🎿 Freeride → 2030 Olympics

Good morning, Stoke Crew. Hope you're all out there getting after some fun adventures! Here's some cool stuff from the outdoor world to go with your morning coffee. Let's get into it! Stay STOKEDDDD - Tyler

In today's report

• 🎿 Freeride is in for the 2030 Olympics
• 🚵 Boulder bikers stop trail restrictions
• 💼 Vail Resorts takeover rumors

Mountain Briefing

🏅 Freeride goes Olympic

🎿 Freeride is going to the Olympics. The IOC executive board signed off Tuesday in Lausanne on adding freeride skiing and snowboarding to the Alpes 2030 Winter Games program. It's a first for the Games: no groomed course anywhere, just riders picking a line down a natural face and getting scored on how they ride it, not how fast.

• Four medal events are coming: men's and women's ski, men's and women's snowboard, with 44 riders total split evenly between men and women.
• That even split feeds a bigger milestone. Alpes 2030 will be the first Winter Games with a 50-50 athlete quota, with 3,046 athletes competing across 126 events.
• Something had to give: Nordic combined got cut after a 102-year Olympic run, while synchronized skating joins the program and snowboard parallel GS survives.
• FWT founder Nicolas Hale-Woods called the moment the result of "three decades of commitment and dedication," and U.S. Ski & Snowboard is already standing up a qualifying pipeline so American riders have a clear road to 2030.

Why It Matters: This is the closest Olympic skiing has ever come to the skiing we actually do. No gates, no groomed course, just a rider reading a face and committing to a line. And with 2034 headed to Salt Lake City, freeride could debut in France and come home to American snow four years later. Let's gooooo!!

Local Stokelight

🚲 Boulder's bike ban is dead

🚵 Boulder County's bike restriction plan is dead. Commissioners killed the pilot program that would have kept mountain bikers off certain trails at Heil Valley Ranch and Hall Ranch on set days, ending the fight at a June 30 work session after months of pushback over two of the Front Range's popular trail systems.

• The idea started in March with Commissioner Claire Levy, who wanted to study restricted days modeled on Betasso Preserve, where bikes already sit out Wednesdays and Saturdays. Riders showed up in force: the county survey drew 7,522 responses, four times the usual haul, and three in four respondents opposed the restrictions.
• Staff pitched three pilot options and recommended monthly-alternating directional loops at Heil. Commissioners Stolzmann and Loachamin turned down all three, leaving Levy without a second vote. Instead of restrictions, the county will work the softer levers: better sightlines on busy trails, plus education and signage.
• The stakes weren't small. Heil alone logged about 66,000 visits in 2025, and biking is the most-reported primary activity at both parks. The Boulder Mountainbike Alliance is now backing a ballot push to grow the board from three commissioners to five.

Why It Matters: When a county floats a trail restriction, the assumption is that it eventually becomes policy. Seven thousand survey responses and packed public meetings flipped that script. Organized trail users just proved they can move local government, and the five-commissioner push means they're not done.

🚠 Aspen Mountain is auctioning chairs from the retired Little Nell and Bell Mountain lifts, which came down for the new Nell Bell high-speed quad arriving this winter. Online bidding runs July 4 through 19: 15 Little Nell chairs from $250, 100 Bell Mountain chairs from $500, and 10 artist-reworked chairs from $2,500, with nationwide shipping available. All of the money goes to climate action and voting rights groups, and nearly $15,000 was in by this week. Another 24 chairs are being donated to local schools and nonprofits, and 75 head into an employee raffle.

🔥 The STOKE VOTE

Business

📈 Vail Resorts

💼 Vail resorts CEO Rob Katz finally answered the rumors swirling around. The short version: a big investment firm called Oasis has been buying up Vail stock, and reports say it might launch a proxy fight, a campaign to vote out board members and push the company to sell off some of its mountains. On his Epic By Nature podcast, Rob said the reports that Vail hired bankers to fight back are flat wrong. "The company's not hired anybody, bankers or otherwise,".

• The pressure is real, though. Oasis owns almost 8% of Vail, and when the takeover reports hit in mid-June, the stock jumped up 11% in a single day.
• Nothing official has happened yet. Oasis hasn't actually started a fight; its paperwork with regulators is still a Schedule 13G, the form investors file when they're just holding shares, not trying to change anything. Katz's episode dropped June 23.
• There's a billionaire in the mix too. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince keeps publicly asking Vail to sell him Park City Mountain and promising to put $500 million into it, though he says he isn't working with Oasis and doesn't own a single share of Vail.
• Katz's answer: owning all 42 resorts outright is what makes the Epic Pass work. Rival Alterra's Ikon Pass covers 70-plus mountains, but Alterra only owns 17 of them. And Park City can't be sold anyway, because Vail doesn't own the land. It runs the mountain on a 300-year lease. "It's always been kind of a silly conversation," he said.

Why It Matters: The megapass era gets treated like a permanent feature of skiing, but it's really just one corporate strategy that a board can vote to unwind. With pass sales flattening industry-wide, this is the first serious test of whether Wall Street still believes in the model that reshaped the sport.

What else is going on

• Palisades Tahoe brings back Midweek Pass at $699 for first time in a decade, offering unlimited Monday-Friday access to 6,000 skiable acres.
• Off-duty Eagle River firefighter freed himself from 400-pound boulder.
• Ninety years ago in July 1936, four elite climbers died attempting Eiger's north face.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

The world's first chairlift started spinning in 1936 at which American ski resort?

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Answer!

Sun Valley, Idaho. Union Pacific bridge engineer James Curran designed it, borrowing from a conveyor system built for loading bananas onto boats.