🏅 Rainier in 3:43:50!

Good morning, Stoke Crew. Hope everyone's Monday was good, and happy belated Mother's Day to all the lovely mothers out there. Including beautiful Mother Earth! Here's the news to keep you STOKED, let's get into it!!!

In today's report

🏅 New FKT on Mount Rainier
🧗 22-year-old becomes youngest Yosemite Triple Crown finisher
🚲 Monarch Crest biking improvements
🐟 Northern California salmon runs come back swinging

Today's Stoke Story

🏔️ Rainier's on-foot FKT!

🏅 Simon Kearns set a new on-foot Fastest Known Time on Mount Rainier, going to the 14,410-foot summit and back which is 14.5 miles in 3 hours, 43 minutes, and 50 seconds. The summit split alone was 2 hours, 34 minutes. He had originally been chasing the ski record this spring, but a lean snow year and a snapped race ski forced him to swap edges for running shoes and go on foot instead.

He works the mountain for a living. Kearns started guiding on Rainier last year for RMI Expeditions, and that knowledge of the route let him pace the climb precisely.
For context: Kearns reached the summit roughly the same time Jack Kuenzle hit it during his ski record. Kuenzle's full ski round trip is 3:04:31, still the standing ski FKT on Rainier per the FKT database.

Why It Matters: 9,000 feet of glaciated gain to a 14,410-foot summit in this amount of time is impressive! For perspective, most parties take 2-3 days to do this route. Check out Simon's instagram here!

Climbing

👑 Boulder local completes Yosemite's Triple Crown

🧗 Boulder's Chris Deuto, 22, became the youngest person ever to climb Yosemite's Triple Crown, linking Mount Watkins, Half Dome, and El Capitan in 22 hours and 16 minutes with partner Erik Andersen. They topped out the Nose just past noon on May 9, taking the youngest title from Cheyne Lempe, who was 23 when he and Dave Allfrey did it in 2014. Only 11 teams plus Alex Honnold soloing have completed the Triple since Dean Potter and Timmy O'Neill invented it in 2001.

They swapped the standard Watkins, Nose, Half Dome order. Going Watkins first, Half Dome overnight, El Cap in the cool morning which shaved an hour and a half off the connecting hike, and they moved between formations on foot and by bike.
Set personal records on two of the three formations: El Capitan in 6 hours, 55 minutes, and Mount Watkins in 3 hours, 24 minutes. The current Triple speed record belongs to Tanner Wanish and Michael Vaill at 17:55.
Deuto's resume is already long: 5.14c and V14 outdoors as a teenager, the hardest free wall in Brazil, the Southeast Ridge of Cerro Torre, and the first free rope-solo winter ascent of the Casual Route on the Diamond at Longs Peak.
For reference most climbers take 2 to 5 days on either El Cap or Half Dome alone.

Why It Matters: The Triple Crown still gets done about once a year, by people who have already proven they can move on big walls. Doing it at 22, after practicing each formation only once, is a different level of preparation. It says the pipeline of young big wall climbers in the U.S. is alive and is producing climbers who can step into the Potter, Honnold, and Caldwell lineage without years of valley time first.

Biking

⛰️ Singletrack on the Crest, a master plan in Mammoth

🚲 The most disappointing section of the Monarch Crest Trail outside of Salida is finally being replaced. The Colorado Trail Foundation and the U.S. Forest Service have approved a 1.8-mile singletrack reroute that will swap out the rough doubletrack mining road descent toward Marshall Pass, the stretch that has always made riders scratch their heads about why a world-class trail dumped them onto a janky two-track losing 500 vertical feet at the worst possible moment.

Funding came through a $99,661 motorized trail grant from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, paid for by OHV registration tags. Local builder James Flatten, known as the "Flow Farmer," will run the machine work; CTF volunteers will hand-finish.
The new line splits off the existing singletrack before the old mine site, skirts above it, wraps around Mount Ouray, and drops to Marshall Pass through meadows. The trail management objective specifically calls for motos and mountain bikes, not the usual hiking-first standard.
Construction is set for the 2026 season. Official opening is June 15, 2027!
The window opened thanks to Monarch Mountain's recent No Name Basin terrain expansion, which forced a separate reroute for the Colorado Trail and let the CTF bundle this long-wanted project into the same NEPA (The National Environmental Policy Act) study.

