⛰️🏥 Search and rescue moves under state control

Good morning, Stoke Crew. Hope your Monday wasn't too Monday-ish. Got a couple hot days in the forecast unfortunately, but it's a good excuse to go hang out by the river :) Alright, lots of cool stuff to cover today. Hope you enjoy! Yeeewwww! Stay STOKED — Tyler

In today's report

• 🌲 Pitkin County breaks ground on McClure Pass Trail
• 🏔️ Roaring Fork coalition rolls out 8 conservation projects
• ❄️ Sherpa survives 6 days alone on Everest
• 🏛️ State moves to take over backcountry search and rescue
• ⛷️ Ski industry updates

Local Stokelight

☀️ Boots on the ground in the Roaring Fork!

🌲 Pitkin County (Aspen) Open Space and Trails has officially broken ground on the McClure Pass Trail, a 2.52-mile, natural-surface route climbing 1,295 feet from Highway 133 to the summit of the pass. It's the first major construction phase of the long-envisioned Carbondale to Crested Butte Trail Plan, an 83-mile non-motorized corridor for hikers, equestrians, and mountain bikers.

• The cornerstone of phase one is a tunnel under Highway 133, giving trail users a fully separated crossing. A new trailhead at the base of the pass will replace the informal McClure Pass Road pullout, and switchbacks will carry the trail up to Ragged Mountain Road.
• Tunnel and trailhead work is targeted for completion by Oct. 3, with the singletrack and bridge done before first snow. Singletrack work doesn't start until mid-August because of wildlife constraints, and the trail will close annually from Dec. 1 through April 30 to protect wintering elk.

Why It Matters: This is why Colorado is so good. The state and its counties keep grinding away at projects that quietly add real access to the best outdoors we have. More access is always the right answer!

🏔️ The Roaring Fork Outdoor Coalition is rolling out eight projects across the Roaring Fork Watershed this summer, backed by $132,000 in funding. The partnership covers Pitkin, Eagle, Garfield, and Gunnison counties and pulls together local governments, the Forest Service, BLM, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife, tracing back to Gov. Polis's regional planning executive order in 2020.

• The flagship effort is invasive vegetation control on trails in Aspen, Snowmass Village, Basalt, Carbondale, and up Independence Pass, targeting cheatgrass, poison hemlock, and spotted knapweed before they push into the valley's wetlands.
• A second push restores trails on Basalt Mountain, Light Hill, Thomas Lakes, and Red Hill. With drainage, tread stabilization, erosion control, and better wayfinding. Other projects cover visitor services, public lands advocacy, and Independence Pass restroom access.
• Funding: $87,000 from Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Great Outdoors Colorado in 2025, plus $45,000 in local dollars from Pitkin County, Aspen, Snowmass Village, and Eagle County.
• On-the-ground work runs through partners like Roaring Fork Outdoor Volunteers and the Roaring Fork Mountain Bike Association.

Why It Matters: $132,000 isn't a huge number for eight projects spread across four counties. But state grants stacked on top of local dollars from Pitkin, Aspen, Snowmass, and Eagle County, then layered with volunteer labor through groups like RFOV and RFMBA, is how small budgets actually stretch into real conservation work.

Mountaineering

🏔️ A miracle on Everest

❄️ Hillary Dawa Sherpa, a 52-year-old Nepali guide, has survived six days alone on Mount Everest after vanishing at roughly 25,000 feet on May 29. A cleaning crew with the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee found him crawling near the foot of the Khumbu Icefall on June 4, frostbitten and exhausted but alive.

• He was descending below Camp IV with British client Chris Thrall and a Polish climber when he sat on a rock to rest, told Thrall to keep moving, and was not seen alive again until the cleanup crew spotted him days later.
• After his oxygen ran out, he walked, slid, and crawled from above Camp III to Camp I, surviving on a single chocolate bar and chewed ice. He fell into a crevasse above the Khumbu Icefall and spent two days stuck inside, climbing out only after avalanches filled in enough snow.
• He then crossed the icefall after Sherpas had already pulled the fixed ladders and ropes for the season.

