~Kyle

I spent a week in Norway this past summer with a very loose plan. Fly into Ålesund, rent a car, and do a big loop within a few hours of the airport. Norway is…massive, so it’s easy to get caught in the trap of driving an insane amount of hours and trying to see the whole country (you won’t).

Here are a few highlight and photos from along the way.

Åndalsnes

Åndalsnes sits at the head of the Romsdalsfjord, about an hour and 45 minutes from Ålesund, and it was our base for a few days. One day I hunted down a trail in nearby Mandalen using AllTrails/Strava heatmaps (a few locals seemed surprised to see us up there) and we also got took a nice drive to Trollstigen for sunset, which in this part of Norway means ~11:30 pm in July.

Romsdalseggen

We did Romsdalseggen ridge, the “classic” in the area, on a day of mixed weather that left us feeling like the only folks up there. There are some logistics involved: you need to reserve and catch a bus to the start, and then hike the ridge back to the cable car station (or all the way down to town, as we did). It’s not overly technical, but it is definitely exposed and consequential in a few spots, especially in turbulent weather (a trail runner tragically lost her life on the route last month).

The last bit down to town is a local runners test piece (going up), covering 2300 ft in just 1.2 miles. Kilian Jornet holds the segment record (he also lives nearby).

Geiranger

From Åndalsnes we headed south through Geiranger. It’s a UNESCO Heritage site, and it’s probably on every top 10 list of “things to see in Norway.” I think it might be a bit overrated.

Before the pitchforks come out, yes, it’s beautiful. But so is most of the country, and I didn’t find it immeasurably more dramatic than the other fjords we saw. What it does have is a giant cruise ship parked at the end of the fjord and a town built around shore excursions (215 residents, and more than 300k cruise passengers a year). We charged the car, grabbed a coffee, and kept moving.

Skåla

Like most trails in Norway, Skåla is a relatively short distance with a lot of elevation (~4.5 miles one-way and 6k gain). Our hike started with sun, turned to rain, and then to snow as we made the final approach to the summit in a full whiteout. Classic first week of July in Norway. Fun fact, this is one of 300 trails in Norway that feature stone steps built by Stibyggjaren, a trail-building company that employs Sherpas from Nepal. Can confirm, pretty amazing trail work.

The hut at the top, Skålatårnet, is part of the incredible DNT system, and as a “self-service” hut, it had a stocked pantry that you can use and pay for through the DNT app. After an evening spent drinking tea and watching the sky for glimpses of the massive Jostedalsbreen glacier to the south, we did get a bit of clearer weather and calmer skies for the hike out in the morning.

The Sunnmøre Alps

We looped back toward Ålesund through the Sunnmøre Alps, which turned out to be a highlight of the trip. We spent a night in a cozy off-grid cabin near Vartdal, and although the cabin was socked in the clouds I got in a really lovely trail run on the ridge above the valley in the afternoon. There is so much to see and run and scramble in this zone. Gotta come back.

We took the ferry over to Urke to hike Saksa, which was a 10/10 day. The sun was out, the hike was amazing, and the views from the top were unbelievable. This was our one day of warmth and spectacular sunshine and wow, what a day for it. Our hike was followed by a deserved beer at a bar in Urke right on the fjord. Immaculate vibes.

We spent last night in Sæbø and spent some time in swapping between the sauna and dips in the fjord before treating ourself to dinner. Our last day was a drive back to Ålesund and a lazy afternoon in town before our flight.

Logistics

Lodging: We booked close to half of our accommodations the day of, all around $130/night on a combination of Airbnb and Booking. That won’t work out for everyone, but it did for us 🤷‍♂️. Just searching around, lodging can be expensive, but it was not nearly as expensive as I expected, especially if you’re not tied to the most popular areas. There are a lot of great tiny homes/cabins/campgrounds all over the place.

Eating: We cooked every night but one. Eating out is on par with Swiss prices but the grocery store is much more reasonable (kjøttboller ❤️).

Driving: The electric car was easy (and the cheapest option), although charging adds a wrinkle to daily logistics. I think a campervan and a few weeks (or months) is probably the best way to see Norway, but this was great for a week. Ferries were easy. And the tunnels 🤯.

Weather: I mean, it’s Norway. Expect variable weather. You could get a stretch of beautiful summer days or never see the sun. Come prepared for anything and embrace it.

People are asking LLMs about things they never would have considered just a year ago, whether it’s where to hike this weekend or how to train for a marathon. It’s not always a great idea, but I was looking for a bit of structure going into a race, and decided to use myself as an experiment.

I’m not making a case for AI as a replacement for a real coach. But it was an interesting way to dig into what works and what doesn’t (at least right now).

There are a lot of apps doing this

There’s a whole category of training software that is marketed as AI-first, and vibe-coding has only exploded the segment. TrainAsONE rewrites your plan whenever you miss a run. Athletica sells its engine to human coaches so they can manage more athletes. Eliud Kipchoge has his own AI coaching startup. HumanGo gives you an AI coach named Hugo. Then there’s the long tail: Coach Leo, Running Genie, RunWatch, and free templates that do much the same thing without a line of code.

Irrespective of scale or funding, these apps usually combine the same two inputs: your activity history (often from Strava) and an LLM. It raises an obvious question of what most of these are actually selling. The training logic isn’t proprietary; most of it is available in research papers and widely shared training philosophies (which is why they all advertise themselves as “science backed”). They point an LLM at training plan data, then at your data, and generate a plan. Depending on the depth/attention to detail, there are generally a few more checks/loops, but yeah, that’s basically it.

The differences lie mostly in the design and whatever trust a brand can build before the next app shows up…which is a pretty thin moat.

How I built my version

In late December 2025 I built a Strava-connected coaching bot. It was a standalone app, connected to a CSV download of my recent Strava data. I gave it a pretty detailed set of context about me: current mileage, where I live (no access to good vert in London), and currently no race in mind. When I added a couple of potential target races for the spring or summer (Mischabel 60k being one of them) it basically told me that I was woefully underprepared for a mountain race given my current mileage and lack of elevation training.

I shelved it and kept running without much of a plan through the spring. Then in June, the Strava Claude MCP launched. I got everything hooked up to Claude and had a conversation with it about my data and my goals. It pulled a full history of my Strava activities and the race details, and came back with a read of my fitness and a 12-week plan.

The implementation was intentionally light. I used the “scheduled tasks” feature and it pulled my recent activities directly from Strava every Sunday evening rather than me needing to dump in a CSV. It compared my last 7 days of Strava data with the previous week’s plan, benchmarked it against the original plan, took into account any additional information I provided throughout the week, and then generated an adjusted plan for next 7 days.

What went fine

The plans themselves were solid, if not revolutionary, with a sensible mix of easy and hard days, short and long runs, and treadmill incline work to make up for London’s lack of hills. It’s not rocket science. It also did a pretty good job of adapting, because every Sunday it was grading what I actually did against the weekly plan. In late July it cut targets for a “peak” week once it was clear I wasn’t going to hit them. At one point it made up a new metric, “climb density,” to more succinctly explain that I consistently wasn’t getting enough elevation (hey, training for a mountain race is tough in London).

In the middle of the block, I added more detailed data on the course and previous finishers (turns out I had been using a previous year’s route). One of the climbs is over 6k ft, and Claude revisited weeks of its own advice because it wanted me to be better prepared for long stretches of continuous climbing.

It got more useful the more I told it. I had a knee tweak in August, and it adjusted the plan once I told it about the issue. I added context about vacations, and it changed plans when I was clear that I was not going to hit goals on a brutally hot travel week to Colorado for a wedding.

Looking back at the full scope of the conversation, there are also plenty of random things, like me in a hotel room in Grächen the night before the race asking whether a pain au chocolat or a Butterweggli was better for a race morning breakfast.

What Claude couldn’t see

While things mostly went pretty well, it did break down in a few places. Not in hallucinated facts or “bad” training recommendations, but usually failures of context, which is slightly more annoying, because then it’s technically “my” fault.

One example: on June 28th I ran 16 miles in the New Forest while working on my gel fueling (this was my first time racing since the high carb craze took off), and my stomach wasn’t adjusted to eating gels for three hours. I mentioned my stomach issues in the Strava activity and Claude picked that up in the next check. It turned that issue into a whole fueling protocol. That’s fine, but that “issue” remained a staple of suggestions for weeks and weeks because it got added to the root prompt.

I sorted out my stomach issues after a few runs, but for whatever reason I never explicitly told Claude that it was “solved.” A coach would have asked how my gut was doing, learned it was fine, and dropped it. Claude had no way of finding that out unless I told it, and I kept forgetting to.

Mid-week, it would sometimes say it had updated the plan without actually changing anything, because my original instructions only told it to re-evaluate the full plan on Sundays. Treadmill power hiking doesn’t come with elevation in Strava, so unless I explicitly added it, those workouts weren’t accurately accounted for in plan updates.

A 2024 study asked coaches to rate a selection of ChatGPT training plans, with the only difference being how much information about the runner the LLM initially received. The vaguer prompt scored a 2/5, and the more detailed one (only a few sentences more) a 4/5. Unfortunately, there was no coach-written plan in the set to compare against. That means the research can’t say that AI plans are worse than a human’s, only that they’re likely to get better the more information you provide.

That tracks with what my experience was like. I’ve spent many years designing/building software, and a good chunk of the last few working with LLMs (on things like automating construction permitting). I know both what a reasonable training build looks like, and understand the limits of prompts and context. A lot of what went right was the result of me asking the right questions and providing the right info.

Someone newer to running and with less LLM experience might have a different result. An LLM will confidently give you a plan whether it’s good or bad; if you don’t know how or when to push back, you’re kinda stuck. That doesn’t make the whole thing pointless, but it is a significant snag in the process.

The case for humans

Not everyone will be happy I’m even writing about this. The outdoor industry’s relationship with AI is…fraught, at best. There will be people who unsubscribe as soon as they see the title. But I’m not here advocating for everyone to switch to an “AI coach.”

I think we can agree that the ideal coach is one who knows your history, your job, your sleep habits, and your previous injuries, and is able to adjust accordingly. These people exist and are worth every dollar.

When people share why coaching worked for them, it’s almost never the plan they point to. It’s the accountability and the relationship that a coach provides. Claude didn’t actually care whether I ran or hit my goals each week (although it did get a bit testy a few times), or even how my race went. I didn’t have money invested in the relationship, and I wasn’t worried about “disappointing” Claude.

But a great coach can be hard to come by. There’s a wide range of quality in the industry, and sometimes what you’re actually buying is a generic template with your name on it, slightly adjusted in a spreadsheet once a week. Which is, more or less, what Claude was doing. I wouldn’t be surprised if some influencer-type coaches are leaning heavily on AI behind the scenes. There’s a whole separate conversation about whether it matters if a coach uses AI, especially if the most important things they provide are actually the less reproducible aspects of the relationship.

After all, a lot of endurance training is pretty formulaic. Build volume, don’t build it too fast, keep easy days easy, adjust things up or down X% every week based on how you’re feeling. Yes, that’s a simplification. But I’ve also had conversations with a few coaches who acknowledge that some of the actual plans…aren’t really that complicated.

The hard reality is that a human coach isn’t cheap. I was never going to spend a few hundred dollars a month on a coach. I’m not serious enough to invest deeply in training. I’ve been faking my way through road, trail, and ultras since I got dropped from the UC San Diego cross country team because of injury 15 years ago (I played four years of ultimate frisbee instead).

What I needed was structure with a bit of customization, and that’s what Claude provided. And I suspect that’s all a lot of people really need.

Where that leaves me

A week out from the race, Claude built me a pacing sheet with A, B and C targets. The B target was 10:18. I ran 10:39. For a first go at that distance and that much climbing, I think that was a pretty decent estimate. It’s also a good example of the gaps in a nutshell; it couldn’t really model the effect of a more technical course and how the downhill would hit my fit (but not super downhill fit) legs.

I don’t know what any of this proves about AI training. There’s a whole boatload of caveats here, from my decent baseline fitness to my experience with LLMs. It might only prove that having a plan slightly beats not having one…for some people. Ironically, I’m currently struggling with a knee issue, not because an AI pushed me to overtrain, but because I banged my knee playing volleyball and apparently I’m at the age where that can take me out for a while.

If I’m being honest, there’s a good chance I’ll fire up Claude if I have a race to train for next year.

It was below freezing this morning, which has me starting to think ahead about winter, skiing, travels, and more. Let me know if there’s anything on your mind when it comes to stories or otherwise. Thanks for reading!

~Kyle

Instagram’s algorithm served me a suggested account the other day that tickled all the wrong parts of my lizard brain. Brooke Wilder seems like a run-of-the-mill gear influencer. She’s posting photos of her tent at sunset, walking on a tree-lined trail wearing a new backpack, or “YouTube” posed on reels promoting her latest gear review. Her latest posts highlight products like the Outdoor Research Echo hoodie, the Osprey Aether 65, and the BioLite Range 500.

But Brooke has never worn that headlamp. Or the backpack, or the hoodie. In fact, Brooke has never worn anything. She’s a homunculus cobbled together with code, an AI-generated persona, and the “byline” of a new “gear review” website (I apologize in advance for the amount of gratuitous quotations) that is itself stitched together by LLMs remixing the work of real people on other gear sites.

I’m not going to link to the site here, because the last thing I want to give it is a backlink. But it doesn’t look like junk. It looks reasonably comprehensive: lots of text, spec tables, scores, pros and cons, etc. It’s not polished, and it does look like a site generated by an LLM (if you know those obvious design cues), but if you don’t spend your days around LLM output, I can easily see the average person on the internet not noticing anything odd.

To be fair, they’re not completely hiding it. The about page on their website makes a pitch for why their “named editorial persona” and their “research” process is better that what’s currently out there. No free samples, no sponsored placements, and every claim traceable to a spec sheet, a lab test or owner review. On the other hand, their Instagram promises “honest reviews, campfire vibes & trail-tested gear,” which at the very least feels like a strong misdirection (naturally, there’s no AI disclosure).

Every gear review on the site runs through a nearly identical template and hits the same beats. If you’ve worked around LLMs enough, you’ll see a litany of AI writing tells. Walls of text, sentences that sound like they’re saying something profound and yet say nothing, formulaic phrasing, odd juxtapositions, and words strung together with a distinctly inhuman cadence. I would be surprised if a human had touched a single sentence on this site.

In one tent review alone: “Here’s the sum that made me sit up.” “Here’s the sum that matters.” “Here’s the sum I keep coming back to.” “Here’s the fine-print moment.” Elsewhere it’s things like “Those two facts are the same fact” and “A lightweight stove is the smallest piece of big decisions.” The review of the Echo hoodie says, “The brief says durability is mixed but doesn’t give a count,” whatever that means.

For a site that swears off “invented field anecdotes,” the “writer” sure does a lot of “thinking.”

And whether you’re pro, anti, or please-stop-talking-about-it on AI, this feels like a rather egregious application of the technology. This goes beyond “LLMs are trained on the work of real humans” to “we scraped a bunch of sites with real humans, that employ real writers to test gear out in the real world, and we’re hoping to steal an affiliate link from them.” The site proudly mentions data and reviews from places like CleverHiker, SectionHiker, Switchback Travel, GearJunkie and OutdoorGearLab, but never once links to the source.

Read more

Covering ~40 miles and ~12,000 ft of elevation gain, the 60k is pretty stout. The race starts with a short climb above town before dropping 3,000 ft to the valley floor in under 2 miles, a pretty rough way to start the day. From there, there’s a steep 4,000 ft climb followed by another extended grind up the valley to Almagelleralp. After a technical downhill and a crossover to Saas-Fee on the other side of the valley, the route returns to Grächen on the Balfrin Höhenweg, a rocky up-and-down trail (but mostly up) for the last 20k.

By all accounts, it went about as well as it could have, especially living and training in London. I hit the first aid station 29th overall and finished 17th in 10:39. I felt good the whole time and closed strong over the last 20k. I haven’t raced in close to three years, was coming off a knee injury, and UTMR is not an easy course, so I was pretty happy with that. With a bit more time in the mountains I think I could have handled the downhills a lot better (I lost a ton of time, especially in that first steep descent). Legs were absolutely wrecked the next day.

