👸🏼 Ski like a Girl

Good morning, Stoke Crew. The sun's been pretty not cool lately. If your trail plans don't start with a 5 in front of them, good luck out there! Stay STOKED (and hydrated) - Tyler

In today's report

• 😮 First human to finish the Double Seven
• ⛷️ A-Basin's ski patrol is now led entirely by women
• 🏆 Shiffrin, Vonn, and Gu take over awards season
• 🚲 Salida's rebuilt bike park
• 🎣 The Sacramento reopens to salmon anglers
• ❄️ 10 feet of snow just saved South America's winter

Skiing

👸🏼 Ski like a Girl

⛷️ A-Basin's ski patrol is now run entirely by women. Lizzy Schofield took over as patrol director on July 16, and no woman had ever held the job at A-Basin before. She joins assistant director Lindsay Wiebold, and since those two roles make up the entire patrol leadership team, it's the first time in the ski area's history that women hold both!

• The arc in one stat: when Schofield joined patrol in 2013, the crew of 30 included exactly two women. Now women run the whole program.
• She's a lifer. Schofield landed at A-Basin in 2010 making snow, moved to patrol three years later, went part-time in 2018 to raise her kids on the Front Range, then returned in early 2025 to supervise patrol full-time. "I feel really fortunate that I get to hold that title," she said.
• Wiebold has her own hardware: she was named Patroller of the Year at the 2022 Colorado Ski Country USA awards after working her way up from a patrol hire in 2018 to supervisor by 2021.
• The shift goes past two job titles. A decade ago the Basin had six or seven women working mountain operations; today that number has more than doubled to around 15.

Why It Matters: Schofield didn't break a barrier so much as outwork it. Fifteen years of snowmaking shifts, patrol seasons, and supervisor duty made her the obvious hire, and the Basin just did the obvious thing. The first woman in the job also happens to be the best person for it. That's not a milestone the mountain engineered. It's just what happens when the right hire finally gets made.

🏆 Skiing's women owned awards season this week. Fresh off Milano Cortina, Mikaela Shiffrin, Lindsey Vonn, and Eileen Gu all walked the carpet at the July 15 ESPYs in New York. The next night, five skiers were honored at the gala for TIME's first-ever list of the 100 most influential people in sports.

• Shiffrin was one of four finalists for Best Athlete in women's sports, sharing the category with hockey's Hilary Knight, golf's Nelly Korda, and the WNBA's A'ja Wilson. Wilson took the trophy, but a ski racer standing in that company at all is good for the sport.
• The TIME list stacked up: Shiffrin, Gu, and Masters all made the Icons category next to LeBron James and Lionel Messi. Vonn landed in Innovators (alongside Alex Honnold) for coming back at 41 on a partially replaced knee. Jessie Diggins made Leaders after a retirement season that closed with her fourth Crystal Globe, plus years of advocacy on eating disorders and her climate work through Protect Our Winters.

Why It Matters: Attention is currency. Sponsors, media deals, and the budgets that fund development programs all follow the athletes who stay visible between Olympics. Right now that visibility belongs entirely to the women, and the sport's business side should be taking notes.

Today's Stoke Story

🌊 Swim the oceans, climb the summits

😮 Rob Lea just did something no human has ever done! On June 30, the 45-year-old from Park City (a realtor by day, an endurance athlete the rest of the time) swam the Tsugaru Strait between Japan's Honshu and Hokkaido islands in 11 hours, 44 minutes, closing out the Oceans Seven. Since he'd already knocked out the Seven Summits, the swim made him the first person to complete both challenges, a combo he calls the Double Seven.

• Quick decoder: The Seven Summits = climbing the highest peak on each continent. Oceans Seven = swimming the seven famous channels.
• The math on why nobody had done this: only 44 people have ever finished the Oceans Seven, and a few hundred have done the Seven Summits. Until June 30, the overlap between elite channel swimmers and big-mountain climbers was exactly zero.
• The swim rules are brutal: nonstop, no wetsuit, just a Speedo, cap, and goggles. Lea packed on around 20 pounds ahead of each channel so the cold wouldn't shut his body down.
• The whole project spanned 17 years.

Why It Matters: Lea did this at 45, around a full-time real estate job, with a rebuilt ankle and a scoped knee in the rearview. No sponsor machine, no pro contract. Just a guy from Park City who kept signing up for the next one. That's the version of big adventure most of us can actually see ourselves in.

Mountain Breifing

⛰️ This week's quick hits

🚲 Salida's bike park got a full rebuild, and the ribbon cutting is July 31 at 10 a.m. at the base of S Mountain. Salida Mountain Trails hired Santa Fe's Rocket Ramps to redo the old pilot park with prefab features, stepped-up jump lines, and drops built for beginner and intermediate progression. Foundation grants and local donations covered the build, which came in under its $100,000 estimate, and it's the first phase of a roughly $2 million community bike park vision. The park is already open and free to ride!

Why It Matters: This is the small-town model working: a trail nonprofit raises the money, hires pros, and hands the community a free public facility. The kids learning takeoffs there this summer are the ones dreaming about ridng slopestyle one day!

🎣 The Sacramento reopened to salmon anglers this week. Recreational Chinook fishing returned after a three-year closure brought on by drought-crushed returns, with the season running from July 16 to mid-December depending on the stretch and a two-fish daily limit. The forecast behind the decision: 392,349 adult Chinook expected back this fall, more than double last year, helped along by habitat restoration near Redding, ramped-up hatcheries, and the Klamath dam removals. Commercial boats got back on the ocean this spring too, their first season since 2022.

Why It Matters: Fishery closures usually feel like managed decline. This one worked: three hard years plus real restoration produced a run strong enough to fish again. That's a rare, documented win for conservation!

❄️ South America's winter just got saved. After weeks of bare slopes and snowmaking, an atmospheric river hit central Chile on July 14 and buried the Andes: Portillo picked up over 10 feet, in 72 hours! Roads to Portillo and the resorts above Santiago are closed, Portillo closed up shop to ride it out, and Argentina is mostly missing the moisture on the far side of the crest.

Why It Matters: Three weeks ago Chilean ski towns were staring down a lost season. One storm cycle flipped an entire winter economy, and once patrol digs out, the deepest lift-served skiing on earth will be south of the equator.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

What year did Arapahoe Basin open for its first ski season?

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Answer!

1946, with one rope tow and $1.25 lift tickets.