbornness. Now the car shuttle finally gets traded in for an actual lift. Ski areas don’t usually come back from the dead.

Biking

🏅 Hardline heads north

🇨🇦 Hardline is headed north. Red Bull’s wildest downhill race has never come to Canada until now. This weekend it hits a track built from scratch at Cypress Mountain, just outside Vancouver. Finals start Friday, view live at Red Bull TV and YouTube.

• The jumps are absurd. The biggest stretch 80 to 100 feet. Add a 35-foot drop, top speeds near 45 mph, and 1.3 miles of track. Justin Wyper ran the build, and he figures it took nearly 7,000 hours of work over five months.
• Durango’s Asa Vermette is the guy to beat. He won Wales last year! He’s rolling in hot. Vermette clinched the World Cup overall earlier this month as an elite rookie, something only one other man has done.

Why It Matters: Hardline puts the world’s fastest downhillers on freeride-size features, the kind UCI races won’t allow. That mix of race pace and huge air is what makes it must-watch. Taking it to the North Shore, where freeride grew up, is about as fitting as it gets.

Environment

⛰️ Water worries, wildlife win

💧 (Not STOKED) - Lake Dillon keeps dropping. By April 1, Denver Water figures it’ll be just 45% to 50% full. The low end of that range would beat the 2002-03 drought, when Dillon got down to 48%. Its all-time low is 35%, from 1978.

Think of Lake Dillon as the metro’s savings account. It’s the largest piece of Denver Water’s storage, filled with snowmelt in big years and drawn down in lean ones.

• It keeps getting worse. Dillon sat at 64% on Oct. 1, well short of the normal 95%.
• The water never showed up. Dillon took in just 47,559 acre-feet between April and July, a new record low. In a typical year, that number is closer to 160,000.
• You can see it from the shore. Frisco Bay Marina kept its public ramp and slips closed all season, and the old U.S. Highway 6 roadbed is poking out of the lake again. Losing the slips was projected to cost the town about $315,000.
• Since Oct. 1, Denver Water customers are not allowed to water lawns at all.

Why It Matters: Don’t count on El Niño to bail Dillon out. Denver Water says there’s no clear link between El Niño and more snow in the mountains that feed its system. A full refill needs a winter nobody here has seen in three decades. Saving water isn’t just a summer thing anymore.

🦌 Colorado’s new wildlife overpass is the biggest on the continent. The Greenland Wildlife Overpass opened last December, crossing I-25 between Larkspur and Monument. It’s 209 feet long by 200 wide, just shy of an acre of dirt and plants over six lanes of traffic. Most of the $15 million came from a federal grant.

• Wildlife crashes have nearly disappeared. Fences steer animals to the overpass or one of five underpasses, and there have been two reported hits in about 10 months. That’s a 91% decline, per state officials. This stretch used to see about one a day in spring and fall.
• The bridge is really for elk and pronghorn. Both are skittish about underpasses and prefer open ground. This June, a pronghorn walked across. Biologists say it’s the first one documented crossing here in 20 to 30 years. Cameras have caught bears, deer, and coyotes!

Why It Matters: I-25 has cut the plains off from the foothills since the 1950s. Researchers are already sampling elk DNA on both sides to see if the herds start mixing again. A pronghorn strolling across an interstate it couldn’t cross for decades is the win we like to see!

📚 Trailhead Trivia

In 1937, Colorado's first rope tow spun up on a mountain pass where skiers had been running car shuttles. Name the pass.

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Answer!

Berthoud Pass. Skiers there would drive to the top, send one car to the bottom, and ski down. Denver's May Company paid for the tow, Denver Ford dealers donated a V-8 to power it, and it started running on Feb. 7, 1937.