I did get some mountain time in with a trip to Chamonix and Courmayeur in June, Norway in July, and trips out to the Peak District and English countryside around London (I’m basically an expert in trails within an hour of London by train), but it’s difficult to be properly prepared for this kind of race without easy access to elevation.

Highlights:

• La Sportiva Prodigio Pro. Don’t think I could have asked for a better shoe for this race. No foot issues, and they ended up being ideal for this course, which was more technical “running” than I expected. Did the majority of my on-trail training in these, and then raced on a slightly “fresher” pair. Now that I’ve had more time on them, I think my KipSummit Max would have been a good shout as well.

• I wore some things I’ve had for a while. A Saxx shirt, a pair of Roark shorts, and Injinji socks (as always). My Salomon Adv Skin 12 is a few years old and has seen better days but it’s still kicking.

• I ate SIS Beta gels the whole way. One flavor (orange) the whole time, like a completely psychotic person. I supplemented with a few snacks and Coke at aid stations. I had no stomach issues, so no complaints.

• Some friends from Colorado were out doing the 170k and crushed it. They somehow managed to finish 16, 17, 18 despite one of them having stomach issues and only drinking Coke for most of the race. Ridiculous. It’s an ungodly amount of elevation gain (~38k).

• The volunteers were fantastic, and this was a common refrain amongst all the participants I talked to, regardless of what race they participated in. They were helpful, engaged, and many of them spent days on little sleep driving around to different aid stations to support the 170k and stage races that were happening at the same time.

• Overall vibe - amazing. Friendly people, everyone excited, low-key. There’s no expo or big finish line production, just a group meal and a short prize ceremony in the village square.

There’s always a lot written about UTMB; it soaks up a lot of the attention at the end of the racing season. But UTMR is a week later, a couple valleys over, and a much different experience. Small, no hype, no brands, no lottery, no detailed shoe analysis of every race. That’s not a knock on UTMB at all. Plenty of people at UTMR had previously raced UTMB, had a great time, and were looking for something a bit different. There are all kinds of options out there; you can run whatever feels the best to you.

I’m happy I did it. I needed a goal to get training consistently again (it worked). But at the same time, I’ve been thinking a lot about what racing costs me.

I spent a lot of this summer saying “sorry, I need to…” run 20 miles today, or go to bed early, or plan around being able to spend X hours a day running, or whatever. At one point I thought about taking a vacation to sit on a beach in Crete for a week, but the thought of hot days making it difficult to get training in was always in the back of my mind. I love running, but I won’t lie and say it didn’t suck a little bit of fun out of this summer.

A few years ago I posted on social media that I was looking for races to do in Europe. Dan Patitucci (running photographer and co-creator of AlpsInsight) replied, saying something along the lines of “why are you looking for races? Those trails are always there.”

It’s something that has stuck with me. He’s not wrong. The Balfrin Höhenweg is there all year and nobody needs a bib to go up to Hannigalp. Despite that, sometimes having a race on the calendar is what gets me fit enough to actually enjoy being up there the rest of the time.

I’m definitely moving more toward the “it’s just fun to run in the mountains” vs race. But the reality is, I’ll probably sign up for more races down the line. If nothing else, UTMR proved that while I’m not quite as fast as I used to be, I can race a tough course and finish strong. And, I’d kinda like to maybe do OCC one day, so I need those stones 😂.

~Kyle

Trump's recent executive order, "Reinvigorating America's Hunting Heritage" (EO 14429), is mostly about hunting. It opens up hunting in a couple of national monuments, pushes for more Sunday hunting, brings back lead ammo and tackle, and funds youth and veteran hunting programs. I’ll leave most of that to the hunting folks.

But it also includes a few provisions on river permits, bots, and corner crossing that read like they were added to hit a few “positive” beats for the broader outdoor crowd. Namely, weighted lotteries, fewer bots, and better access to landlocked public land. I don't disagree with too much of it, on the surface.

But, looking at it deeper it feels more like an order that lets the administration point and say “look, we did something for hunters and outdoorists, pay no attention to everything else going on” a month before the midterms.

A weighted river lottery

The order says: "the Secretary of Agriculture shall review high-demand Forest Service-administered river access lotteries, and shall initiate the reform of such lotteries to prioritize United States citizens, including prior unsuccessful applicants, and prohibit the use of automatic computer entries into the lotteries." That mostly means the Four Rivers lottery, which covers four of the most coveted multi-day trips in the country: the Middle Fork of the Salmon, the Main Salmon, the Selway, and Hells Canyon.

It doesn't say how, but prioritizing unsuccessful applicants sounds like a weighted lottery, something the river community has discussed for years. A 2022 American Whitewater survey found ~56% of boaters would be supportive of one.

There are few details in the order (like most of these recommendations, they seem to be written by someone who has only a rudimentary understanding of the issues at hand), but the easiest comparison is the Grand Canyon, which is already uses a weighted system. Applicants for private river permits gain points (up to 5) for every year that they don’t win a spot or go on a trip. Each point is basically another ticket in the hat for next year’s lottery. If you go on a trip (whether it’s your permit or not), your points drop back down. This gives people who haven’t been on the river recently slight edge on future lotteries.

Slight being the key word there. On rivers like the Middle Fork and the Selway, the gap between the number of applicants and total launches is so vast that basically everyone would have 5 points within a few years. It will shift the odds, just don’t expect to be suddenly winning permits because you haven’t been on the river in a while.

The Grand Canyon has a pretty stringent system to make points work. Everyone has to have an account, your last trip down the canyon is tracked whether it was private or commercial, the park checks it against their records before issuing a permit, and there’s a ranger checking IDs the day before you start on the river. Nothing like that exists for the Four Rivers. Rec.gov knows who applied and who holds the permit, and that’s about it. So for points to really work the way they do on the Grand, a lot of things would have to change. Not impossible by any means, but a lot of pieces that don’t exist right now.

Prioritizing citizens solves a problem that doesn’t exist

Of course, the admin couldn’t just stop with a weighted lottery. The order also says that lotteries should "prioritize United States citizens," which is just MURICA FIRST virtue signaling. It will have almost zero effect on permit outcomes and piles on bad PR for tourism-based local economies that are already hurting. International visitation has taken a beating over the last two years (I wrote about it here), and we don't need headlines like "USFS bans Canadians from rafting in the United States."

The USFS publishes official numbers on Middle Fork and Main Salmon lotteries, including addresses. This isn’t a 1:1 representation of “citizens”, but it’s pretty close and the best data we’ve got. So, I ran the numbers.

In 2025, 19,761 people applied for 353 Middle Fork permits. 176 of those were non-US addresses and TWO won, changing your lottery odds from 1.79% to a whopping 1.80%.

River lottery odds

Honestly, I’m not even sure how this would be implemented. The Four Rivers lotteries run through Rec.gov, which does not verify citizenship, and as I mentioned above, addresses are not an accurate representation of citizenship. Not to mention, only ~50% of Americans have passports. It seems like an administrative rigamarole to exclude a fraction of a percent of people.

The bots aren’t a lottery problem

Bots (aka automatic computer entries into the lotteries) are a problem on Rec.gov, although I’d argue they’re far less of a problem than articles on the topic tend to depict. But lotteries aren’t where they’re an issue. You only get one application per person per river, and if you submit duplicates you’re banned from that river for three years. The window for lottery entries is two months so there’s no reason to be fast. And you still have to actually win to be able to book.

Where bots matter is the booking side, like campsites dropping at 10 a.m. or the release of unclaimed Middle Fork launches. That’s a completely different problem, and it’s already in the RFI for the next Rec.gov contract (I’ll bet Booz Allen knows the public (and lawmaker) perception around bots is a risk to winning the next contract).

Looking at those odds gives you a good example of what’s going on across all public lands. Sure, let’s have more processes to address bots, but there are still close to 20k people applying for 350 spots. They’re gonna be nearly impossible to get, bots or not. Take the bots away, and you’ve still got tens of thousands of people fighting for a tiny number of permits and campsites during peak times of the year.

Corner crossing?

On improved land access, there's reason for cautious optimism here. The order doesn't say "corner crossing" straight out, but it directs agencies to improve access to "difficult-to-access Federal lands and waters." It's a step forward, at least on paper. Corner crossing has been a contentious public access issue for years, mostly for hunters, but it affects everyone who recreates on public lands. A lot of public land in the West is laid out like a checkerboard (thanks, 19th-century railroad grants), with public and private squares that only touch at the corners. To get from one public square to the next, you have to step diagonally across that corner point, and some landowners say that's trespassing. onX has done some great advocacy work on the topic.

I won’t hold my breath though, because some of the language here sets off alarm bells in my head, particularly the use of land swaps to improve “access.” The full line is “prioritizing practical access opportunities, including voluntary access easements, land exchanges, cooperative agreements with States and local governments, and other tools that respect private property rights.” Pardon my paranoia, but given what this administration has done with public lands over the last two years, I think it's well-founded. "Practical access opportunities" feels like a generic enough wording to be a convenient justification for land exchanges that are otherwise weakly justified. Although National Parks mostly aren’t part of this order, could see it making situations similar to Yosemite's access road a lot easier to push through.

Going into the midterms

All this to say, sure, we’ll take the “wins” as they come. But the recency effect is at play here. In a long list of things, people tend to remember the first things and the last things. If public lands is something you care about, don’t be swayed by some middling, relatively sane (if uninformed) recent news; there have been a lot of unmitigated disasters so far in this admin.

Running retail (and just, retail, period) has always been hard, especially right now. It got me thinking about how these stores, and their struggles, are a symptom of how we can sometimes over-index on niche communities.

Those of us who think and write about running/sport/outdoor/etc (especially on Substack) have a pretty warped sense of what “running” looks like. In that world, you’d have me believe that everyone is waiting with bated breath for Satisfy’s latest capsule, foaming over Bandit’s fall drop, buying a tenth Norda collab, joining a run club, and calling out UTMB as a pox on the industry.

And before the Satisfy fanbois jump on me, of course you care about Satisfy’s latest drop. And of course everyone in your run club does as well. You’re all very important and unique flowers, and wearing matching outfits makes you all very cool.

But most runners in this country couldn’t pick any of the “hip” brands out of a lineup, if they’ve even heard of them. The running stores that stay open are the ones that figured that out a long time ago.

Most runners aren’t reading this

Circana recently asked a bunch of people who call themselves runners how seriously they take it. About 10% said “serious.” More than half said casual, and if you’re reading this, you’re probably in that 10%, and honestly, probably a tiny piece of that.

The average running consumer isn’t in your Instagram feed and they’re not reading about trends. They’re doing a few loops around the neighborhood before work, maybe a turkey trot in November, and they want a shoe that doesn’t hurt. And that’s if they’re really running at all, because a huge percentage of people (60% by some estimates) that buy running shoes just wear them for walking around or for work.

The bulk of shoe sales are big, soft, forgettable daily trainers. Brooks, a brand that almost never comes up when people talk about “running culture,” has three of the six best-selling shoes, and the Ghost and the Adrenaline alone are more than 10% of the performance running market. They’re all around $150 (or less), they’re all on version 10-something, and they don’t get reposted by the gear accounts on Instagram. Brooks and Hoka together account for close to half of US running shoe sales at retail. That’s shoes, but we can make some relatively straightforward assumptions that the people buying a Clifton to walk around in aren’t also copping a pair of Bandit tights or SOAR shorts.

And, they mostly aren’t getting bought at a running shop, 4th wave or otherwise. They get bought at a place like Dick’s, or online. Run specialty is a small portion of overall sales. The CEO of Fleet Feet (which operates 284 stores) said earlier this year that sales are exploding for the brands while business is mostly flat for the stores (They also sell more sandals than it does total Nike shoes, which is just a wild stat).

Retail is hard, and it’s not just the hip stores that are having a hard time.

Luxury vibes, without the margins

If you walk into one of these 4th wave stores, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re in an art gallery, not a shoe store. I’m generalizing a bit, but the aesthetic often includes concrete floors, a single wooden bench, a gray couch in the back and shoes widely spaced out on floating shelves. They have the “hard to find” color ways or collabs, and a handful of shirts, shorts and singlets hang on racks a couple inches apart to really highlight how curated everything is. There’s a good chance someone is making our over coffee in the corner.

A Prada store also has a lot of empty space, and a similar approach to layout. The extra space and minimalism are classic design cues for quality and exclusivity. But the Prada stores and the brand are the same. Prada designs the bags, makes them, sells through its own stores, and then keeps all that margin.

A hip running shop copies that look without the business underneath it. It buys someone else’s shoes at wholesale and keeps a much smaller slice. There’s no parent company covering the rent on a mostly empty store floor and no global ad budget. Yes, there are people who will drop $300 on an Adidas one-off or the new Satisfy capsule, but enough to carry a whole store in a localized market? Enough to send foot traffic through day after day and make sales? Enough people who will buy in-person instead of clicking on Satisfy’s (seemingly weekly) drop emails?

Rapha is another great example here. It popularized this gallery layout + coffee + community model for cycling, and unlike a 4th wave running shop, it actually owns the product for sale, much like Prada. But that Clubhouse model didn’t result in financial success—it closed five of its Clubhouses this year, and the CEO recently departed. The stores operating a running version of Rapha’s model and buying someone else's product at wholesale have an even harder road.

I stopped by the new enroute store on Pearl street in Boulder yesterday, a combination cycling/high-end running store. As expected, it’s stocked with Pas Normal, MAAP, Bandit, Satisfy, Raide, with a few Hokas, Asics, and Adidas shoes thrown in for variety.

I’ve often wondered why Boulder doesn’t have a shop like this, but I always imagined it more in the vein of London’s Outsiders Store, which feels more broadly accessible in its aesthetic, carrying a mix of clothing and gear that caters more to both casual lifestyle shoppers and hard-to-find shoes/gear. There’s a warmth there that is lacking in the cold, luxury minimalism of many of these store designs. Yes, they carry Satisfy, but also Gramicci, Patagonia, Finesterre, Montbell, and Arc’teryx. They sell cups and hats and puffys and sleeping bags and Pa’lante backpacks. They also have the advantage of bridging that outdoor/lifestyle divide in a city of 9 million people, but they’re also putting that floor space to work, not leaving half of it empty.

I wish enroute the best. I’m sure the cycling community will appreciate the space after the loss of Rapha that used to be in this space, and it’s great to be able to see pieces from companies like Raide in person. If anything, Boulder might have enough middle-aged men with the disposable income to support an expensive, hip, gear habit that helps them feel younger than they are. But Boulder is an odd market. I’m not sure there are enough people who properly care about this high-end slice of the world to make a niche retail store sustainable, especially with the astronomical rents on Pearl Street and what I’d expect to be limited foot traffic most of the week.

Volume comes from regular people buying their next pair of Ghosts, and a pair of those on the wall would probably ruin the whole vibe.

Part of the industry, not the industry

Hip running brands push design forward, the 4th wave shops that carry them can play an important role in local communities, and they’ve also helped attract a lot of younger runners who might never have walked into a Fleet Feet. These spaces can work, it’s just really hard. I personally like following these trends, hearing about new brands, and seeing what folks are launching, even if 95% of it isn’t for me. I think it’ll remain a key goal for bigger incumbents (and retailers) to figure out how to make product and engage with the audiences these newer brands are catering to. Those brands are growing and there is a market there (yes, even for Satisfy’s drops).

But they are a part of the industry, not the industry. The bulk of the sport still runs on people buying the same “boring” support trainers they bought last time. Fleet Feet, REI, and Dick’s (where Arc’teryx is launching this fall) are probably better positioned to serve more of these audiences than a store that only caters to one slice of them. The stores that are built around the people who care about the drop of the week and ignore the average runner are the ones that are most likely to end up on Cole’s list.

Thanks for reading.

~Kyle

If you’ve tried to book a campsite in Yellowstone, get a Half Dome permit, or visit the Enchantments, you know the drill. Reservation windows, lotteries, timed entry, all the bells and whistles. For most of the last decade that’s been a mostly American problem: a lot of people visiting national parks and hiking popular trails, and new restrictions to control that visitation. The Alps (with its hut networks, trains, and hundreds of years of infrastructure) avoided these issues for a bit longer, but over the last few years, that’s starting to change.

