⛷️ Shiffrin goes exploring

Good afternoon, Stoke Crew. Yeah, you read that right. THE STOKE REPORT is running a little late today, so consider this your lunch break reading :)

Stay STOKED - Tyler

In today's report

• ⛷️ Shiffrin goes exploring
• 🚠 Utah adds 1,300+ new acres
• 🏂 Snowboarding up 9% in a dud year
• 🥇 Rampage turns 25 on OG dirt

Skiing

🏔️ New lines, new snow

⛷️ Shiffrin is easing off slalom. The best slalom skier on the planet is making this winter about Giant Slalom and super-G. She broke the news Tuesday and is calling 2026-27 a "season of exploration."

• Colorado gets her for a month of training this fall. Right after the season-opening Sölden GS on October 24, she'll be home instead of chasing slaloms around Europe. The old routine left almost no room for family.
• The Levi and Gurgl slaloms go on without her. She won't race slalom until Killington on November 29. She'll still hand-pick slaloms after that, enough to keep her slalom ranking alive so the door stays open.
• Slalom is her house. It accounts for 73 of her 110 World Cup wins, which is the all-time record. She won every World Cup slalom but one last season, and she took Olympic slalom gold in Cortina.
• This is about the long game. She could have raced only slalom and kept stacking wins. She figures that grind would have her hanging up the race skis sooner.

Why It Matters: Colorado might be the big winner here. Beaver Creek hosts two women's downhills and a super-G December 11 through 13. If super-G is really the new focus, the December 13 race just became the one to circle on the calendar!

🚠 Utah wins the terrain race. Three resorts there are adding more than 1,300 acres to their public trail maps this winter, and no other state is in the same zip code.

• Powder Mountain carries the load, of its 1,047 new acres, 147 are hike-to and the rest hang off the new three-seater. Think a 2,200-foot drop of advanced-to-expert fall line below James Peak. Last season you needed a guide to ski it.
• Sundance adds 100-plus acres with the Electric Horseman Express. Six minutes on it gets you 1,850-plus feet of vert.
• Deer Valley keeps building. The Hail Peak Express opens seven fresh runs across 200 acres. Deer Valley's total is now 4,500 acres, and this is its 11th new lift since December 2024.
• Back home, Purgatory adds about 40 acres off its brand-new Colorado Couloir chair. Sun Valley's new glades on Baldy come to roughly 50 acres.

Why It Matters: More acres off more chairs means a powder day lasts longer (in theory). Crowds spread out, and the good stuff doesn't get tracked by 10 a.m. That's the real win here for anyone who skis the Wasatch on a Saturday.

❄️ Sugar Bowl is making snow at 60 degrees. Its new TechnoAlpin SnowFactory brings its own cold. Regular snow guns are at the mercy of the weather, and they only work when the air is cold and dry. This thing is basically a giant freezer in a shipping container. Water gets chilled to freezing inside a closed refrigeration system, and finished snow gets pumped out onto the hill. It's just water, no additives.

The catch is that it burns more power and makes less snow as the air warms up, so TechnoAlpin pitches it as a sidekick to regular snowmaking, not a replacement.

Business

📈 Snowboarders carried the winter

🏂 Snowboarders carried last winter. The newest numbers from Snowsports Industries America put snowboarding at 10.6 million riders for 2025-26, up about 9% in a single season. Total snowsports participation grew about 3% to nearly 32 million. All of that happened in a winter the West would rather forget.

• Skiing hasn't budged. Roughly 13.2 million people skied, and that number has barely moved in four winters. The high mark was 14.9 million, back in 2018-19.
• Age explains a lot! Under 25, it's practically a tie, 5.5 million skiers to 5.3 million snowboarders. At 55 and up, it's a blowout. Skiers lead 1.9 million to 0.3 million.
• There are now 2.2 million Hispanic snowboarders. Two seasons ago there were 1.8 million. Roughly a quarter of women on snowboards are Hispanic.
• Resorts felt it. U.S. ski areas logged roughly 52.6 million visits, about 9 million short of the season before. Colorado hadn't seen numbers this low since 1991-92, with 10.5 million visits, a 24% drop.

Why It Matters: Back in the '90s, snowboarders got treated like troublemakers and plenty of resorts wanted nothing to do with us. Now we're closing in on skiers, and under 25 it's basically a tie. As a snowboarder myself, I love seeing it. But I'm all for skiing and snowboarding. As long as you're out on the mountain having fun, that's all that matters. Now I just need Alta to let snowboarders in!

🔥 The STOKE VOTE

Biking

🚵 25 years of Rampage

🥇 Rampage week is finally here. The women ride today (currently being live streamed!) and the men go Saturday, October 10. For year 25, it's back on Rampage's very first venue.

• The OG site got taller. Red Bull bolted on fresh terrain up top, so the start gate now sits roughly 33% higher than in 2001-2004. No Rampage venue has ever been taller, at 678 vertical feet across 90 acres.
• Everyone drops from one start deck this year. Lower down, the women's and men's lines peel off to their own finish areas. In 2024 and 2025, the women built on a separate section.
• Robin Goomes is chasing a third straight women's title. Hayden Zablotny defends the men's crown he won last year as a rookie, after zeroing his first run.
• Both finals go live at 10 a.m. MT on the Red Bull Bike YouTube channel and Red Bull TV.

Why It Matters: Racing the OG dirt again is a love letter to the riders who did this on 40-pound bikes, back before digging a line was its own craft. Some of those old features are still in play. Fans get a quarter century of history and today's progression in the same run.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

Aspen Mountain was the last Colorado ski area to ban snowboarders. What year did it finally let them ride?

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Answer!

2001. Aspen Skiing Co. announced the change in January 2001, and riders got their first day on April 1. Keystone had already dropped its ban back in 1996.