🏂 Winter is here :)

Good morning, Stoke Crew. Short and sweet today. I don't create the news, I just follow it, lol. As always, thanks for reading. We've grown a lot over the last few months, and your support means the world to me!

If you ever have ideas, tips, or feedback on how this newsletter could be better, reply to this email. I love hearing from you all! Or if you just wanna check in and ask how I'm doing, that'd be cool too ;) Here's the report!

Stay STOKED - Tyler

In today's report

• 🚠 A-Basin is open, Keystone Friday
• 🏂 World Cup slopestyle hits Breck
• ⛷️ Birds of Prey guns go automatic
• 🏔️ First descent of a Nepal face

Skiing

🎿 A-Basin gets the first chair :)

🚠 Colorado ski season is open. A-Basin started its 80th winter yesterday, with Black Mountain Express hauling skiers up to High Noon. Its the first Colorado resort open this season, and it's the first in North America. Keystone opened first in Colorado last season, on Oct. 25. This year it opens on Friday, Oct. 30.

• Keystone opens 9 to 4 with a hike-to park and 2-plus miles of man made groomers off the River Run Gondola.
• On the Vail Resorts side, Breck is set for Nov. 6 and Vail for Nov. 13. Crested Butte and Beaver Creek both target Nov. 25.
• Copper shares Breck's Nov. 6 date, and Eldora goes Nov. 13. Steamboat follows Nov. 21. Snowmass and Aspen Mountain plan on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 26, with Telluride targeting the same day.
• Elsewhere in the West, Whistler, Grand Targhee, Solitude, Alta, and Park City all point at Nov. 20. Big Sky comes next on Nov. 25, then Snowbasin, Jackson Hole, and Snowbird on Nov. 27.

Why It Matters: If you hold an Ikon or Ikon Base pass, A-Basin is unlimited, so your season starts now. Few things beat the first chair of the year, even if it's one blue run! Winter is finally here, yeeew!

🏂 World Cup slopestyle comes to Breckenridge Dec. 10-13 at the Toyota U.S. Grand Prix. It's the first World Cup stop on U.S. snow this winter for park skiers and riders.

• Breck hadn't hosted a Grand Prix in 12 years. U.S. Ski & Snowboard president and CEO Sophie Goldschmidt put it simply: "Twelve years is a long time to be away."
• Each discipline qualifies two days before its final. Skiers go for the win Saturday, and snowboarders get Sunday.
• Breck opened its lifts to snowboarders in 1984, ahead of every other major Colorado resort.
• The only other park and pipe World Cup Breck has hosted was a halfpipe contest in 1995.
• Copper's halfpipe World Cup follows Dec. 17-20, and the Grand Prix wraps up in Aspen Feb. 25-28.

Why It Matters: Breck, Copper, and Aspen are all Grand Prix stops this winter. That's three World Cup park and pipe weekends in Colorado. The best freestyle skiers and riders in the world are spending a good chunk of their season in our backyard!

⛷️ Sixteen self-starting snow guns now cover the bottom third of the Birds of Prey course at Beaver Creek. That's the same section of the hill that came up short on snow last December.

• Six SMI Super Puma fan guns join 10 SMI Grizzly stick guns.
• No one has to set these guns up by hand. Each one kicks on by itself when the conditions are right, and crews can keep tabs on all 16 remotely.
• Last December's race showed the stakes. Only one of the two scheduled downhills ran, on a course cut short of snow.
• No Birds of Prey has ever packed in as many races as this one. Seven World Cup events run Dec. 3-13. Men race first, Dec. 3-6, and women follow the next weekend!

Why It Matters: Last December's downhill stopped above the usual finish and skipped the Red Tail jump entirely. Marco Odermatt's winning run came in about 8 to 10 seconds shorter than a full one. Sixteen guns that fire up the moment it's cold enough are Beaver Creek's insurance against a repeat.

🔥 The STOKE VOTE

Ski Mountaineering

🏂 Strapped in at 22,850 feet.

🗻 Three Americans dropped into an unskied face in Nepal. On Oct. 20, the crew rode the south face of Dorje Lhakpa, a line nobody had ever touched. The peak tops out at 6,966 meters (about 22,850 feet) in the Langtang region. Nick Russell strapped in on a snowboard while Adam Fabrikant and Billy Haas went down on skis.

• Getting up was a grind. From their 6,000-meter high camp, the summit took roughly 7.5 hours of tool-and-crampon work. The team pegs most of the face at 45 to 50 degrees.
• Coming down took a fraction of that, and nobody touched a rope. Russell said the snow was "just edgeable enough to hold an edge." He called it "by far the heaviest line I've ever ridden."

Why It Matters: Anyone who's side-slipped an icy chute on a snowboard knows the feeling of trusting one edge. Now picture that near 23,000 feet on 50-degree hardpack, this is some badass Ski Mountaineering! Check out photos of the mission here!

📚 Trailhead Trivia

Beaver Creek's Birds of Prey downhill was designed by a Swiss Olympic downhill champion. Who?

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Answer!

Bernhard Russi. He won Olympic gold and silver in the downhill and nine World Cup downhills in the '70s, then became one of the go-to downhill course designers in the world.

Birds of Prey got built in one summer, 1997, for the 1999 World Championships. His take on laying it out: "I don't want to change the mountain. But I want to listen to the mountain."