This week, seven French communes proposed a new management plan for the Tour du Mont Blanc (TMB). Starting in spring 2027, people hiking the TMB (on the French section) will be required to have a reservation in a refuge, hotel, campsite, or approved bivouac area. Wild camping (what Americans would call backcountry or dispersed camping) will be banned completely, and a “green brigade” will be created to check whether hikers have reservations.

So, not permits, per se, but a new set of reservation requirements that will functionally cap capacity on the trail.

A trail the world wants to hike

The iconic 170km route passes through France, Italy, and Switzerland and most people hike the loop in 9-11 days, counter-clockwise from Chamonix or Les Houches. You can camp, you can do it with a guide and a luggage van, or you can book the refuges/hotel nights yourself (or have it organized via a company). It’s also the course for UTMB, and the growth of trail running has helped turn the trek into a global bucket-list item. It’s spectacularly beautiful, not particularly technically challenging outside of elevation gain and loss, and passes through a solid mix of villages and huts that makes it palatable for a wide range of hikers.

There’s not really a clean accounting of how many people hike the trail every year, but it’s a lot, and that number has steadily increased over the last several years. A study conducted over the summer of 2025 estimated about 75,000 hikers on the route, and on AllTrails we’ve seen a 400% increase in tracked activities on TMB segments since 2022. Jean-Marc Peillex, the mayor of Saint-Gervais, told the Times it hit 90,000 this summer.

That growth has started to cause problems. Refuge keepers are complaining about their huts being surrounded by campers who didn’t book, farmers are concerned about trash and human waste in pastures, and villages are annoyed by the number of taxis shuttling suitcases between stages. And last August, surveyors counted 125 tents overnighting an area where camping was clearly marked as forbidden. It’s not a small problem; the same 2025 study found that 29% of TMB hikers were bivouacking.

The share of TMB reviews on AllTrails mentioning crowds or busy trails has climbed over the last two summers, and people call out a few specific things: the early-morning exodus from Les Contamines, shuttle lines at Les Chapieux, and crowded valley campgrounds in peak season. People also mention August as an incredibly busy time of year and recommend hiking in the fall or choosing less-traveled (but often harder) variants for days with a bit more solitude.

It's not the Alps, it's the bucket list

It’s easy to say “the Alps are getting more crowded,” and that’s not totally untrue. But I’ve spent most of the last few years based in London and I spent a considerable amount of that time in the Alps. The majority of places are not this impacted. Nobody is capping visitors to the Vanoise. There’s no lottery for the Stubai High Trail. There’s still hardly anyone in St Anton in the summer. There’s a lot of people in Interlaken/Mürren/Grindelwald, but even one valley over you’ll hardly see anyone. The Dolomites encompass a huge area and while there are more people overall than five years ago, the biggest over-tourism problems are concentrated in maybe three or four spots.

Pressures tend to be focused on a shortlist of places that have become synonymous with bucket-list travel to the Alps.

• Tre Cime di Lavaredo: the toll road requires a mandatory online reservation during the summer

• Seceda: The price of the cable car increased to €74 and some farmers have installed a turnstile, charging visitors €5

• Lago di Braies, Alpe di Siusi, and Passo Gardena all have vehicle caps or timed access

• Chamonix recently announced that they’re considering daily hiker quotas for Lac Blanc in 2027

• Madeira requires a timed entry slot and a €4.50 fee for every official trail on the island

If there’s one thing most of these places have in common, it’s millions of views on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. The TMB is a good example of what that kind of global popularity to a trail. Three-quarters of the people on it are international, with Americans making up the largest group followed by China, Canada, the UK, Belgium, and Israel. These are also beautiful places, so it’s not as if I can blame anyone for wanting to visit. But when everyone has the same list, we end up with problems like these.

What to watch

There are a few things I’ll be keeping my eye on as this continues to develop. First, the approach they’ve opted for is linked to capacity, not a visitation cap/permits with a lottery. The cap ends up being whatever the huts, hotels, campgrounds, and official bivouac sites can hold; the new plan commits to not adding any new ones. It’ll be interesting to see how much more pressure this puts on refuges and villages if wild camping demand shifts to hotel rooms and refuge beds.

They’re also targeting luggage transfers, which feels like a signal about how they believe the TMB should be experienced. The new guidance only allows trekking packs, on a schedule, and the stated goal is to get the TMB back to being a mountain route walked on foot…rather than a paid tour where your suitcase rides a van from hotel to hotel. It feels a bit like drawing a line between hikers/trekkers and tourists. Peillex put it bluntly, telling the Times the tour has become a “consumer object” that operators sell without worrying about the damage and criticizing “tourists sending ‘pink wheelie suitcases and make up-bags’”.

It’s unclear how this will be enforced across three countries and whether Italy and Switzerland join at all (they already have very strict restrictions on wild camping). But we can look at the Alta Via 1 to see how this might play out. The huts open their books in August for the following summer, the famous ones sell out within weeks, and much of the inventory is held by tour operators. The TMB was already in a similar place, but it’s likely to get more challenging. No permit, no lottery, but a trail you have to plan a year out or pay an operator. Reservations for the 2027 TMB refuges open October 15. If you were thinking about planning a trip for next year, that’s the date to put on your calendar.

~Kyle

How many people visited public lands last year?

For a long time, that wasn’t a particularly easy answer to get. Not because it was impossible, per se, but because the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, etc, all counted their visitors in different ways, at different times, using different definitions, and then published that data in different formats in different places on different timetables. (The answer, for 2024, was 947 million visits)

I’ve written a lot of data dives for Here & There, ranging across different slices of public lands and recreation data. I mostly followed a similar, tedious process every time: find the PDF summary of the report → find a CSV file with more complete data → import that to Excel → clean it → do an annoying amount of table wizardry to answer specific questions → manually create a few charts to accompany any analysis.

Over the last year I’ve been working on building and improving publiclandsdata.com, originally as a resource for myself and eventually as a more public-facing way for anyone to access a wide range of data about public lands.

Check it out

What’s in there?

• NPS visitation - across 405 units, not just the 63 National Parks. Monuments, historic sites, battlefields, seashores, parkways and more.

• Recreation.gov bookings - 79 million transactions from 2007 to 2025

• FICOR unified visitation data - 947 million visits for 2024 across 2,065 units and six agencies

• Outdoor recreation economy - BEA data tables by activity, industry, and state

• Also GAOA projects, and federal recreation inventory

This data is all public. But the gap between "public" and "usable" might as well be the Grand Canyon in most of these cases.

The work

Most of my time went into the architecture, not the visualizations: pulling down everything available, working out what each agency actually meant by its columns, and then normalizing across years and formats.

A few examples: Recreation.gov transaction data comes in 3 different table formats across the available years. NPS reports by calendar year; Rec.gov and the interagency report use the federal fiscal year, so the same park can have two visitation numbers for "2024" and both are technically right. Rec.gov identifies a park by a four-letter code (NOCA), GAOA identifies it by unit name, and BEA doesn't know parks exist at all, only states.

All those issues had to be addressed before I even started to think about what makes this data interesting, what people would like to learn from it, and how to visualize that.

Nobody is looking for a dataset

If you really dig into “what are people looking for,” it’s usually information about a place. Nobody wants a "reservations dataset," they want to know how many people visited Yosemite last year.

So, under the hood it’s organized around datasets, but with extra effort around parks and states, because if you dig into what people are actually looking for, it’s usually information about a place.

Every NPS unit (not just National Parks) has a page with its visitation history, overnight stays by type, and seasonality, most going back to 1979. I also pulled in the Rec.gov bookings for each park, so you can see visitation and reservations side by side, and links out to activity breakdowns and the state outdoor economy numbers.

In a few key places I added annotations to provide additional context. That YOY spike in North Cascades visitation? It’s really more about Highway 20 re-opening after the 2024 fires than it is a surge in interest. There are similar annotations for Yellowstone’s 2022 flooding, the Ferguson Fire closing Yosemite, and more.

The annotations piece isn’t particularly scalable across all units but I’ll continue adding them as I look into different things.

Who’s it for?

I mean, I mostly built this for me, but journalists, gateway towns, tourism boards, and local government might all find this useful. Anyone who has a specific question about recreation visitation/economy and doesn’t want to spend forever comparing different data sources.

Some questions you might be able to answer:

• How many people visited Canyonlands in 2025? (796.1k, -2.7%)

• What industry contributes the most to the outdoor economy in Indiana? (RVing, over 30%)

• How many timed entry reservations did Rocky Mountain National Park sell in 2025? (579.6k)

• What’s the most visited National Monument? (Castle Clinton, it’s the ferry ticket office for the Statue of Liberty)

There are still gaps. Some agencies report better than others, some years are missing, and the annotations only exist where I've spent additional time digging into things. If you spot something wrong or confusing, let me know. The site will get better the more people poke at it.

And if what you’re interested in goes beyond what's easily available on the site, feel free to reach out. I can probably put together a custom report at the state or regional level with a more detailed look at things.

Anyways, poke around, enjoy, and hopefully a few of you will find it useful or interesting.

publiclandsdata.com

Been a busy few months and I’ve been slacking on H&T but I’m hoping to keep it a bit more consistent. But, a break is always nice. Did a bit of traveling, ran the UTMR 60k, and been quite busy with work. More to come.

I originally wrote this for AllTrails, but the comment period on the Roadless Rule rescission is ongoing until Sept 21th (despite the initial social media blitz dying down a bit), and it’s as good a topic as any to kick myself back into gear on here.

Thanks for reading.

Kyle

If you’ve hiked Franconia Ridge in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the Art Loeb Trail in North Carolina’s Pisgah, Baker Lake in Washington’s North Cascades, or long sections of the PCT and the CDT, you spent a good chunk of that day inside what’s called an “inventoried roadless area” or IRA. You probably didn’t realize you were in a designated “roadless area” at all.

Since 2001, these places have been protected by the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which prohibits most new road construction and commercial logging on a subset of National Forest land. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is currently in the process of rescinding it. The rescission affects about 45 million acres of land across the country (Colorado and Idaho have their own state-specific versions of the rule that are excluded from this action).

The formal proposal to remove the rule dropped in late August, and the public comment window runs through September 21.

Submit a public comment to the USDA

Roadless is not Wilderness

The land protected by the Roadless Rule was originally selected from two decades of Forest Service work that identified blocks of undeveloped land (generally 5,000 or more contiguous acres without permanent roads), and smaller parcels adjacent to existing Wilderness. It involved a multi-year process with over 600 public meetings and 1.6 million public comments (the most any federal rulemaking had ever received at the time). It also survived four administrations and a long history of litigation, all the way up to the Supreme Court, which declined to review it in 2012.

The “prohibition” of new construction and logging outlined in the rule isn’t absolute. There are explicit exceptions for road work tied to public health and safety, environmental cleanup, access to inholdings, and fire response. Logging is restricted but not banned outright, and there are allowances for cutting to reduce fire risk and for ecosystem restoration. Existing roads and trails stay in place, and hunting, fishing, biking, and motorized use on existing, designated routes all continue. The rule primarily restricts new, large-scale development. What it doesn’t do (although critics sometimes describe it this way) is prevent all uses of the land.

Perhaps most important to note, IRAs aren’t capital-W Wilderness. Wilderness areas are one of the strictest federal land protections we have. They require an act of Congress to designate, and prohibit all motorized and mechanized travel including mountain bikes. Roadless areas are a bit looser; they allow things like biking, snowmobiling, hunting, fishing, and more. In many ways, they’re kinda like the “happy medium” of land designations.

Roadless areas don’t overlap with National Parks either. The designation only applies to National Forests, which are managed by the USDA for multiple uses, including timber, grazing, mining, recreation, and watershed protection. About 37 million of the 193 million acres managed by the Forest Service are designated Wilderness. Another 58 million (including the roughly 13 million in Colorado and Idaho) is covered by the Roadless Rule (about 30%). And the remaining 50% is open to recreation, logging, mining, grazing, and drilling as part of multiple-use management.

If you want to see an interactive map of IRAs, I’ve got one here.

What rescission removes

Rescinding the rule does not mandate logging anywhere. It doesn’t mean that trails will be replaced with roads, or even that any roads will be built. It doesn’t eliminate any Wilderness designations, override the Endangered Species Act, or bypass the National Environmental Policy Act. Although it’s a compelling headline, the 45 million acres of land involved are not suddenly going to be clearcut overnight.

But what it does do is remove a 25-year-old baseline of protections. That’s why I think anyone who cares about public lands should be concerned. Right now, a new road or logging proposal has to clear a pretty high bar. Without the rule in place, that bar gets lower.

In most affected areas, nothing dramatic will happen overnight. The economics simply don’t work out for logging and agencies don’t have the capacity (or the funds, honestly) to be building a ton of new roads. But a slow chipping away of norms due to a lack of resources doesn’t mean these places are safe. In places where the pressure and infrastructure for logging is already present (Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is a good example), there will be real proposals and real fights, much sooner.

The arguments for rescission don’t hold up

USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the rescission in June 2025 at a Western Governors’ Association meeting in New Mexico, framing it as necessary for active forest management and wildfire prevention. Industry groups, including the American Forest Resource Council and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association have publicly supported the move. Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski has wanted the Tongass exempted for years.

The administration’s main (public) argument in favor of rescission is for wildfire prevention. They lean on the perspective that the Roadless Rule is actively preventing forest management like thinning, prescribed burns, and fuel reduction, and that it’s partially to blame for the destructive wildfire seasons over the last few years.

But…the rule already allows that kind of work. It already has exceptions for fuel treatment, prescribed burns, and emergency firefighting. According to Trout Unlimited, nearly 2 million acres of inventoried roadless area have been treated under the existing rule, and none of the 148 recommendations from the bipartisan Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission mention the Roadless Rule at all. A January 2026 study in Fire Ecology found that fire ignitions are about four times more common within 50 meters of roads than in roadless areas. About 84% of wildfires are human-caused…and humans get to forests via roads. It’s not a far leap to say that more roads have a very good chance of leading to more opportunities for human-caused ignitions.

The logging argument doesn’t hold up much better. Despite an administration push for more logging, federal timber sales in areas like these have already been operating at a loss for decades. Mike Dombeck, who was Forest Service chief when the rule was originally written, pointed out that roadless areas represent only about 8% of the productive timber base. Most IRAs are roadless because they’re steep, remote, and low-value (from a logging perspective, anyway; all public lands are valuable). There’s not a great economic case here, given these are places that mostly weren’t going to be logged anyway.

So what’s this really about?

One aspect of rescission is that it would “return authority to local forest managers who know the land best.” That sounds reasonable until you think about what it actually means from a management perspective. The roadless protections that currently live in one national rule would instead live in individual forest plans, each changeable, each on a separate review and revision cycle, and each subject to whoever is currently running the agency or local office. That kind of fragmentation is great for private industry to influence local decisions, and not so great for broad, consistent conservation and wilderness policy.

It’s part of a broader pattern. Over the past year, the Trump administration has moved to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil leasing, reverse a 2023 mining ban around Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, accelerate construction of Alaska’s Ambler Road through previously protected terrain, mandate increased timber production across both Forest Service and BLM lands, and cut workforce capacity at the Forest Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management. The reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante has already resulted in mining claims being made in the area, only a month later after the removal of protections.

These are different decisions affecting different places and agencies, but together they share a theme. Less land held back from development, and fewer people inside the agencies to slow it down.

The rule isn't the problem

The Roadless Rule isn’t being rescinded because it’s failing, no matter how many times Secretary Rollins calls it “the failed roadless rule.” Take your pick…public support, court cases, ecological outcomes: by any measure, it’s been one of the more successful federal land protections of the last 50 years. When USDA opened a comment window last fall, more than 600,000 comments came in and the Center for Western Priorities found that 99.2% opposed rescission.

It’s being rescinded because it’s in the way of private interests.

The immediate result is not “your favorite trail is about to be clearcut”; that mostly isn’t true, and dramatic headlines give the people pushing for rescission an easy way to dismiss opposition as hysterical. But even the most conservative concerns are still sobering. A 25-year protection that was working just fine is being removed as part of a pattern of deregulation in favor of private industry, and the agencies responsible for managing the impacts are being hollowed out at the same time.

Whether the immediate effect on the trail you hiked last weekend is large or small, the framework for roadless areas, wilderness, and environmental protections is being deliberately dismantled.