Why It Matters: Survival above 25,000 feet, alone, without oxygen, for six days isn't supposed to be possible, and crossing a dismantled Khumbu Icefall on top of that may make this the most impressive single self-rescue in recent Everest history. It's a true miracle, and a real reminder of what the human body can do when survival is the only option on the table.

Recreation

🚁 State takes over backcountry search and rescue

🏛️ Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management are taking over statewide coordination of backcountry search and rescue, ending a 53-year run by the Colorado Search and Rescue Association.

• The new agreement takes effect Aug. 1 and runs through July 2031. Sheriffs keep authority over rescues in their counties; CPW takes over support and coordination of large incidents.
• At stake: the program that coordinates aviation rescues with the National Guard's, plus 22 trained volunteer state coordinators who put in more than 17,000 volunteer hours a year. Last year the Colorado Aviation Rescue Team ran over 40 missions, nearly double its prior year.
• Funding fight underneath all of this: a 2021 law was supposed to split the first $36 million in Keep Colorado Wild Pass revenue between CPW ($32.5M for parks), the Search and Rescue Fund ($2.5M), and the Avalanche Information Center ($1M). CSAR says SAR and the avalanche center should be fully funded regardless. CPW reads it the other way: it gets its $32.5M first under a "waterfall," and the rescue and avalanche money only flows after that bucket is full. $3.4 million in rescue dollars is still sitting undistributed.

Why It Matters: This program has been running since 1973 and has done a really good job of organizing rescues and saving lives every single year. Volunteers have spent their own money on gear and training and put in hundreds of thousands of hours over the years to make it work. Why change something that's been working this well?

On top of that, moving coordination to a state agency that allegedly hasn't distributed the money already owed to teams is the worst possible signal to send to the people doing the ground work.

Business

⛷️ Ski Industry shakeups

❄️ Alterra Mountain Co. has parted ways with Steamboat Resort president and COO Dave Hunter, with the resort announcing an immediate search for a new leader. Rob Perlman, currently executive vice president of Alterra's Rockies Division and Steamboat's president for nine years before his promotion, will oversee daily operations during the search.

⬇️ Colorado ski areas logged a 24% collapse in visitation in 2025-26, the sharpest single-season decline in more than 40 years. Visits to the state's 26 ski hills fell to 10.5 million, down from 13.9 million the prior winter, the lowest total since 1991-92.

🌲 Aspen One CEO Dave Tanner is publicly framing the future of the ski industry as a somber trajectory, and asking the Aspen community for help. He's pitching the city council at a Monday work session on housing, transportation, and infrastructure to help stabilize, not grow, skier visitation.

📉 Vail Resorts told Wall Street to expect a worse fiscal year after a brutal third quater, with CEO Rob Katz calling the past winter one of the most challenging in industry history. Resort net revenue fell 7% to $1.21 billion for the quarter, net income dropped from $389.7 million to $314.4 million.

Why All This Matters: The single thread under all of this is climate. Warmer winters, shorter seasons, less reliable snow, and an industry that built its entire business model assuming the old weather pattern would hold.

Pricing pressure, leadership shake-ups, soft pass sales, weaker spending in mountain towns, fewer hours for the workers who keep the lifts running and the restaurants open, all downstream of that one fact. Skiing isn't in trouble because the industry is broken. It's in trouble because the climate that built it is.

What else is going on

• Lindsey Vonn swept 2026 Stifel Awards winning Athlete of the Year and Best Comeback after seven World Cup podiums, becoming oldest skier to win a race despite Olympic crash.
• Vermont posted best ski season in over a decade with 4.356 million skier visits, up 4.7% and 13.8% above national average despite reduced Canadian visitation.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

What's the official state mammal of Colorado?

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