🏂 X Games goes full league mode

Good morning, Stoke Crew. The aspens are changing and suddenly every person in Colorado is a photographer. No judgment! Here's the report. Stay STOKED - Tyler

In today's report

• 🏂 X Games drafts a winter league
• ❄️ Historic El Niño odds hit 75%
• 🚠 Keystone wants first chair again
• 🚵 Rampage goes back to OG dirt
• 🌡️ The hottest Colorado summer ever
• 💧 The Grand Canyon runs low

Skiing

🗓️ Winter 26-27 takes shape

🏂 Winter X Games is becoming a traveling league. The debut season's calendar dropped Monday. Buttermilk in Aspen opens things January 29-31, Calgary takes the middle leg February 19-21, and Ruka, Finland, hosts the championship April 9-11.

X Games is still X Games, same contests, same individual medals. The MoonPay X Games League (XGL for short) is the new points race stacked on top. Every athlete now represents a regional club, and every result banks points toward a season title that gets decided in Finland. The pitch from CEO Jeremy Bloom is that results now carry "meaning beyond the individual athlete and a single weekend."

• The four clubs (XC Park City, XC Whistler, XC New York, XC Golden State) build their rosters live at the September 16 draft at Cosm in Los Angeles. Each club drafts five women and five men, 40 names total out of 180-plus eligibles. That list includes the 4 founding athletes! Eileen Gu, Alex Hall, Scotty James, and Mark McMorris.
• Calgary brings a genuine first. X Games has never held a competition in Canada, and the February stop at WinSport's Canada Olympic Park changes that.

Why It Matters: For 30 years X Games lived and died inside one weekend in Aspen. Now there are three stops, a draft, and a team title on the line. That's more eyes on the sport, more chances to compete, and more ways for athletes to get paid. Turning an individual sport into a team race is a new playbook for action sports, and I'm pretty stoked to watch it play out!

❄️ El Niño's shot at history keeps growing. NOAA's September update puts 75% odds on the event finishing the fall stronger than anything measured since 1950, up from 69% a month earlier, with better than 90% odds of at least a very strong El Niño. For ski country, the long-range models sketch a mild, patient start, a persistent Southwest storm track, and the best Rockies window landing in February and March. The next update drops October 8.

The honest read: The pattern favors the southern mountains and the back half of winter, and Colorado's link between big El Niños and big snowpack is statistically loose. Ski the winter you get.

🚠 The first chairs of winter have dates.

• Keystone again wants first in North America and will open as early in October as snowmaking allows
• Breckenridge and Copper on November 6
• Vail follows on the 11/13
• Steamboat on the 11/21
• Thanksgiving brings the wave: Beaver Creek and Crested Butte the day before, then Aspen Mountain, Snowmass, and Telluride on the holiday itself.
• A-Basin, Loveland, and Wolf Creek are still quiet.

Every date is a target until the snow guns say otherwise.

Why It Matters: Opening day is never really about the good skiing, it's the sport coming back to life after hibernating all summer (and all last winter)

🔥 The STOKE VOTE

Biking

🏜️ Rampage goes back to the beginning

🚵 Rampage is going home. Red Bull confirmed the 25th-anniversary event will run on the first-ever Rampage venue outside Virgin, Utah, the same ground used for the event's first four years, 2001 through 2004. The women ride October 8, the men October 10.

What made the OG site the OG site is what wasn't there. In those early years riders got no built features at all, just raw desert ridgelines and whatever line they could read from the top. The event moved on after 2004 to venues where crews could shape the hillside, and the riding grew into the flip-everything spectacle we know today.

• The old zone got an upgrade for the reunion. The start gate moved uphill, roughly a third above where riders dropped in two decades ago, stretching the run to 678 feet of descent across some 90 acres, the tallest venue in event history.
• The women's field runs 12 deep, led by Robin Goomes.
• Both broadcasts stream free on Red Bull TV 10/8-10/10!

Why It Matters: Venues are characters in freeride, and this one is the origin story. The first riders treated these ridgelines as a survival test. Running 2026 tricks down the exact terrain that birthed the sport is going to be a cool way to see how far the sport has advanced!

Environment

❌ Not STOKED, but important

💧 The Grand Canyon is getting less water than it has in decades, and it shows. July inflows came in at 12% of normal, Powell and Mead together hold less than at any point since the 1950s, and a June federal study says Powell could slip below its hydropower threshold by January 2027.

Downstream, the river is warming toward 60 degrees, bad news for the trout fishery and rafting outfitters are running smaller boats through rapids the big rigs used to muscle,bookings have reportedly dropped about 25%.

🌡️ Colorado's summer broke the record books. The statewide June-August average hit 69.4 degrees, the hottest since records began in 1895 and 0.7 degrees past the old 2012 mark. It capped 15 straight months of above-average warmth, a stretch that came with record-low rivers, a destructive fire season, and mountain towns sweating through repeated heat waves.

The bigger picture matched. The Lower 48 logged its warmest summer in 132 years, and the planet had its hottest August ever measured.

Why It Matters: Read these two together. Record heat up high, a shrinking river down low, and everything we love sits in between. The snow that becomes our winters, the runoff that keeps rivers running all summer, the mountain towns and economies built on both. It's a fragile system, and watching it strain is hard.

Caring about climate is the entry fee. Action is what counts, whether that's supporting groups like Protect Our Winters or just refusing to take another powder day for granted.

What else is going on

• Megan Eckert ran 636 miles in six days in Hungary, resetting the women's world record and the American men's six-day best.
• Amity Martin established Time is Dancing, a 1,000-foot 5.14a and the hardest route in Wyoming's Wind River Range.
• Colorado Parks and Wildlife killed three yearling wolves in one week for preying on livestock, four total since June.
• Squamish Search and Rescue flew a rope by drone to a climber stuck 250 feet up Stawamus Chief at night.

📚 Trailhead Trivia

Which ski area holds the official U.S. record for most snowfall in a single season, and how much fell?

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Answer!

Mount Baker Ski Area, Washington, with 1,140 inches (95 feet) over the 1998-99 season.