Five minutes, one comment

The comment period on rescission is now open and runs through September 21. Last year, public lands advocates killed Lee’s public land sell-off with a flood of calls and emails. That pressure worked then. It can work now.

Leave a comment on the proposal

I’ll be in Colorado (Boulder) the second half of July, lmk if you’re around and want to grab coffee or get a run. Planning on UTMR 60k for Sept, so will be needing to get the miles and elevation in 😂.

As always, thanks for reading!

—Kyle (say hi via email, LinkedIn, or just reply to this email)

The 2027 London Marathon will run across two days. Elite women on one day and elite men the other, with 100,000 runners total across the two races. London Marathon Events (LME) is calling it a "once-in-a-generation, one-time-only" event. Hugh Brasher, who runs LME, says it will be "one and done."

I have a hard time believing that.

1.33 million people entered the lottery for 2027. The year before, 1.13M applications, up 36% YOY and nearly doubled from 2024. Adding a second day will roughly double how many people get in to what is already one of the largest marathons on the planet…and it lets LME collect another day of entry fees. Brasher is projecting more than £150 million for charity and £400 million in economic benefit off the back of the bigger event. That's significant, given that the event is already one of the biggest charity events in the world.

But one-offs that print money tend not to stay one-offs. I don't think that demand is going to suddenly evaporate, and if London pulls this off without the city completely locking up, every other marathon Major is going to be running the same math.

The venue for a road marathon is typically a large city. Closed roads, massive hotel inventory, and infrastructure and transit systems designed for huge amounts of people. Yes, they're expensive to run and can be a headache for both visitors and residents, but the growth has an elastic quality. Cities can absorb a lot of visitation (or in this case, add an extra day).

That type of growth is exciting for road. But now try to picture the trail running version of “adding a day”. I don’t think it works.

369 runners

There's been a lot of talk about the growth of trail running, why that matters, and how it manifests through retail, racing, and different geographies. There is, rightfully, a lot of excitement about that growth. More than 50 million Americans ran or jogged in 2024, and 16.1 million of them ran trails. Trail has grown around 8% annually over the last 5 years. More people running on dirt means healthier people, opportunities for outdoor gear brands, and hopefully more people who are connected to the public lands they’re often running on. We're coming off the back of the Broken Arrow/TrailCon/Western States weekends, one of the busiest of the year. But how do you continue to grow the competition side of a sport that with signficant barriers to both participation and competition?

Take Western States, one of the most prestigious ultra races in the world, which happened over the weekend. The field is capped at exactly 369 runners. Not because that's what the demand supports, but because that number is a condition of the race's existence. The course runs through the Granite Chief Wilderness, and when Congress designated that wilderness in 1984, the race got grandfathered in on one condition: it could never start more runners than it did that year. That year there were 369. Meanwhile, lottery entries for races like Western States, Hardrock, Leadville, Wasatch, UTMB (the list goes on) continue to grow.

Western States is the extreme case, but it isn't an outlier. Nearly every significant trail race in the US runs on public land using special use permits, and those permits cap capacity. Hardrock is capped at around 146 runners, although nearly 3,000 people applied for those spots in 2026. And it's not an American quirk. In the Black Forest, the new Freiburg Trailrun has a 100K on its roadmap that may never happen; the organizers say it depends on conservation approvals and permits.

Those numbers do brutal things to the math of putting on a race. A road marathon spreads costs across tens of thousands of entry fees and huge corporate sponsors. A 100-miler has to divide the costs of remote aid stations, medical coverage, insurance, and permit compliance across (maybe) a few hundred. That gap ends up getting filled with ever-rising race entry fees and a dependency on sponsors. Trail races manage to be constantly oversubscribed and financially fragile at the same time.

How do you meet demand?

Trail running has largely attempted to satisfy demand by adding more races. The UTMB World Series is probably the clearest (and often most controversial) case; they're up to over 60 events across five continents now, with over 130k participants in 2024. Circuits are expanding, new independent ultras are getting started, and formats like Backyard Ultra have surged in popularity.

But I think that inventory can still feel thin. The average ultra event in the US is small: 100-milers average just over 100 finishers, 6-hour timed events average 22. There are local 10K and 25K trail races, but nothing remotely at the scale of the road 5K or half. The on-ramp from local 5k to jet-setting to tick off marathon majors that turns road running into a massive culture doesn’t quite work for trail. How many 100-person ultras can you realistically add?

With smaller fields, the math on entry fees makes it harder to run events; races need money from sponsors, and sponsors pay for visibility. The Majors can sell that visibility because they have something trail doesn't: a clear broadcast product.

London puts roughly 750,000 spectators on the streets, had around 3 million TV viewers, and added more than 47 million views across BBC Sport's social channels in the days after. Add the charity storylines, human interest features, and news coverage, and you get a full week of national/international attention around a single Sunday morning. Those numbers are why Brasher can project £150 million for charity and £400 million in economic impact.

Trail can't produce attention at that scale in any format. The races happen hours from the nearest city, across terrain spectators mostly can't reach, over durations that don't quite with a broadcast product. Livestreams are brutal to make: when they’re even attempted it means camera runners on e-bikes chasing competitors through terrain with no road access, satellite issues in dead zones, and coverage windows with long stretches of dead air where the stream is just watching an aid station. There aren't many teams with technical broadcast experience to do it well, especially in the US. Broken Arrow streamed all three of its races on Nike's own YouTube channel this year, drawing viewers somewhere between 25k and 40k by some estimations. But a YouTube "view" can mean a lot of things, so even that number might be flattering. Beyond streams, the visibility is in social clips, a few articles about winners in outdoor publications, and podcast recaps, which mostly reach people who were already fans.

Brands and organizers are currently paying in the hope that the visibility is valuable (and helps them sell shoes). Maybe it is. It works great for UTMB week (UTMB claims 15.8 million livestream viewers across its 2024 season, a self-reported number doing a lot of work), but outside of that, I think the value of livestreams is a harder sell and the watchers more sporadic. More esoteric marketing expenses tend to get cut when the ROI isn't there. And a race that can't grow its field can't scale into better unit economics, so that sponsor money ends up propping up the whole professionalized layer of the sport.

A different category

Funnel or no funnel, I'm skeptical trail can scale the way road running has scaled. And honestly? That might be fine.

Maybe trail running doesn't become a bigger “sport” in terms of racing (both pro and amateur). It just continues to grow as a category. More people in trail shoes, more gear sold, a small competitive scene at the top with a media footprint out of proportion to its size, and a long tail of people running dirt roads or jogging part of a hike without ever entering a lottery. The same caps that make the business hard are what keep a Hardrock start line feeling like a Hardrock start line, and I doubt anybody who gets into Western States wishes there were a few hundred other people on the trail.

Right now, the growth at the top of trail is going to be entry fees record lottery entries, every year. The growth at the bottom is going to be trail running shoes, on both casual hikers and competitive runners. What the middle looks like over the next 5 years is anyone’s guess.

If you’ve got any thoughts or ideas that might be relevant to AllTrails, feel free to reach out!

Don’t worry, there are plenty of things that make more sense for this Here & There alone, so there will still be a lot of independent newsletter topics.

—Kyle (say hi via email, LinkedIn, or just reply to this email)

If you hiked the Mist Trail in Yosemite National Park on a weekend this spring, you don’t need us to tell you it was crowded. But, let’s dig into why it might feel that way.

In August 2024, after four years of pilot programs and a public engagement process that started in winter 2022, Yosemite National Park released a 224-page draft Visitor Access Management Plan outlining four options for managing day-use visitation. The plan's preferred option, the one the National Park Service (NPS) explicitly recommended, was to continue a parkwide reservation system covering peak hours–a system first put in place in Yosemite in 2020. That recommendation was built on three years of data, public input from gateway communities (towns near the entrances to national parks), and the park's own assessment of what was working with reservations.

This past February, the Department of the Interior overrode that recommendation, and Yosemite, along with other parks that had existing reservation systems, like Arches, Glacier, and Mount Rainier, opened the 2026 season without timed entry for the first time in more than half a decade.

Why did reservation systems exist in the first place?

Even before the pandemic outdoor boom, the case for introducing a way to control crowds was already strong. Visitation was at record highs and places like Yosemite were seeing three-hour traffic jams on summer holiday weekends. According to the NPS, the five years leading up to 2020 make up four of the top five most visited years ever for Yosemite. The first day-use reservation system in Yosemite went in during 2020 as an emergency COVID response, and other parks followed suit. Yosemite spent the next five years refining its approach, running additional pilots in 2021 and 2022, with a temporary pause in 2023.

According to the 2024 report, the 2023 season without the reservation system produced "long lines at entrance stations and increased strain on the park's employees, resources, and infrastructure." The system came back in 2024 in a more limited form, with reservations every day during peak summer, and weekends only in spring and fall.

Why were reservations removed?

The administration's stated reason is to improve access; that’s a worthy goal, and one we care a lot about at AllTrails, but what that actually means is nuanced. Kevin Lilly, Acting Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks had this to say in a press release about the removal of reservations: "Our national parks belong to the American people, and our priority is keeping them open and accessible." 

It’s important to note that while many conservation-minded organizations favored making reservations permanent, there were also detractors, primarily gateway-town advocates and their Congressional representatives. Rep. Tom McClintock, whose district includes Yosemite, suggested in a June 2025 op-ed that the reservation system suppressed visitation and harmed local businesses. He claimed the reservation system, caused an average of 700 cars to be turned away every day, and between May and October, stops at the Mariposa Visitor Center dropped more than 10 percent from the prior year.

It’s true that reservation systems can discourage spontaneous visits. If you don’t plan in advance, you might not come at all. And if you drive up from the Central Valley or the San Francisco Bay Area on a weekend with no advance reservation, hoping for the best, and get turned around at the gate, the businesses you may have spent money at in the area lose a customer. One Oakhurst hotel manager said that guests were checking out early when they learned they needed reservations: "People are just like, 'I'm going to check out and go to Lake Tahoe.'"

Whether the benefits to gateway town economies are worth the infrastructure, environmental, and administrative costs of unfettered access is a real debate. But the administration's data claim isn’t backed by the Visitor Access Management Plan or park employees. In March 2026, the Yosemite Union surveyed 135 verified park employees: 85 percent disapproved of McPadden's decision, predicting "angry, disappointed, and exasperated guests who take out their frustrations on frontline workers."

What dropping reservations looks like so far

Most of the spring coverage of these parks so far has been via viral anecdotes: posts about crowds, long lines to enter the park, parking issues, etc. But at AllTrails we have some of the strongest data on trail visitation patterns across the country. We looked at trends and year over year data on the top trails in parks that dropped reservation systems. It’s not surprising to see they’re more crowded now,  but the data reveal more than just lines at the gates.

Parks that dropped their reservation systems are seeing growth in trail engagement, which, even after accounting for AllTrails' platform-wide growth, run well ahead of comparative national parks. Measured against the median parks this year, Mount Rainier and Yosemite sit at the very top of the field.

Weekends are seeing a higher impact than weekdays. The growth is concentrated exactly where the reservation system was designed to relieve pressure: weekends. Weekend starts on Yosemite's top trails grew +10.6% year-over-year, more than double the +4.7% on weekdays. Saturday, already the busiest day of the week, grew fastest of all at +15.5%. The reservation system was built to flatten that weekend spike; but that spike is reasserting itself.

The top ten trails in the park, hikes like Lower Yosemite Falls, the Mist Trail, etc, still account for the majority of hiker volume. But the growth we’re seeing is mostly mirrored across the rest of the park, and growing fastest on weekends, which suggests that as the marquee trails fill up, people are spilling onto the next options over. Basically, the whole park still feels impacted, not just the top trails.

People are adapting. The busiest start time on Yosemite's top trails moved from 9 AM to 8 AM year-over-year, and the share of hikers starting before 7 AM climbed from 9% to 11%. The shift is sharpest on weekends, where the typical start time jumped about half an hour earlier. Reviews echo the data: mentions of early-morning starts are up sharply in 2026, with AllTrails members framing pre-dawn departures as the only way to beat what one member called 'Disney-like' lines on the Mist Trail.

Our data gives a strong read for how people are recreating in these parks. It isn’t a complete proxy for visitation, since not everyone uses AllTrails, most parks lack reliable cell service, and peak season hasn’t fully kicked off yet. But, official NPS stats are also estimations, and the data we have at AllTrails is granular: usage trends on key trails and key zones, time of day usage, and more. We can compare to other visitation stats and benchmark that data against previous years and broader platform growth. Long story short, the increases here are significant. 

What this means on the ground

These aren’t just abstract numbers. They translate to more people on trails, earlier in the season, in places that were already running at high capacities before the systems were removed.

For Yosemite specifically, that means more pressure on the Happy Isles zone, more crowding at viewpoints like Tunnel View and Glacier Point, and more strain on Valley parking (as well as that parking filling earlier in the day). Viral videos of cars at the Oakhurst entrance and cars parked illegally around the park won’t be isolated occurrences this summer, it’s simply what an unmanaged peak season looks like.

For Glacier, it will mean that Going To The Sun Road will have serious congestion issues when it opens in the next few weeks. Parking will be an issue.

For Rainier, it means more pressure at Paradise and Sunrise, the two corridors that were specifically designated for timed entry in 2024 because of the damage being done to subalpine meadows and the parking chaos at trailheads. Those problems will be back. Graham Taylor, senior program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association called this out when the elimination was announced, telling National Parks Traveler that  “Reservations ensured visitors could spend more time outside and less time circling for a parking spot.”

Strain shows up elsewhere across park infrastructure as well. Bathrooms that get hit harder than the maintenance schedule planned for. Overflow parking pushed onto road shoulders. These were the exact problems Yosemite's 2024 NPS report flagged, and we’re seeing some of it reflected in review data. Mentions of trash and litter in AllTrails reviews in Yosemite are up more than 50% year-over-year. 

These infrastructure issues hit doubly hard with a reduced workforce. Since January 2025, the National Park Service has lost roughly 24 percent of its permanent workforce — about 4,000 employees through layoffs, buyouts, firings, and resignations. McPadden's plan for managing Yosemite without reservations leans on "active traffic management", which includes increased staffing at key intersections, digital congestion warnings, and signage directing visitors toward Tuolumne Meadows and other less-visited areas. The problem is that "increased staffing" requires staff, and the park has less of it.

The administration maintains that other strategies can replace advance reservations entirely. The data from this spring suggests that case will be severely tested this summer.

So what do we do?

The parks are going to be busy whether we worry about it or not. So if you're headed to Yosemite, Rainier, or anywhere busy this summer, a few things that make the day better for you and everyone behind you:

Show up ready. Download your maps before you lose signal, because service drops at many trailheads. Check recent conditions and the forecast so you're not the person who needed help that a stretched ranger had to provide. Pack out a little more than you packed in, and be prepared to pivot; there are plenty of worthwhile options in and near these parks. 

Go when others don't. The data is clear that weekends and mid-day are peak times. A weekday trip, or an early start, is the single biggest difference-maker, and the hikers already doing it are often the ones writing the most positive reviews. Check what time of day a trail tends to peak before you commit to a plan.

Be kind. Rangers and gateway-town staff are short-handed and catching grief for decisions made outside the park boundaries. A little patience goes a long way right now.

None of this is new advice, it's the stuff our community already believes in and practices. It just matters more this year, because there are going to be a lot of people out there. Take care of our wild places, take care of each other, and we'll all have a better summer for it.

This isn't about any one thing in particular, but you can fill in your own blanks.

—Kyle (say hi via email, LinkedIn, or just reply to this email)

I've been thinking this week about a reader who emailed me a few months ago to tell me I was wrong. He'd read a piece I wrote, didn't agree with where I'd landed, and laid out his perspective. I had a nice few emails back and forth with him to discuss. Watching the last few weeks of events and discourse across the topics I tend to cover has left me feeling pretty despondent. The kind of disagreement and discussion that email chain represented feels increasingly rare.

The specifics don't matter much. You know the patterns: knee-jerk reactions before anyone's read past the headline, rabid fanbases that treat any criticism as an attack, rapid switches in support depending on which way the wind is blowing, boycotts, the demonizing of people who are ostensibly interested in the same outcomes.

