🏔️ Skis, oars, and a $40 billion backlog

Good morning, Stoke Crew. If your Strava looks empty right now, this is your sign. Get out there. The kudos aren't gonna earn themselves!

Bunch of cool things happening in the outdoor world! Hope you enjoy! Stay STOKED - Tyler :)

In today's report

• 🏔️ Skiing Nanga Parbat top to bottom, no oxygen
• 🚣 A river guide just rowed to Hawaii
• 💰 Nederland's Eldora bills keep adding up
• 🚠 Deer Valley grows to 4,500 acres
• 🏃 Hardrock week
• 🏛️ Congress moves to revive the public lands repair fund

Today's Stoke Stories

🥇 Two firsts for the history books

🏔️ Andrzej Bargiel just closed out one of the boldest projects in ski mountaineering. On June 30 the Polish skier topped out on 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, took a 45-minute breather, then skied one continuous run down the Diamir Face to where the snow ran out. It's the mountain's first full ski descent, and he did the whole thing without bottled oxygen. A wall of seracs high on the face had shut down every ski attempt before this one; Bargiel picked his way through it on a traverse and never unclipped.

• The stats are absurd. He left base camp at 6 a.m. on June 28, slept at Camps II and III on the way up, and skied over 12,000 vertical feet back down the Messner Route.
• The full push, base camp to summit to snowline, took two days, nine hours, including about two hours on skis above 7,900 meters in the death zone.
• This was the last piece. Bargiel, 38, has now summited and skied every one of Pakistan's five 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen: Broad Peak, K2, both Gasherbrums, and now Nanga Parbat. That's on top of last year's oxygen-free ski descent of Everest, also a first.

Why It Matters: Every time it seems like the big firsts are gone, someone proves the ceiling was imaginary. Will people keep breaking records and doing things we think are impossible? That's a question I often ask myself.

🚣 A Grand Canyon river guide just became the fastest human to row from California to Hawaii. Kelsey Pfendler landed in Honolulu on July 3 after 43 days, 17 hours, and 55 minutes alone at sea, having left Monterey on May 21 in a 24-foot boat. She's the first American woman to make the 2,400-mile crossing solo, the youngest woman to do it, and she took roughly nine days off an overall record that had stood since 2014. Pending ratification, she now owns the crossing outright.

Mountain Briefing

⛰️ This week in the mountains

💰 Nederland's Eldora tab keeps climbing and the deal still isn't done. The bills keep adding up for the town of roughly 1,500 people as it works to buy Eldora Mountain Resort from Powdr for $120 million. The contract set an April 30 closing; that deadline has gone and passed.

• The money side runs through revenue bonds, capped at $225 million with interest no higher than 9%, underwritten by RBC and Bank of America. Everything above the purchase price covers improvements, reserves, and transaction costs.
• The bonds get repaid only from resort revenue through the town's Mountain Recreation Enterprise, not property taxes or the general fund.
• The town has hired a small army of outside firms, including one law firm that charges up to $800 an hour. The tab so far includes $134,000 to a resort planning firm, at least $260,000 to another law firm, and $174,000 owed to Powdr itself, partly tied to Nederland having to negotiate its own Ikon Pass deal with Alterra.
• Big items remain: a Forest Service special-use permit, that Alterra agreement, and the bond sale itself. Once it closes, Eldora's roughly 700 employees move onto the town's payroll while Powdr hangs around in a support role for two years.

Why It Matters: No town this small has tried to buy and run a ski area of this scale, and the whole experiment rides on whether resort revenue alone can carry the debt. If it works, Nederland writes the playbook for community-owned skiing. If it doesn't, the bondholders own the lesson.

🚠 Deer Valley isn't done growing. The Utah resort announced Hail Peak Express will spin for the 2026-27 season, opening 200 new acres and seven runs on the resort's eastern edge and pushing total terrain to 4,500 skiable acres. That makes it the sixth-biggest ski area in the country, and it gives skiers their first lift straight out of the East Village parking lot.

• The lift itself is a Doppelmayr high-speed quad with 86 chairs moving 2,400 skiers an hour up 1,130 vertical feet.
• The bigger picture is wild. Deer Valley has hung 11 new lifts since December 2024 and more than doubled in size, with snowmaking coverage growing to 932 acres next season.

Why It Matters: Bigger isn't automatically better for skiers. More acreage spreads crowds, but an entire new base village comes with it, and none of this makes a lift ticket cheaper. Worth watching whether the skiing improves as fast as the acreage grows.

🏃 The Hardrock 100 starts Friday at 6 a.m. in Silverton: 147 runners, 102 miles through the San Juans, 33,000 feet of climbing. Courtney Dauwalter returns after a year away chasing a fourth win, while 50-year-old Ludovic Pommeret goes for three straight on the course where he holds the 21:33 overall record. The asterisk is smoke: the Gold Mountain Fire is burning outside Ouray, and organizers are monitoring conditions, though the course itself is currently clear.

Recreation

🛠️ A $40 billion to-do list

🏛️ Congress is moving to refill the fund that pays for overdue repairs on public lands, everything from trailheads to campground water systems. The Legacy Restoration Fund, which expired last October, cleared committees in both chambers unanimously in June. The revived fund would be worth about $9.5 billion over five years, paid for with revenue from energy development on public lands, chipping away at a repair backlog that has blown past $40 billion across the Park Service, Forest Service, BLM, and Fish and Wildlife.

• Colorado has real skin in this. The state's backlog at BLM, park, and wildlife refuge sites alone tops $864 million. The fund's first run put over $133 million into Interior-managed projects here and another $114.5 million into Forest Service work, with 48 of those projects already finished.
• The coalition behind it is genuinely odd: nearly 250 co-sponsors from both parties, plus oil and gas trade groups, hunting and fishing organizations, outdoor recreation businesses, and conservation nonprofits all pulling the same direction.
• Backers hoped for a signature before July 4 and the country's 250th birthday. The Senate adjourned for the holiday first, so it slips to later this summer.

Why It Matters: Every crumbling trailhead, closed campground loop, and failing water system you've hit in the last few years lives on that $40 billion list. This is the funding behind keeping our public lands in good shape, so everyone can keep enjoying them.

What else is going on

• Utah brothers transformed 400-acre Moose Springs Ranch into a backcountry playground with hand-cut ski runs, cliff and pillow lines, and wood-built road gaps.
• Black bear crossed Washington’s I-90 Snoqualmie Pass wildlife overpass June 28, marking first documented bear use since monitoring began 2018 among 9,390 total wildlife crossings.
• Cielo Vista Ranch's 8-foot fence threatens 30 species including Canada lynx, silverspot butterfly, elk and eagles, with joint wildlife study recommending modifications to reduce impact on migration.
• Great Redwood Trail secured first $12.4 million in Prop 4 climate bond funding for eight priority segments across Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties toward eventual 320-mile SF-to-Humboldt Bay corridor.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

How many mountains on Earth rise above 8,000 meters? (26,247 feet)

🔥 The STOKE VOTE

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