Why It Matters: Public lands trail work in 2026 is slow, expensive, and dependent on funding stitched together from grants, volunteers, and the patience of a few small nonprofits. The CTF has put $5.5 million into the Colorado Trail (Monarch Crest Trail is part of the Colorado Trail, specifically segment 15) in the last five years between cash and in-kind volunteer labor. When you're out in the Colorado mountains, biking or hiking a trail in the middle of nowhere, it's easy to forget that trail didn't build itself. Someone put the money, time, and labor in. So thank you to the small organizations, the volunteers, and the nonprofits making it possible for us to enjoy our public lands :) xoxo!

🚵 Mammoth Mountain announced a multi-year master plan for its bike park, developed with trail design firm Gravity Logic, built around progression, downhill identity, and a more focused trail system. The resort pioneered lift-served mountain biking in 1987, and this plan is the most serious reinvestment it has made in the bike park in years.

For 2026, Roller Coaster Express opens for bike park operations for the first time.
Every new run is being designed with a clear progression in mind: green and blue flow trails for first-timers, black and double-black descents for committed riders, all built to a modern bike park standard.
Bike park opening day is May 23, 2026.

Why It Matters: Lift-served bike parks have evolved fast in the last decade. Mammoth invented the format and then watched newer parks like Whistler and Trestle define what a modern build looks like. Bringing in Gravity Logic, the same firm behind Whistler, is the right call. This is Mammoth recommitting to a sport it created instead of coasting on it!

Environment

🎣 Salmon on the rise!

🐟 Northern California's salmon runs are recovering at a scale that hasn't been seen in years, with returns climbing across multiple river systems at once. Upper Sacramento River fall Chinook jumped from just over 4,100 adults in 2024 to 62,000 in 2025, a roughly 15-fold increase, and the entire Sacramento Valley went from about 100,000 to nearly 165,000. After three straight years of fishing closures, things are opening up again this summer!

Feather River Fish Hatchery did most of the lifting, releasing 1.5 million spring-run and 1.16 million fall-run Chinook this spring, plus 129,000 fingerlings stocked directly into Lake Oroville in April for inland fishing. The hatchery met its full 2 million spring-run and 6 million fall-run goal plus extras.
Near Redding, crews are sinking "rockwads," built from almond trees and five-ton boulders, into the Sacramento to give juvenile salmon cover from predators. Underwater cameras showed small fish using them within hours.
The Klamath dam removal, the largest in U.S. history, is paying off fast. More than 10,000 fish over 2 feet long passed the former Iron Gate Dam site in 2025, a 30% jump from 2024, and Chinook spawned in the Wood, Williamson, and Sprague rivers for the first time in over a century. Fall Creek alone counted ~65,000 wild juvenile Chinook.
Putah Creek brought back 2,100 returning salmon that produced nearly half a million juveniles with no hatchery help at all.

Why It Matters: For California fishing communities, this is the first real exhale in three years. Commercial and recreational seasons have been shut since 2023. A 2026 opening, even a conservative one, is the payoff for years of hatchery work, habitat restoration, and the largest dam removal in U.S. history finally lining up.

🌲 An invasive beetle smaller than a grain of rice is killing California trees, and researchers may not be able to stop it. The shothole borer tunnels into bark, plants a fungus, and the fungus chokes off the tree's vascular system. Eighty-plus species are at risk including sycamores, oaks, willows, and orchard trees. One San Diego County infestation killed 120,000 native willows in three years. No pesticide kills the beetle inside the tree, so the only tools are early detection, rapid removal, and chipping infested wood.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest peak at 19,341 feet — what country is it in?

⚡ Share The Stoke

This newsletter is for mountain lovers, first chair advocates, and the ones who live for type 2 fun. Basically, the type of people whose "five-year plan" is just a list of peaks and routes!

If you know someone like that, forward this email or send them to thestokereport.com. Thanks for spreading the stoke — it seriously means a lot!

🏅 Rainier in 3:43:50!

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