This isn’t a surprise for anyone who has been on the internet, say, over the last decade (or ever, really). Social media developed so many bubbles and verticals and algorithms that reward groupthink, or more often, not really thinking at all. Yes, we have the social media big bads to blame, but I think there’s something to do about it, if we actually care.

I'm not pretending that criticism and PR crises are always unwarranted. Both individuals and companies do dumb (or poorly communicated) things and honest criticism is a feedback mechanism that helps us grow. What I want to argue is that the kind of audience responses we're seeing didn't come out of nowhere. It's an output of how brands, creators, and publications, particularly ones with a strong focus on social media, built these communities in the first place.

If you spend years telling your audience that you are the rebel, the visionary, or the moral protagonist, that the people who disagree with you are the bad guys, that buying your product or supporting your account is itself a form of righteousness, you’ve trained your audience to evaluate everything you say from an emotional and tribal perspective. That might be an effective tactic when you want to mobilize them, but it also creates a pedestal that allows for more ambiguous developments to be read as betrayals; you never built enough rapport to allow space for actual conversations. If your audience doesn't know how to hold "I am broadly supportive of this organization" and "this particular situation doesn't sit right, and I want to understand why," maybe it’s because you never demonstrated it to them.

The reason that simplistic, dogmatic messaging is so prevalent is because it works, and it's self-reinforcing. A loyal audience that agrees with you all the time, buys what you tell them to buy, and gets angry at who you tell them to get angry at feels pretty great. So you start to optimize for it. There's a whole category of media that trades exclusively in takedowns, breathless headlines, and boils down complex issues to a bland, one-note broth; the audience they cultivate behaves accordingly. Even when it's not deliberate, easy, low-risk framing tends to win. Simple in, simple out.

The mirror image of that is an inability to take criticism. When pushback does come, the reflex is too often to circle the wagons, dismiss critiques as bad-faith, or treat anyone who pointed out the misstep as the problem. If you've spent years building your community as a loyal in-group rather than an engaged one, you've also probably spent that same time training yourself to read criticisms as attacks.

Focusing on simplistic, engagement-optimized content, whether you’re an influencer, a brand, or a publication, erodes the collective IQ of the broader community. And that community might eventually turn against you. Something complicated inevitably comes up: maybe a partnership that doesn't fit the narrative, a decision that requires more context, or an issue that requires people to hold two ideas in their head at once (the horror!). The simple thinking you used to keep them engaged gets pointed at you, and you’ll discover that you've spent years neglecting the critical thinking skills you now need them to use.

Unfortunately for my thesis, good intentions and nuanced communication don’t guarantee positive outcomes when others elsewhere are happy to build reactive audiences. The amount of programming that thrives on turning people into reactive zombies is a lot to overcome. And, plenty of people will tell me that clean POVs outperform nuance, and that high-engagement, directionally “correct” work is the most important thing right now. But look at where we’re at. If the slightest friction is enough for people to drop you on a dime, what was the point? My bet is that when more people build audiences through actual conversation and depth, all of our audiences gets more resilient over time.

When I wrote for Mountain Gazette, editor Mike Rogge was very clear that there was never an expectation to please their audience, only to trust them and respect their intelligence. People often wrote in because they felt heard, or knew there was a conversation to be had about disagreements. When you start treating community pushback and disagreement as valuable, not as a constantly looming potential PR disaster, you learn to leave openings, admit what you don't know, and push people into sitting with or discussing complications. That's a writing skill. It's also just how I think we should talk to the people we’re asking to care about what we have to say.

Part of what I’m taking from this stretch of frustrating headlines is a reminder (for you) that my inbox is always open. "Yes, and" emails are always great to get, they feed my ego and need for validation that people find my work interesting. But equally interesting are the ones that say "I disagree, here's why." I try to always write back, although I'll admit to things getting lost in my inbox occasionally.

If you want an audience that can hold complexity, demonstrate that you can.

A few months ago I said “I'd love to find something at the intersection of outdoor/travel/tech, but generally I just love working on cool problems,” and well…here I am.

Incredibly excited to bring my unique blend of all the things to this incredible, massive, outdoor community. Nothing is changing with the newsletter right now but keep an eye out for other work under the AllTrails banner.

—Kyle (say hi via email, LinkedIn, or just reply to this email)

REI's Anniversary Sale week opened with a boycott. The union representing workers at 11 unionized stores, and vocal advocates on social media, called for members to skip the sale. Then, on May 21, Crain's reported that REI was accelerating the closure of its SoHo flagship to July. About 72 workers at the location will lose their jobs.

I don't have a clean position on this. Employees have the right to advocate for better working conditions. But the boycott is happening at a moment when REI is in a poor structural position, the alternatives don't replicate what REI provides at the industry level, and I think the next few years are going to be hard regardless of how a contract gets resolved.

The labor situation

REI's workers have been trying to negotiate a contract for four years. Eleven stores have unionized since SoHo in 2022, and not one has a signed agreement to show for it. The company hired one of the country's best-known union-avoidance law firms, National Labor Relations Board charges have been filed against them, and 115,000 members voted against REI's board nominees in 2025. Not great.

At the final bargaining session at the end of April, REI didn't send its head of labor relations to the table, didn't put forward a proposal until the last day of talks, and then floated four terms the union calls “poison pills”: a ban on the union supporting organizing at other REI stores, a non-disparagement clause, a mandatory $1 million annual donation to a charity of REI's choosing, and a six-year contract (twice the length previously discussed). REI has pushed back on some of this, saying the non-disparagement language was aimed at the union as an organization rather than at individual workers, and that the charity donation idea originally came from the union side. What actually went on isn’t public, so I can't tell you exactly where the “truth” sits, but it’s not a leap to say that both sides are probably spinning things to their benefit.

Still, the pattern doesn't read as good-faith bargaining no matter how you slice it. The workers have grievances. The company's handling of the issue has been poor. And anyone honoring the boycott on those grounds is making a defensible call.

What's happening at REI

Their 2025 financials came out in late April, showing net sales of $3.54 billion (up slightly from 2024), and a net loss of $54.3 million. That's a meaningful improvement (net income improved by $102M year over year) but it's the fourth consecutive year of losses.

The number that matters most for the labor conversation is their payroll-to-sales ratio, which sits around 25%. That’s incredibly high when compared to other large retailers. Costco: 11%. Tractor Supply: 14%. Dick's Sporting Goods: 14%. Those are the companies that are weathering retail challenges relatively well right now, and their ratio is a fraction of REI’s. REI's retail model is (by design) service-intensive. Experienced green vests are a value proposition they built the brand on, and the armchair experts often say that the solution is to lean back into that, with more experienced full-timers, more of that in-store expertise. But that's the opposite of what the financials allow for.

The dispassionate reading is that there's no world in which REI remains successful without that ratio coming down. And the only ways to do that are to reduce costs (closing stores, paying people less, reducing headcount, slimming down verticals like Experiences) or sell a lot more product. Costco is able to provide high retail pay, good benefits, and maintain a very healthy payroll-to-sales position because they have massive volume. 

The bigger picture is ugly

More people are going outside than ever, but research indicates that they're buying less of the “core” gear that defines the outdoor industry. Specialty outdoor retail is struggling, and not just at REI. Dick's, whose core sporting goods stores remain strong, tried to build its own premium outdoor concept (Public Lands) but eventually pulled that back and shut down nearly all of Moosejaw within two years of buying it.

Brands have also shifted the ways they reach consumers. Specialty outdoor retail (and bigger outdoor retail like REI) used to be one of the places to find brands like Arc'teryx. But now, Arc'teryx has hundreds of its own stores globally, and has flipped its business from 80% wholesale to 80% direct-to-consumer. Salomon, Hoka, Patagonia, On and others are all taking similar approaches. Owned retail locations and DTC sales mean higher margins, better customer data, and tighter control over how their stuff gets discounted. So they're preferring sales through their own websites and stores instead of through wholesale partners like REI.

All of this means REI and other retail locations become less of a shopping destination, with less exclusive products, and less freedom to discount.

Where people turn instead

Much of the boycott discourse pushes shoppers toward local retailers or other options (as if part of the problem isn't that most of us already moved our shopping online). But even with union criticisms, REI currently has some of the best pay and benefits in retail, particularly among large national chains. Part-time workers get benefits, the retirement contributions are meaningful, and PTO is generous by category standards. It's also irrelevant to whether the workers at the unionized stores have legitimate grievances.

Most independent outdoor shops are small businesses. One or two locations, a handful of employees per store. They typically pay maybe $14-20 per hour, depending on location, for retail associates, offer benefits only to full-time staff if at all, and rarely have retirement programs. 

Independent specialty matters, and the case for shopping there is real. Independent specialty is often where new brands break in, where true local expertise lives, and where outdoor culture is built in ways that don't scale to national chains. The boycott discourse tends to fuse a cultural argument and a labor argument as if they're the same thing. The cultural case for shopping at these places is real. But as an act of labor solidarity, shopping local mostly shifts spending to operations that are worse on many of the issues this boycott is concerned with.

REI’s place in the industry

I'm not defending REI's corporate decision-making. There's a long list of choices over the past several years that are missteps of their own making. But what REI is at the industry level isn't really replicated anywhere else.

REI funds the Cooperative Action Network, which has driven over 775,000 members to write to elected officials since 2021, and generated a record 1.2 million messages to lawmakers in 2025 alone. They're leading the Brands for Public Lands coalition with 170+ companies pushing back on federal threats to public lands. Product Impact Standards apply to over 1,000 brand partners and have driven category-wide progress on PFAS phaseouts, recycled materials, and supply chain transparency. REI representatives sit at the table on EXPLORE Act implementation, Legacy Restoration Fund reauthorization, tariff conversations, and conservation policy work in Washington and across state capitals.

There’s a lot of talk about the shift from core outdoors to outdoor lifestyle, and how those brands are taking consumer dollars and market share; when that happens, we lose something else as well.

What happens as spending and cultural influence shift toward brands (or retailers) with less of a dog in the fight on American and public-lands issues? A global brand chasing growth in dozens of markets doesn't have the same reason to care about the EXPLORE Act as a mission-driven, US-based co-op does, and maybe it's not fair to expect it to. But who do we expect to be engaged (or get more engaged) in that work? Lululemon isn't spending the time and money to lobby for public lands. Alo isn't speaking up about Bears Ears. Vuori isn't part of the Brands for Public Lands coalition. Many of the bigger outdoor players do more, but there’s a difference between marketing around these issues and being deeply engaged.

The bottom line

The flip from "REI is great" to "REI is a pariah" over the last few years has been unfortunate. This isn't an argument that REI is above criticism. It's an argument that turning against it so completely, without acknowledging the complexity or what REI represents at the industry level, misses something.

And maybe I'm overstating that importance. It's possible the industry work reorganizes itself, other companies step up, and REI matters less than I think. I'd love to hear from others if they have a different take.

None of this is to say REI is doomed. The 2025 numbers are better than the last few years, and this isn't a company on the verge of immediate collapse. We're watching a company try to claw its way out of a hole it partly dug itself, and that's going to be slow and ugly even if it works.

The SoHo closure isn't the last hard decision REI is going to make. There's no sustainable version of REI that doesn't involve more cuts. None of that will feel good to watch or experience, and every headline will stir up emotional responses. But the alternative is a company that doesn't survive the next few years, and the alternative to that is private equity. And PE isn’t known for investing in policy coalitions.

I made a few updates to projects over the weekend, adding GAOA project investments to data.hereandthere and re-working Indie Outdoors a bit to have a more useful feed of great writing vs only database of indie publications. If you have a sec, check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks for reading.

—Kyle (say hi via email, LinkedIn, or just reply to this email)

"To love America is to see America," Duffy says.

I have many fond memories of summer road trips up Highway 395, backpacking and hiking all over the Eastern Sierra. Stops at McDonalds (a road trip treat for us), the Schatts Bakery in Bishop, looking through those little ‘telescope’ pipes in Lone Pine that point at Whitney and Langley. There’s a simplicity and a romanticism to it. You need a car, a tank of gas, and somewhere to point towards.

Beyond concerns about conflicts of interest (the show is sponsored by companies Duffy is supposed to regulate), I think the most grating aspect of Duffy's industry-funded vacation is the blind eye it turns to the current state of the world. The road trip experience Duffy is pitching, the long-haul, cross-country version, is exactly what’s getting harder to do this summer. And the administration he's a part of is the reason why.

What gas prices do to road trip math

The national average for a gallon of regular gas has risen to over $4.50, and is significantly higher in many places. That's up roughly 50% from $2.98 on February 26, the day before the U.S. and Israel launched a war against Iran and the Strait of Hormuz got blockaded. It's the highest gas has been since the immediate aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Add inflation, tariffs on imported goods, and higher food-and-lodging costs, and a road trip in 2026 is noticeably more expensive than it was a year ago.

Those increases have trackable effects. A poll from late April found that 44% of adults have cut back on driving and 34% have adjusted travel or vacation plans because of gas prices. Consumer research firm Technomic estimates that every $0.50 increase in gas prices reduces U.S. consumer spending by roughly $68 billion.

AAA is still projecting 45 million Americans will travel at least 50 miles from home over the holiday weekend. On paper, that's a record. But it's also only a 0.4% increase over last year, which is the smallest year-over-year growth in over a decade (outside of 2020). People are still going to travel, especially around holiday weekends. And road trips are still the more flexible and cheaper option than flying, which has also been affected by fuel prices. But, I would not be surprised to see a shift toward shorter, more regional drives this summer, which could affect outdoor recreation spending.

We've been here before

When gas prices rise, outdoor recreation tourism gets hit hard because so much of it depends on people being willing to drive. Trips & Travel account for $252B of the $696B outdoor recreation economy. In 2008, FHWA recorded the largest year-over-year decline in vehicle miles traveled since record-keeping began. Great Smoky Mountains NP, the most-visited park in the country, dropped 5% in visitation. The NPS at the time attributed the declines in visitation directly to fuel prices. In 2022, visitation held up better, but mostly because of post-COVID demand. The pattern underneath was the same: closer destinations, less spending per visit.

There’s been a lot of recent discussion about increased park fees, but the clearest finding, across multiple studies of NPS attendance over the last few decades, is that the cost of getting to a park matters more than the cost of getting in. A UMass Amherst study that modeled NPS attendance from 1993 to 2010 found that rising fuel prices relative to income were the strongest predictor of visitation declines, more than entrance fees or other factors. Visitation from people living relatively close to a park tends to hold stable during fuel spikes and recessions, while long-haul visitors have a steeper decline and recover more gradually.

Which gateway towns get hit is pretty predictable. The ones close to major metros hold up better, and the ones at the end of long drives lose visitation faster. Even where visitation holds, the spending mix is likely to change. People still come, but they stay shorter, eat cheaper, and skip more expensive local tours and experiences. In 2024, visitors to national park units spent $29 billion within 60 miles of a park — concentrated in places like West Yellowstone, Springdale, Estes Park, Moab, and Cortez. These towns are at the end of long drives, and the business model assumes people are willing to make them.

A few thoughts

I think more local camping will see a surge if trips get shorter. Even with reservation frustrations, rising fees, and the well-documented NPS campground availability issues, camping is still the cheapest multi-night option for a family by a wide margin. A weekend at a state park campground is a steal compared to a weekend at a chain hotel within an hour of any major outdoor destination. If you want to predict where outdoor recreation grows this summer, state parks within drive radius of population centers seem an obvious answer. Whether the systems are funded well enough to handle it is a separate question.

Visitation won’t be down everywhere – plenty of places will still see high/record visitation this summer, matching recent trends. Yosemite is already seeing record visitation so far in 2026, which makes sense, because they dropped entry reservations, it's a few hours from major metros, and driving there is still cheaper than flying anywhere. The parks that are more likely to see fluctuations are the ones with a higher travel/drive commitment.

State tourism budgets are typically focused on capturing high value out-of-state spending — which works in a low-gas-price world where people will drive 12 hours. But with rising prices, the valuable visitor is the one 200 miles away choosing between you and the next state over. South Dakota's tourism secretary Jim Hagen told the Mitchell Republic this month that the state is leaning into its role as a "regional drive market" precisely because higher gas prices are pushing travelers toward closer destinations.

One of the legitimate criticisms of the Legacy Restoration Fund has been its outsized focus on tentpole national parks. Most GAOA money has gone to deferred maintenance at places like Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon rather than expanding capacity or improving park experiences closer to where people actually live. A summer where long-haul travel is getting harder is exactly when you'd want federal investment flowing toward regional trailheads, campgrounds, and access points within a few hours of population centers. Instead, this administration is cutting the programs that fund them and hasn't proposed anything to replace them. The case for regional outdoor infrastructure is at its strongest. Nobody in a position to act on it is making it.

Which brings me back to the trailer.

The thing that bothers me about The Great American Road Trip is that it asks people to do something the administration is simultaneously making harder. Gas is at a four-year seasonal high because of a war the administration started. International tourism is down because of anti-US sentiment, fee changes and visa policies. The public lands that inspire millions of road trips are having their staff gutted, funding nixed, and being opened to increased extraction.

I’m all for encouraging people to travel and experience different sides of the US. Road trips are a great way to do that. But the show, featuring the Transportation Secretary, isn't tied to a single piece of policy that would make it easier or more enjoyable to do so. No expanded campground funding, no infrastructure for rural tourism or EV travel, no additional support for state parks as a lower-cost alternative. It's vapid, tone-deaf promotion without investment.

What you have instead is a Toyota-sponsored reality show telling people that to “love America is to see America”, produced by the same administration whose policies are making seeing America more expensive than it's been in years.

I've written about the outdoor recreation economy and public lands policy for years but I'd never actually walked into a lawmaker's office and made the case for something in person. Last week I did, for the first time, with the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA).

—Kyle (say hi via email, LinkedIn, or just reply to this email)

A Few Days on Capitol Hill

Capitol Hill is confusing, frustrating, and complicated. The meetings are short. The staffers are young. Some offices are warm and engaged and some are politely going through the motions. You can walk out of one meeting feeling like you moved the needle a fraction of an inch, and out of the next one wondering if anyone was listening.

But folks from across the industry showed up for the Capitol Hill Summit, hosted by OIA. In many cases, far more often than this. Two, three, four times a year. Others are in Washington far more than that.

The Summit started with a day of presentations and panel discussions before anyone set foot on the Hill. It's part briefing, part networking, part getting everyone on the same page. There were deep dives on the policy asks, a panel on the current state of tariffs and trade investigations, conversations about how to frame stories effectively in meetings, and a lot of getting to know the people you'd be walking into congressional offices with the next morning. For a first-timer like me, it was invaluable.

The Priorities

So what were we actually there for? In brief: the re-authorization of the Legacy Restoration Fund (LRF), pushing for continued funding and implementation of the EXPLORE Act, and supporting more clarity and consistency on tariffs.

The LRF was created by the Great American Outdoors Act in 2020 to address the deferred maintenance backlog on public lands (it’s still around $41 billion), dedicating up to $1.9 billion a year for five years. But that authorization expired in September of 2025 and reauthorization has stalled. A bipartisan bill, the America the Beautiful Act, has 52 co-sponsors in the Senate (26 and 26). The White House budget even proposes reauthorizing it. The House is looking a bit more complicated. Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee have expressed concerns, saying the “draft proposal unduly includes tolls, fees and a “slush fund for Donald Trump to do vanity projects.” That's almost certainly a reference to the $10 billion 'Presidential Capital Stewardship Program' (*cough* giant Trump arch) in the FY27 budget, which proposes D.C. construction and beautification projects while cutting NPS maintenance funding by 40 percent everywhere else.

The EXPLORE Act passed in late 2024 by unanimous consent (almost nothing does) after roughly a decade of work, and represents the most significant outdoor recreation legislation in a generation. Susan Viscon, who has been at REI for over 30 years, talked in our meetings about what that actually looked like. REI spent nine years helping draft key provisions, from the SOAR Act (which overhauls outfitter and guide permitting) to climbing access language developed with the Access Fund. They co-founded coalitions, built support for the permitting reform, and drove thousands of constituent messages to Congress.

But passage and funding are two separate fights. We were on the Hill pushing lawmakers to make sure the EXPLORE Act gets the appropriations to actually do the things it authorizes. Some things have moved forward, like permitting reform and digital parks passes. But a significant amount of the bill still lacks funding. And with the Forest Service down roughly 8,500 employees, the agencies that would implement these provisions are stretched thinner than ever.

And yes, the constant issue of tariffs. Outdoor apparel and footwear already carry some of the highest base import duties of any consumer goods category, and the new reciprocal tariffs pushed some products to astronomical numbers. Cassie Abel, the founder of Wild Rye, has been one of the most visible voices on this, telling the story of what it looks like for a small brand with no ability to absorb those costs and nowhere else to source. She was joined by folks with similar stories from Cotopaxi, Keen, VF Corp, Columbia, and more. The IEEPA tariffs have since been overturned by the Supreme Court, but two new investigations are underway (one covering 60 countries on forced labor, one covering 16 countries on excess capacity), and the realistic expectation is that new rates will land by mid-July. The tariffs aren't going back to zero. But the question is what the new normal looks like – the repeated word was consistency. Companies can forecast and plan for tariffs but if the rules keep changing on a weekly basis, it's nearly impossible for companies already pricing FY27 and FY28 lines.

OIA organized the meetings in groups, each with a different set of lawmakers and a slightly different focus. Taldi Harrison from OIA led our group around the Capitol, keeping everyone on schedule and on message. Everyone finds their role. Someone opens with the economic case, someone tells a personal story, someone handles a specific policy ask. I was the data guy, so I'd lead off every meeting with the top-line numbers around the outdoor recreation economy, and dive into a few state-level stats relevant to whomever we were talking to.

I quickly coded up a printer-friendly fact-sheet using data.hereandthere.club

The Meetings

My team’s meetings were primarily with Democrats and it often felt like preaching to the choir (I told Kent Ebersole, president of OIA, that I wanted all Republican meetings next time). But, that's still important. These offices need to hear from constituents and businesses that public lands and outdoor recreation are priorities, as well as safe, popular policy positions. One office told us they were working on a bill to prevent public lands sales from being pushed through via reconciliation. That bill, the Public Lands Integrity Act, has since been introduced by Bennet (D-CO), Merkley (D-OR), Wyden (D-OR), and Heinrich (D-NM). It would amend the Byrd Rule to make any provision resulting in the sale of federal public lands "extraneous" under reconciliation, meaning it would need 60 votes instead of a simple majority. This is a direct response to last summer, when Republicans nearly approved selling one to three million acres of federal land in the reconciliation bill. That provision got pulled after bipartisan pushback and public outrage, but nothing currently prevents someone from trying again.

Other groups had harder conversations. Some Republican offices were blunt about the Congressional Review Act being a tool they intend to keep using now that the precedent has been set (the Boundary Waters mining issue being the most recent example). Others conveyed a general sense of "we know, but there's not much we can or are willing to do right now" on public lands issues, which is honest but not exactly comforting. At least one was genuinely a bit hostile and off-the-wall. That feeds the cynicism. But it also makes the case for why you have to keep showing up. It’s still important for everyone to hear these stories and see this data, whether or not they vote your way every time.

It's not glamorous work. It's not even particularly exciting in the moment. You're sitting in a conference room surrounded by photos of the member's district, making a case you've rehearsed three or four times already that morning. Sometimes you're with senior staff who are helping make decisions and sometimes you're hoping a staffer who looks like they’re in high school will remember your visit and pass it up the chain.

But this is where the work happens. In boring, bureaucratic conference rooms with people who show up year after year, knowing that making progress is a game of inches. Most of the work done in these rooms won't bear fruit or show concrete results for years, but you have to do it anyway. That young staffer who took your meeting? They might become a member, or a governor, or remember you the next time and make your meeting a priority.

I should be clear: constituent engagement (emails, letters, phone calls, etc) matters as well. We heard it over and over again this week. When people call their representatives, write letters, show up at town halls, that registers. The public lands sell-off got stopped last year in large part because enough people made noise about it through the right channels. The distinction isn't between activism and advocacy, although those things are different. But we should make a distinction between engagement that's directed at the people who can actually change things and engagement that's directed at LL Bean's customer service line.

The Invisible Work

Many of the companies that showed up on the Hill this week are the same ones that social media has been furious at for various reasons over the last few months. AltNPS recently ran a campaign urging followers to flood the customer support channels of brands that didn’t speak out quickly enough about the USFS office reorganizations.

I've written about AltNPS before and the concerns haven't changed. It's an anonymous engagement engine with no organizational transparency, repackaging other people's journalism and selling t-shirts from a virtual mailbox in North Carolina. The petition does little to move anything, and targeting outdoor companies is misguided. Getting a company to sign a petition because you flooded their customer service line is not a win. And it's aimed at the wrong target, because the USFS directive is an executive branch action that is, frustratingly, within their power. We can argue it's bad policy, but LL Bean posting on Instagram is not going to reverse it. But, LL Bean was here, at the Summit. AltNPS was…not.

This has been a bit of a pattern. The Burgum letter outrage. The Patagonia/Pattiegonia lawsuit discourse. USFS coverage is frequently characterized as a "complete dismantling" or framed as affecting national parks (it doesn't). The underlying frustration is real and everyone should be alarmed about what's happening to public lands. But much of the content driving the outrage either intentionally or unintentionally lacks the depth of knowledge to effectively communicate the shape of the problems we face. And the people generating that content often have more of a stake in maximizing engagement than in the work toward better outcomes.

I’ll Be Back

I had an academic understanding of lobbying before this week. Actually doing it changed my perspective. It's also, honestly, kind of fun. Put on a suit ($14 on Vinted), work with your team, figure out what data/stories/angles reach each member the best, and zigzag around the Hill hoping you're moving things forward. It takes an immense amount of time and effort to get anything done, and the outdoor industry is outspent by orders of magnitude by other sectors. But many of the people at the Capitol Hill Summit were founders or executives carving time out of running their businesses to be there, and we still manage to punch above our weight class.

It's true that the brands have often done a poor job communicating this work, and that they've sometimes moved slower than it seems like they should. But the folks doing the most useful work aren't typically the ones yelling the loudest on social media. The slow, deliberate progress of moving issues forward with repetition, determination, and compromise doesn't perform well on Instagram.

But the reason we care is that we truly enjoy the things we do in the outdoors. I don’t want to lose touch with that, partially because it’s not so fun to write about depressing stuff all the time, but also because I need an excuse to share photos that would otherwise languish on my hard drive 😂.

—Kyle (say hi via email, LinkedIn, or just reply to this email)

Three Different Trips

One was a city-based week where I never stayed at a resort. One was a proper British package holiday, and one was a week at a place that’s iconic in the freeride world. Innsbruck, La Plagne, Engelberg.

Innsbruck, Austria

Innsbruck is one of my favorite cities. It's a real city, not just a ski town, with a population of 132,000 and the Nordkette rising directly above the north bank of the river. It also happens to have a bounty of great skiing within a stones throw by public transit. We stayed near the train station and picked a different mountain every day: Axamer Lizum, Stubai Glacier, and a trip over to St. Anton.

The SKI plus CITY Pass covers 12 areas across the Innsbruck and Stubai regions with a single card, and it includes the ski buses, which run from town out to the base stations every morning. You get on a bus, and an hour later you're on a lift. Axamer Lizum is maybe 30 minutes from the city. Stubai Glacier is about an hour.

Each of the mountains had its own character. Axamer Lizum feels like a backyard hill, albeit with some pretty fun looking off-piste that was too sun-baked to ski while we were there. A spot that Innsbruck locals turn to for a quick morning or afternoon ski. The resort has decent variety, but it’s a bit small if you’re just skiing pistes. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Hoadl-Haus at the top, one of the more stunning mountain lodges I've been in.

Stubai Glacier is higher, colder, and bigger with the kind of terrain that stays in decent shape when the lower resorts are struggling. The top station sits at 3,210 meters, and the whole ski area lives between about 2,300 meters and the summit, which means no trees and no tree line. The whole resort sits in a big bowl. It can be great, but also frustrating if a bit of weather moves in and visibility drops to zero. You get around on a handful of T-bars on the glacier itself (the ice moves too much for chairlifts).

St. Anton is St. Anton. Catch a train west out of Innsbruck in the morning and you're at one of the most iconic resorts in Europe. It's an easy commute: we caught an 8:00 train, got there around 9, skied basically bell-to-bell and caught the 5pm train back to Innsbruck for dinner. There’s a huge variety of piste and off-piste terrain, and the amount of connected Ski Arlberg connected resorts is huge. You could easily stay around St Anton for a week and not get bored, although the price tag for accommodations might be a bit different. We’ll definitely have to come back with better off-piste conditions.

The thing that sticks with me about Innsbruck isn't necessarily any single day of skiing. It's the overall vibe. The train station is consistently full of people with skis and mountaineering packs. You see people biking to the station with skis, ropes, and ice axes over their back. In some ways it reminds me of Boulder but Boulder doesn’t have twelve lift-served ski areas within an hour that are all accessible by public transit.

La Plagne, France

La Plagne pulls somewhere north of 2.5 million visitors a season, in large part because it has the size and infrastructure to handle so many people. When you combine it with Les Arcs it becomes Paradiski, one of the largest linked ski areas in the world with 425 kilometers of pistes.

We went on a proper British package holiday, which was a first for me. It was all organized by a friend in London and we joined a group of 32 — some people we knew, some we didn’t, but everyone was connected in some way. The package holiday is a kind of institution; they run Saturday to Saturday, with flights into Geneva, coach transfer to the resort, and a week's lift pass, all bundled together. Total cost for the week, not including flights (which aren’t very expensive in Europe) was around a thousand dollars a person.

The amount of tourism infrastructure that is purely designed around this style of trip is insane. Every operator runs Saturday-to-Saturday rotations, which turns Geneva airport into a kind of controlled riot on changeover day. Groups stand around waiting for the last of their friends to land before boarding buses. Buses stack up outside arrivals. Traffic between Geneva and the Tarentaise valley is bumper to bumper for hours. It's not the most relaxing. But once you're on the resort, you don't need to think about any of it again until the next Saturday.

We ended up with mostly bluebird weather, which was good for the pistes, and less so for the off-piste. Days weren't really about charging, but that was part of the point. A lot of the week was just skiing with friends: get going in the morning, pick an area to explore, stop when somebody needed a coffee. I learned that “elevenses” (a short break taken at around 11:00 am for a drink or a snack) is a real thing and not just something Hobbits do. Not gonna be mad about a short break for an espresso or a vin chaud. Raging bell-to-bell is fun but so is spending six hours on the hill without any of it feeling like a sprint.

A lot of people in our group were happy to take long mountaintop lunches, and more power to them. We tended toward the "cheese, bread, butter, and keep skiing" camp, albeit with the occasional elevenses stop thrown in. Mid-week a storm rolled through and dropped enough snow to refresh the off-piste terrain. We spent a day lapping the Combe off the top of the resort, and lines that would have been gone by 10am in the US were soft all day. Part of the reason for that it is that European skiers tend to stay on-piste more, and part of it is just scale.

Engelberg, Switzerland

Engelberg is different. The train pulls in from Lucerne and drops you at a small station in the middle of a small Swiss village toward the end of the valley. There’s a thousand-year-old Benedictine monastery on one end, a handful of restaurants and ski shops along the main road, and above it all the Titlis massif.

I wrote about Engelberg and the Ski Lodge in the summer a couple years back more focused on trail running, and finally made it back in the winter. I'd go back next week if I could. Titlis has less than a quarter of the pistes of La Plagne. But it has a 2,000-meter vertical drop and some of the best lift-accessed off-piste terrain in the Alps. The "Big Five" freeride routes (Laub, Galtiberg, Steinberg, Sulz, Steintäli) are legendary for a reason.

I wouldn't recommend Engelberg as a first choice for for beginners or people who prefer pistes. The piste map is small and less experienced skiers might get bored quickly. But if you want to ski off-piste and you want to be surrounded by people who really, really love skiing, there are probably few better spots.

Day one, run one was a trip up the gondola to the top of the resort at Klein Titlis, where we dropped into the Steinberg, 4,000 ft of glacier skiing running down to Trübsee. And that pretty much set the tone. We spent a few days romping around the resort and then as spring temps started to turn the snow into mashed potatoes, we got off the resort and did a couple of tours on nearby Wissberg and Bannalp with friends.

Have Fun

There's no takeaway or conclusion here, These were three different trips, and they were all great. (If someone asked me which was best, I'd say Engelberg, but that’s beside the point). The main thing is that skiing is fun. Skiing a big resort is fun, skiing with friends is fun, and being surrounded by really good skiers is fun. We do the rest of it, the writing about the industry, policy, climate data, etc, because that fun (skiing, trail running, hiking, fishing, hunting, whatever it may be) is worth protecting.

A Quick Aside on Gear

I’ve been running on minimal gear while living in London, since the rest of my stuff is in a storage unit in Boulder. So, for the gear nerds:

Stellar Equipment Pro Shell/Bibs, Peak Performance Freelight, an Arc’teryx wind shell (10y old, no idea what). Rab baselayers. Smartwool socks.

Salomon MTN Lab helmet, Sweet Protection Connor goggles, K2 Mindbender 130 Boa, Salomon Echo skis w/ATK Freeraider 15, Raide 40L backpack.

The Stellar kit is bomber, not much more to say there. I run pretty warm so the minimal Peak Alpha Direct and light jacket layering has been perfect for me, not only for skiing but longer trail days. The Echo isn’t bad for a one-ski quiver but a heavier/narrower 50/50 will be significantly better for Europe most of the time. The Mindbenders are good, but not great as a hybrid, and I haven’t experienced any of the QA issues some folks report. I have the v1 of the Raide backpack and love it (also spotted it on a bunch of folks in Engelberg).

Hope y’all are well. I’ve been trying to ramp up my running a bit with some time in the English countryside this week. I’m off to DC next week with OIA, and figuring out if I can swing some trail time in the Alps plus a visit to European Outdoor Week in Italy next month. Stay tuned for updates from Capitol Hill.

This week, I’m talking a bit about AI. Not in a broad sense; there are so many angles to the topic: AI slop, displaced workforces, energy costs, fundraising hype, etc. I'm focused narrower here, on what happens when the cost of building software collapses, and what that looks like in the outdoor industry.

—Kyle (say hi via email, LinkedIn, or just reply to this email)

I sat through a panel at a travel media conference last year where an AI expert spent his presentation explaining that AI wasn't actually 'intelligent' and couldn't even generate a picture of a clock correctly. I left thinking he'd steered around the actual effects of LLM adoption in order to make a room full of people feel a little better.

Twelve months later, the distance between "I wish I could build X" and "I built X" has never been narrower. (I've built a handful of things myself this year with AI tools.) A lot of other people are doing the same thing, in the outdoor industry and beyond.

How many "I built a thing to replace feature X from Strava" projects have launched in the last few months? Dozens? Hundreds? I built my own little training plan app in an afternoon by feeding in a CSV of my Strava data. It told me I was severely undertrained for a mountain ultra because I'm not getting enough elevation in London. (Fair.) Strava apps are only one example; it’s happening across nearly everything related to the outdoors, sport, and travel (in addition to other consumer categories).

Everyone is building on top of Strava data

Calorie tracking apps, route planners, all-in-one travel planners, coaching platforms, segment analyzers, social fitness alternatives, recovery dashboards, AI training plan generators. These are all popping up (seemingly daily) from solo-builders and new startups. Anything map-based has a similar story. Most map-centric apps sit on roughly the same underlying OSM and trail data; what differentiates them is the interface, community, and distribution, not the data layer. Same for anything built on publicly available APIs like weather, snow conditions, fire data, and air quality. If your product's primary value is "we pulled public data and put a nice interface on it," it’s probably cloneable in a weekend.

Uses my Strava data to suggest workouts and asses “race readiness”

It's not just hobbyists and vibe coding. Engineers at your favorite brand are running coding agents every day. Marketing leads are drafting subject lines and ad copy. Brand teams are running research. Enthusiasts are shipping apps over a weekend. Operations teams are building one-off internal tools that a year ago would have sat in a backlog for a year. RunSignup, the race registration platform, built out an entire vibe-coding webinar series for race directors, teaching them to build custom apps with RunSignup's public API.

My personal social image creator for H&T

Now, most of these little apps will fail as businesses, because statistically, most businesses fail. But it’s also because making something and posting it on social media is not the hard part of building a product. Distribution is hard. Scaling and sustaining infrastructure is hard. Customer support is hard. Security and privacy are hard. Keeping the lights on past an initial wave of novelty is hard. Many of the "problems" people are breathlessly solving are things the community has magnified far beyond the actual addressable market.

But some of them won't fail. Some small team will find a niche an incumbent didn't care about, build something genuinely better, get loud on TikTok or in the right Reddit community, and grow from there. Take Cal AI. Two teenagers built an AI calorie-tracking app that logs meals from a photo, hit $30M in revenue in under two years, and then got acquired by MyFitnessPal last December — by all accounts mostly for the userbase; there’s nothing particularly special about their underlying technology.

And many of them won't need to grow. Len Necefer recently shipped the Expedition Power Planner, an iOS app that models battery, solar, and power station loads for backcountry documentary shoots. I spoke to one tour operator who has been building internal tools for things like trip cost estimation so they can answer customer questions faster while on the phone. PackTrak will never make money, but I spent a few hours last weekend fixing bugs and adding features because a user from Germany emailed me some feedback. There's going to be more and more of this, not less.

When code and content can be generated in a few keystrokes, the things that matter are the things you can't generate. Things like brand. Community. Trust. Proprietary data. Real relationships with the people who use the product. Physical infrastructure you can't vibe-code around.

Network effects aren’t going away. Strava isn't competing purely on the quality or depth of its training analysis. It has 150 million users and a social graph that's nearly impossible to build from scratch, which is why anyone who's tried a Strava clone for more than a week feels the absence of their friends and drifts back. Similarly, the core Instagram experience is not particularly complicated. But the years are littered with a graveyard of over-hyped "Instagram alternatives" that promise to bring a chronological feed that "everyone wants" and no ads.

Proprietary data is more important than ever. A coding agent can build a booking engine in a long weekend. It can't fabricate a decade of conversion data, pricing history, or guest behavior analytics. You can build a trails app, but it’ll take something very special to compete against years of photos, reviews, and user activity.

The advantages for incumbents are significant. If anything, larger companies are in a position to use this moment well, either by acquiring the small, fast-growing competitors who prove out a niche or by actually using new tooling internally to ship faster and clean up the parts of their products that have been embarrassing for years. That said, in a subscription-fatigued world, a new challenger that’s 70-80% as good but at lower price point can still eat into incumbents market share.

Relationships are a kind of proprietary data of their own. I've owned findoutdoorjobs.com for almost a decade at this point. I initially bought it because I thought outdoorindustryjobs.com was such a poor experience. I could spin up a full-featured jobs site over the weekend (who knows, I still might), but that's a far cry from building the relationships with brands and hiring managers that would make it sustainable and useful.

You have to make people actually care about your brand. That means having a voice, telling stories, being a company with recognizable personality attached to it rather than a faceless PE operation. This has always mattered, but in a world where software is increasingly generic and content is being churned out by bots, the companies with a real point of view and human perspective are going to stand out more. Yes, you can make your own snow forecast app. But why should I trust you over Joel at OpenSnow?

There are interesting versions of this in adjacent industries. Karri Saarinen, CEO of Linear, is a public voice on design and product strategy, and the company's worldview is visible in the product itself. Tyler Denk, CEO of Beehiiv, writes a personal newsletter to 120k readers about his life and the business. Rafat Ali, CEO of Skift, s a loud, opinionated voice on travel, in his editorial and on LinkedIn. Each of them provides a more human lens into what the company thinks and how it operates.

A year from now, there will probably be more of all of this. More tiny apps. More hobbyist tools. More Cal AIs. More hot takes about "everyone making their own personal software." A lot of bad products and a few genuinely useful ones.

But you can't ask Claude to "make a website to visualize outdoor recreation data" and end up with data.hereandthere.club. What's in it still depends on a pile of product and design experience, opinions, context, and decisions that don't exist in any training data. The challenge is building companies and products that still matter when anyone can build software.

—Kyle (say hi via email, LinkedIn, or just reply to this email)

Engelberg FTW

A few days ago, a French running brand called Kiprun officially launched in US specialty running shops and online. Kiprun is one of Decathlon's "expert brands," alongside Van Rysel for cycling and Simond for mountaineering. If you're US-based, I might give you a pass for never having heard of Decathlon, although I'm consistently surprised at just how many people in the US outdoor industry are unfamiliar with one of the most significant sporting goods companies on the planet. They're the world's largest sporting goods retailer: 1,817 stores across 79 countries, around €16.2 billion in annual revenue. And they have zero cultural recognition in the United States.

I spoke with Julien Vancauwenberghe, Kiprun's global CMO, about the launch, the strategy, and what it's like to introduce a brand that's well-known in one market and completely invisible in another. He's a French-American marketer who came to Kiprun via Coca-Cola and Amazon, where he worked on Vitamin Water and Amazon Fresh. Not necessarily the resume you'd predict for someone running a French running brand's specialty wholesale launch.

When I asked why now, and what makes Kiprun think there's room for yet another brand in a crowded market, Julien's answer had three parts. He thinks the product is ready, the brand identity is ready (Kiprun went through a full visual rebrand recently), and the strategy is different this time.

It needs to be, because Decathlon hasn’t been able to crack the US in the past.

Trying To Crack The US, Again

Decathlon has been in and out of America more than once. In 1999 they bought MVP Sports Stores and rebranded the locations. All of them were closed by 2006. They came back in 2017 with a store in downtown San Francisco and scaled up to full-sized stores in Emeryville and Potrero Hill, but closed everything in March 2022. I think the failures were primarily because Decathlon was trying to import a retail format that doesn't have a US equivalent. Or at least not one with positive associations in outdoor.

In Europe, Decathlon is where you can buy a tent, a yoga mat, a soccer jersey, running shoes, golf clubs, workout gear, and a bike pump in one trip. It’s affordable, good quality, and almost everything is store-branded. No one's putting them up directly against Arc'teryx, but if you need a solid rain jacket at half the price, that's the place.

The closest US analog would be REI, whose house brand is slightly cheaper than the brands it stocks but which is still mostly a curated outdoor retailer. Or Dick's, which has a broader stock but isn't owned retail. Neither is really the IKEA-slash-Trader-Joes-of-sports format Decathlon runs in Europe, where everything on the shelf is theirs and the quality holds up. Americans didn't have a great reference point for it, and "cheaper and store-branded" got associated more with Walmart than performance value.

Kiprun is doing things differently on basically every front. Instead of using the Decathlon brand or owned retail, they're focusing on wholesale through specialty running shops, performance positioning instead of value, and no Decathlon branding anywhere on the product. This makes their competitive set brands like Hoka, Brooks, Saucony, and On — not Dick's, REI, and Walmart. I think it’s a more competitive approach for them, but by no means a sure thing. The shoes will also be available online.

"From a consumer perspective, there's no association between Kiprun and Decathlon," Julien said. "If you look at a running shoe, no mention of Decathlon. We decided to focus on attracting a very specific customer target group, more performance-driven. That's not the core target of Decathlon." I will say, there is a bit of confusion here that consumers may have to navigate, particularly online. Kiprun.com exists, but so does decathlon.com/collections/kiprun-shoes, and the Kiprun site redirects to a dual-branded Stripe checkout.

For year one, it isn’t about national launch campaigns and heavy marketing, it's about the shops. "For now, our focus will be at the point of sale, working well with the right partners, and making sure that it sells through," Julien said. "All our focus should be on the community around the stores." He drew a parallel to his Vitamin Water days at Coca-Cola: "It was a brand that was built store after store. We were not doing a lot of typical marketing, we were making sure that the product was positioned in the right stores, and getting in the right hands of the right people."

For distribution, Kiprun is launching with Running Warehouse, Run Moore, and Heartbreak, targeting 10 to 20 retail partners in year one. They brought potential retail partners to Decathlon's facilities in France and to UTMB Chamonix so they could see the R&D labs, the scale of the operation, and understand the breadth and story of the brand in a deeper way.

A Limited Launch

The product lineup for the US is small. Kiprun has an extensive range in Europe but is launching in the US focused on just a few models: the Kipride Max ($160, daily trainer), the Kipstorm Elite ($250, carbon-plated road racer), and the Kipsummit Max ($150, max-cushion trail shoe). No true entry-level price points, no apparel, and no Kipstorm Lab (their $350 super shoe).

Kipsummit Max

The shoes undercut comparable models by a decent amount. The Kipsummit Max is $15 cheaper than a Speedgoat 7. The Kipstorm Elite is ~$30 less than most of the carbon racers it'll sit next to. But Kiprun won't be leading with price in any of their consumer-facing marketing. "Our communication should be about establishing ourselves as a credible brand with great quality products," Julien said. "The price will be discovered on shelf or online." He's aware that in the US, lower price can signal lower quality, and the plan is to build the performance reputation first and let the pricing be a bonus rather than the headline. Leading with price would risk inviting the exact "budget brand" perception that hurt Decathlon and Kiprun is trying to avoid.

Kipsummit Race

The reason the math works at all is that Decathlon designs, tests, and manufactures almost everything themselves. Julien compared the model to Trader Joe's, where about 90% of what's on the shelf is their own product. That vertical integration is what lets them sell a $250 carbon racer that's comparable to a $280+ shoe while also giving the retailer better margins. "Because of our scale and verticalization, we can offer generous margins to the retailer. And as long as we're committed to giving them a generous margin, they're very happy to support us."

I think the trickier part is what actually happens in-store. A customer walks into a run shop, picks up the Kipstorm Elite, sees that it's $30 less than a comparable carbon racer, and asks the employee why. The shop has to have a compelling answer that frames the price gap as a feature, rather than evidence that the shoe is somehow of lower quality. The next year of word-of-mouth and online discourse will be incredibly important. Either Kiprun is "performance at a fair price," or it's "the cheap one," which might put them right back where Decathlon was in the Bay Area.

You can watch some of this play out in real time on a recent Believe in the Run review of the Kipsummit Max. Both reviewers walked in expecting budget-tier quality. Both reviewers ended up with a positive review. Taylor Bodin wrote that the brand had set him up "for being completely and utterly surprised," which is basically the best-case version of what Kiprun is trying to engineer, and a useful example of the perception challenge they're working against. A reviewer is skeptical (despite almost no actual experience with the brand), runs in the shoe, and walks away surprised, saying it earns its place next to more expensive options. One review isn't a trend, but it's a useful early data point.

A few final thoughts

1. Kiprun isn't really a “new challenger brand.” There are a lot of smaller brands trying for a piece of the pie right now, like Mount to Coast, Norda, Satisfy, Nnormal, Speedland, etc. But Kiprun was founded in 2008, sells in 70 countries, and has a huge parent company funding its R&D. They’re openly planning a multi-year ramp, and they can do that because Decathlon doesn't need the US business to be fully realized next quarter. €16 billion in revenue buys some patience.

2. Athlete marketing. Kiprun signed Jimmy Gressier from Nike and then he won the 10,000m at last year's Worlds in Tokyo. Blandine L'Hirondel has multiple trail titles and recently won Diagonale des Fous wearing both the Kipsummit Race and Max. But I don't think either of them really moves the needle in the US the way they might in Europe. Paul Chelimo is the sole American (and is a track athlete) on their roster, which is otherwise mostly French. I think they'll need to either get their athletes into big US trail races or sign more domestic names. Shoes on podiums aren't the only way to build awareness, but it sure doesn't hurt.

3. Not a unique strategy. The wholesale and specialty-focused approach has worked before for European brands. Hoka and On both launched through specialty running shops, leaned on word-of-mouth and athlete adoption rather than mainstream marketing (initially), and grew into billion-dollar brands in the US market. Kiprun is running a “same same but different” version of the same playbook. The 2026 running market is a lot more crowded than the one Hoka and On entered, which is the actual question year one will answer for Kiprun.

I'm familiar with...

Just curious how many of you are familiar with either Kiprun or Decathlon.

Kiprun

Decathlon

Both

Neither

Of course, there’s been a bit of snow since I

—Kyle (say hi via email, LinkedIn, or just reply to this email)

Adventures led by women designed to make a difference.

Trek the Andes with an all-female crew in Peru. Join a women-run tuk tuk tour in Cambodia. Enjoy a traditional hot stone bath experience at a women-owned farmhouse in Bhutan. Intrepid’s new small-group Women’s Expeditions in Peru, Cambodia and Bhutan provide immersive local experiences for travellers while supporting women-run businesses.

Explore the new trips

A Rough Year

The median SNOTEL station in the American West is at 24% of normal snowpack. That means if you line up every reporting station from driest to snowiest, the one in the middle is at 24%. The average is higher, pulled up by a handful of stations in the North Cascades, Alaska, and Montana, but that's like saying the average person in a bar with Jeff Bezos is a billionaire. Nearly one in four is reading zero, at a time where most places in the west are typically at their peak for the year.

What SNOTEL Measures

The USDA's SNOTEL network is a system of roughly 900 automated stations scattered across mountain sites in the West. They've been collecting data since the early 1980s, and they measure two things that are very relevant right now: snow depth and snow water equivalent (SWE).

Snow depth is just how many inches of snow are on the ground. Useful for storm tracking and skiing. But the snow depth by itself doesn't tell you much about water supply, because snow density can vary wildly. A foot of champagne powder might contain an inch of water. A foot of heavier snow might contain four or five inches. Two sites can have identical snow depth and completely different densities.

SWE measures the actual liquid water content of the snowpack. Think of it this way: if you melted all the snow right now, SWE is how many inches of water you would actually get. This is the number that matters the most for water discussions, because it what determines how much water flows into rivers and reservoirs during spring and summer melt.

One caveat on the numbers throughout this piece: SNOTEL data is updated frequently (which you can explore at snotel.hereandthere.club) and changes hourly/daily. Some stations go offline temporarily (or the API goes down), a few inches of new snow can bump a reading, and the exact figures and percentages will depend on exactly when you pull the data. The numbers I'm citing are based on figures I’ve looked at over the last two weeks, and I’ve already revised several times closer to publishing. If you go dig into the tool yourself and see slightly different figures, that's why. The broad picture isn't going to change, but individual station readings might shift by a few points in either direction.

It’s bad bad.

You’re probably already aware that it’s been a bad snow year. But to put it in perspective, if I picked a station at random almost anywhere in the West and told you it's having its worst year on record (without looking at the data), I’d probably be right. At hundreds of sites with decades of continuous data, Water Year (WY) 2026 is the worst ever measured, and in many places by a wide margin.

We’re currently at about 21% of median snowpack across the west. That means that for every 10” of water typically in the snowpack on this date, there’s currently about 2”. Across all 713 active stations, 45% are at or below 25% of normal. Nearly a quarter are at zero. Only 12 stations in the entire West, 1.7% of the network, are above 125%. A few spots that drive home the current situation:

Vail hit a peak SWE of 9.5 inches this winter. In 48 years of records, the previous low was 12.4" during 2012. Vail currently sits at 2.9" of SWE, or 13% of its average peak.

Vail is at zero, almost a full month before the median peak

On March 23, the historical median peak at Palisades Tahoe, SWE was at 9.4” vs a historical 46”. It continued dropping from there. It did just snow, but that’s not going to make a meaningful difference, it’s still tracking toward one of the worst years ever.

Snowbird, one of the most consistently deep resorts in the Rockies, managed to track above historical minimums for most of the season. But, over the last few days it dropped below those minimums. It’s at 17.2" against a 36" normal, the lowest reading ever on today’s date.

What's different about this year?

Bad snow years happen, but this is a bit different. Not only in how poor the snowpack is, but the breadth of effect across the west. Sure, the east had a great season but everywhere west of the Mississippi and from the Canada to Mexico had a dismal year.

December temperatures in Utah and Colorado were the warmest on record, so precipitation fell as rain instead of snow. January was straight-up dry. February was closer to average on precipitation but still warm. And then, in mid-March, a “heat dome” settled over the West with temperatures reaching 30º above normal. The Rockies, which typically reach peak SWE in early April, basically peaked a full month early, and SWE fell off a (steep) cliff. The season was too warm, then too dry, then too warm again.

A snapshot of temperature readings vs snowpack a the end of March (bottom right is high temps, low snowpack)

What are the impacts?

Water. The Colorado River Basin supplies water to around 40 million people across seven states. The current forecast for water flowing into Lake Powell through July is about 2.3 million acre-feet, which works out to about a third of normal. The Glen Canyon Dam can’t reliably generate hydroelectric power below an elevation of 3,490 feet, and the current most optimistic outcome is that Lake Powell finishes the year within two feet of losing the ability to generate electricity.

As this crisis is unfolding, those seven states are in their most contentious water negotiation in a century, with the current guidelines expiring at the end of 2026 and no agreement yet in place. The 1922 compact that currently governs the river allocated water based on unusually wet years, but river flows have shrunk 20% since 2000, and every dry year like this makes things a bit more complicated.

Fire. It seems obvious, but a snowpack that already gone in April and May won't melt gradually through June and July, leading to drier conditions.

Research published in Environmental Research Letters just last week (Balik et al., Western Colorado University) analyzed 36 years of data about what drives fire issues in the west. They found that early snowmelt drives longer fire seasons and more total area burned. But specifically, they found that low SWE drives more severe fires: higher tree mortality, greater ecosystem damage, and increased likelihood of long-term forest loss. So not just more fires, but worse fires. "Snowpack acts as a kind of seasonal water savings account for forests," Balik said. "When that account runs low, soils dry out earlier, vegetation loses moisture, and forests become more vulnerable to severe fire." Unfortunately, 2026 has both a record-early melt and record-low SWE.

There’s also a feedback loop of sorts: forests that burn severely don't regenerate the canopy that previously accumulated and shaded snowpack. Severe fire begets worse snowpack begets more severe fire. And repeat.

Recreation and tourism. Skiing is the obvious one here, and Vail’s stock price is a decent bellwether for just how bad this season was for the industry. I’ve seen a few pictures of backcountry zones I usually ski until the end of June almost bone-dry this week. But a whole range of water-dependent activities face a shortened or uncertain season. Rivers will see rafting windows compress dramatically, with flows drying up months ahead of typical peak season. A couple rivers in Colorado are flowing at ~200% of normal right now, and not in a good way. That’s going to quickly drop to a fraction of normal as they reach peak flows months early, then dry up.

Fishing, floating, and reservoir recreation all depend on a seasonal water cycle that's broken this year. Places like Glen Canyon (which drove 3.73M recreation visits in 2025) have visitation trends that correlate pretty consistently with Lake Powell’s elevation. Fire, as I noted in last week’s dive on NPS visitation, also results in large swings in tourism patterns as areas close or are affected by air quality issues.

Lake Powell elevation vs Recreation visits

The outdoor recreation economy that produced $1.3 trillion in economic output is built on assumptions about functional natural systems. Rural recreation economies could be hard hit by a new normal where skiing ends in March, rivers run low by June, and fire closes wide swathes of public land and affects air quality the entire summer.

Is this an outlier?

Yes, WY2026 is statistically extreme. No weather model predicted this year’s specific combination of warm-wet followed by warm-dry followed by crazy “heat-dome”. So in that sense, yes, it's an outlier.

But, the pattern of precipitation falling as rain instead of snow at mid-elevations is exactly what climate models have been projecting for decades. Research published in Nature in 2024 found clear attribution of declining snowpack to climate change across the Northern Hemisphere.

The question for future years isn't whether we’ll have more years that are this bad. It’s basically a certainty at this point. But will it occur every 30, 20, or 10 years? If it occurs more often (which is what warming trends suggest is increasingly possible), the economics, hydrology, and fire ecology of regions start to fundamentally change.

Meanwhile, the outdoor industry's advocacy response to this moment has been, charitably, inadequate. Brands still remain mostly quiet on climate related topics and are reluctant to wade into political battles. The West is facing a summer where fire could close huge swaths of public land and water systems are at breaking points. The current administration will probably refuse disaster aid, say that Democratic states deserve it, and mumble something unintelligible about raking forests. They’re going to keep defunding climate science, cutting public lands budgets, and attempting to privatize parks. I hope more big players recognize these crises as existential for the industry and stop tiptoeing around these topics. When winter doesn't show up, so many things downstream (sorry) are at risk.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years digging into government data on outdoor recreation. But, getting to that data can be a pain. For every data dive I’ve written in the past, I’ve been pulling PDFs and Excel files from bad government websites, converting formats, cleaning the data, reading methods, and manually running my own analysis. It works, but it’s tedious, and it means the analysis lives in my spreadsheets and nowhere else.

So I built something. data.hereandthere.club is a free, interactive tool that takes all of this data and puts it in a more accessible format, for everyone. You can explore NPS visitation data for all 400+ locations in the National Park System from 1979 to 2025, and see the full BEA outdoor recreation economy data at both the national and state level from 2012–2024.

I’m not doing anything particularly revolutionary here. This data already exists, it’s public, but it’s a challenge to access and understand. I wanted to make it more accessible and more useful, both for people in the industry and for anyone who’s curious about how we use our public lands.

If anything is missing, broken, or needs to be improved, let me know. There’s a lot of ways to slice and dice, so it might be a bit overwhelming.

The timing of this “launch” is ideal…the NPS just released their 2025 visitation numbers. So let’s put the tool to work.

The National Park Headlines

• 323 million recreation visits across the National Park System in 2025

• That’s down 8.85 million visits (2.7%) from the record year in 2024 (331.9M)

• Recreation visitor hours: 1.39 billion (down 0.7%)

• Overnight stays: 13 million (down 2.4%)

The top parks are mostly the same, with a few that swapped places and the most notable change being the drop at Grand Canyon, which I’ll talk about later.

The NPS press release frames this as “public interest remains strong.” Which, sure. But also…the agency lost 24% of its permanent workforce in 2025. DOGE-initiated firings started in February, followed by a hiring freeze, early retirements, and probationary employee terminations. Seasonal hiring was way down, the Big Beautiful Bill clawed back $267 million in previously committed NPS funding, and a 43-day government shutdown ran through October and November.

So maybe a 2.7% decrease is actually kind of remarkable, given the amount of upheaval this year.

A Tale of Two Parks Systems

Visitation to the 63 national parks was nearly flat. The system-wide decline is being driven almost entirely by everything else. The NPS manages 433 units in total: 63 national parks, plus 85 national monuments, 31 national memorials, 25 battlefields, 58 national historic sites, and a bunch of recreation areas, seashores, parkways, and other designations. These sites sometimes get overlooked when we think about the “National Park Service.” But they drive a ton of overall visitation, and they’re where the steepest declines were last year. 84% of monuments saw visitation declines. 79% of historic sites. 74% of memorials. The national parks themselves were mostly fine (the avg % change across parks was +6.6).

Why? For one, national parks are more tentpole trips. You book six months out, you buy the flights, you reserve the rental hotel. You’re probably going regardless of whether the visitor center is fully staffed. These trips have real economic mass behind them, and states and local partners have a financial reason to prop them up. Utah spent $336,000 to keep visitor centers running at all five of its national parks for the duration of the shutdown. Colorado chipped in $64,000 to keep two Rocky Mountain visitor centers open for the final 20 days. At Great Smoky Mountains, a coalition of state and local governments, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and Friends of the Smokies pooled roughly $62,000 a day to fund full park operations through fall foliage season. The Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and Alcatraz City Cruises donated week by week to keep Alcatraz open and staffed.

The shutdown created a patchwork of open vs closed vs “kinda closed?” across the system. Parks and visitor sites that collect fees under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act could use available fee balances to keep basic services running, like trash collection, restrooms, road maintenance. Sites without fee collections, or with insufficient balances, had to seek DOI approval and often just shut down. Muir Woods closed. Fort McHenry closed. “Smaller” park units with less staff were affected at a higher degree by changes in staffing. If you’re running a staff of 10 and lose 4 at a park that needs a visitor center experience, that’s a much bigger deal than some of the national parks where trails stay open and some changes can be absorbed.

Some of the parks that stayed open captured displaced demand. Arches, which ended its daily permitting system early when the shutdown hit, ended up with a 16% gain in October year-over-year. Though, it’s worth noting that correlation isn’t necessarily causation here; nearby Dead Horse Point State Park also saw an October increase without any permitting system, and Goblin Valley was up 40%.

I’ll be the first to admit that I can’t be fully certain of the reason behind every decline. The methodologies for counting visitors vary quite a bit across the system, and it’s entirely possible that some of these decreases reflect fewer staff dedicated to counting and reporting rather than actual decreased visitation. I’m inclined to believe we’re seeing real declines because of closures, decreased international travel, and more, at most of these sites. But it’s a good example of how messed up things are right now. We can’t even fully trust the numbers because the people who collect and analyze them have been cut too.

The Biggest Movers

Outside of the the top 10, a few of the biggest year-over-year percentage changes tell some of the more interesting stories.

North Cascades was up 185%, from about 16,000 visitors to 47,000. This is a more of a rebound, not a sudden surge in interest. Wildfires in 2024 suppressed visitation well below normal. North Cascades still remains one of the least visited national parks in the system (57 of 63).

Crater Lake jumped 25%. A major construction project starting in 2026 will close the Cleetwood Cove Trail, the park’s most heavily used trail and the only permitted access to the lakeshore, for at least three years. The bump could be a “see it now before it’s closed” rush. It’s also possible some visitors saw headlines about a multi-year closure and assumed the whole park was shutting down, which may have driven urgency beyond what the actual closure warrants.

Grand Canyon was down 10%. The Dragon Bravo Fire hit the North Rim hard. Olympic down 2.6% after a 3,000-acre fire closed sections of the park. The Grand Canyon Lodge burned down and closures resulted in a 18% reduction to overnight stays. This is an impact likely to continue through 2026.

Black Canyon of the Gunnison dropped 26%…and this is yet another fire story. Wildfires over the summer destroyed infrastructure across thousands of acres and campgrounds and trails remain closed.

There are also a few fun/interesting things, like Isle Royale and Wrangell-St Elias having by far the highest average visit duration. Which makes sense, because, one is an island, and the other is…out there. But Kings Canyon and Sequoia were also quite high, probably because of a high percentage of backpackers. Golden Gate NRA and Blue Ridge Parkway have more raw visitors (albeit of a different kind) than the top National Park, Great Smoky Mountains.

What I’m watching for 2026

Honestly, 2026 is harder to forecast than usual.

Let’s start with gas prices. The war with Iran has spiked the national average to just under $4. Even if things somehow get resolved and the Strait of Hormuz opens soon, prices wont magically fall back below $3. That matters for park visitation because national parks are, overwhelmingly, road trip destinations.

Consumer sentiment also hit its lowest point of 2026 in March, and there’s a spending slowdown that hits exactly the categories that feed park visitation: discretionary travel, vacations, and big-ticket experiences. Morgan Stanley forecasts consumer spending growth dropping to 2.9% this year, down from 5.7% in 2024.

In a normal year, I’d say increased visitation from the World Cup this summer would result in tourism spillover to parks as international visitors tack on road trips and longer stays. But I have no idea how that’s going to play out this year. People are going to come, it’s a World Cup, after all, and we’ll probably get great articles written about that tourism boost. But I don’t think it will be as significant as it could have been. A meaningful amount of international travelers view the US as a less than welcoming destination, and I think the percentage that extend to longer stays around the even won’t be as significant.

Bookings for U.S. national park tours are currently down 42%, per Intrepid Travel. One UK travel agency scrapped its Montana, Washington, and California itineraries entirely. Canadian residents’ return trips from the US were down 24.3% in January 2026 versus January 2025. Add to that the DOI directive that raised entrance fees for non-US residents to $100 per person at 11 of the most visited parks, I’m not totally against that in practice, but it comes at a poor time. It’s just another negative-feeling headline for international visitors.

323 million people showed up to national park sites in 2025. A lot. But that number is more about the inertia of domestic travel demand than the true health of the parks, or visitation patterns. I don’t think the question for 2026 will be the headline count. There’s a decent chance it’ll be another banner year, there are a lot of people. But I think there’s open questions about whether the data will even be reliable, whether the smaller sites will keep bleeding out, and whether the parts of the industry that depend on international visitors are about to have a very bad year.