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.

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 run 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 in kind. Nearly every significant trail race in the US runs on public land under special use permits, and those permits cap capacity. Hardrock is capped at around 146 runners by its Forest Service and BLM permits. 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 divides remote aid stations, medical coverage, insurance, and permit compliance across (maybe) a few hundred. So, that gap ends up getting filled with ever-rising entry fees and a dependency on sponsors. 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 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, more independent ultras are getting started, and new formats like Backyard Ultra have surged in popularity.

But I think that inventory can still feel thin. The average ultra event in the US runs small: 100-milers average just over 100 finishers, 6-hour timed events average 22. There are local 10K and 25K trail races, but nothing at the scale of the road 5K or half. The extensive on-ramp from local 5k to ticking 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?

Part of the answer comes down to what makes a race possible in the first place. With smaller fields, the math on entry fees makes it harder to run events; races need $$$ 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 and human interest features and you get a full week of national attention around a single Sunday morning. Those numbers are why Brasher can project £150 million for charity and £400 million in economic impact. Sponsors aren't just buying a logo at the finish line; they're buying everything around it.

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 align with an afternoon at the pub. Livestreams are brutal to make: camera operators on e-bikes chasing runners through terrain with no road access, satellite uplinks in dead zones, coverage windows measured in hours or days, and long stretches of dead air where the stream is just watching an aid station. There aren't many teams with technical broadcast experience, 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 grow into better unit economics, so that sponsor money isn't just funding cameras. It's 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. That's not a failure. It might be the healthiest version of the sport. 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 thousand other people on the trail.

Right now, the growth at the top of trail is going to be constantly increasing entry fees and new articles about 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.

It's been a heavy stretch for anyone paying attention to the outdoor world. Public lands rollbacks, the Boundary Waters opened back up to mining, national monument boundaries redrawn, staffing gutted, consolidation, affordability, etc. I’ve written about a lot of it, and all piled up, it starts to feel like a lot.

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)

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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.

View the Full Interactive Report

What is “Outdoor Recreation”?

OREC isn’t a true “industry,” it’s a satellite account that aggregates economic activity across standard industry categories. The report takes industries like Manufacturing, Retail Trade, Agriculture, etc, and then figures out what parts of that data applied to outdoor recreation.

The definition is probably broader than most people expect. Yes, there’s hiking, and camping, and biking and stuff. But also gardening supplies. Kite flying. Pickleball. Oil and gas extraction. Golf. Flights. Boat manufacturing. Car rentals. So when you hear a “$1.3 trillion outdoor economy,” what they’re referencing is an amalgamation of connected economic activity that was somehow related to outdoor recreation; the BEA’s broad definition includes “all recreational activities undertaken for pleasure that occur outdoors.”

The Post-Pandemic Growth Spurt Has Slowed

When I look at the trends over the last few years, this is one of the bigger stories. Real GDP for outdoor recreation grew 2.7% in 2024, compared with 2.8% for the overall U.S. economy. It’s the first time outdoor recreation has grown slower than the broader economy since before the pandemic.

There was huge growth and interest after the pandemic but the deceleration has been precipitous (and predictable). In last year’s analysis, I wrote: “It’s encouraging to see that the growth of outdoor recreation continues to outpace the economy, but we’ll have to see in upcoming years if it can continue to maintain this trajectory.” Well, that growth has stalled a bit. Outdoor recreation is still growing, but in a much less exciting way.

A 2.7% growth rate is fine. It’s not a crisis. But for the last few years, the story has been “outdoor recreation is booming, growing faster than the economy, an economic force.” That story is over. What we’re seeing now is convergence with GDP growth.

Nominal vs. Real Growth

The $1.3 trillion is a nominal number. Adjusted for inflation, it’s closer to $990 billion, and the nominal number is growing more than the inflation adjusted one. A chunk of what gets reported as “growth” is just price increases. Lift tickets cost more. Hotel rooms cost more. The industry is raising prices faster than it’s growing participation.

There’s an interesting example in the ski industry. From 2017-2024, the value added increased 28%, but real value (inflation adjusted) actually declined 7%. I was digging into some ski industry data earlier this week (thanks to a Cody Townsend thread) that showed ski visits were down for 2023/24. And over that period skiing declined 2.5% in nominal dollars, but fell 6.8% in inflation-adjusted dollars. It’s probable that price increases in everything from lift tickets to lodging and travel are masking lower performance.

Boating Remains on Top, and Hunting/Shooting Grows

Boating/fishing remains the largest conventional outdoor recreation activity at $38.4 billion in value added. It’s been essentially flat for the last two years.

RVing continues a post-pandemic contraction trend, down from a peak of $31.2 billion in 2022 to $27.5 billion now. Last year I noted that production was down 47% and the resale market was getting hammered. That trend has accelerated. New registrations and shipments continue to fall, and some manufacturers are laying off staff. Used RV prices have dropped to pre-pandemic levels, and are increasingly hard to sell. By every measure of the manufacturing and retail market, RVing is in a sustained downturn, although a more optimistic analysis might attempt to position this as a “correction” (it’s not).

So why does the BEA still show $27.5 billion in value added? Well, RVs are still expensive, even with reduced sales, and it’s capturing all economic activity related to RVing: the millions of RVs already on the road, campground spending, fuel, maintenance, parts, accessories, insurance, and the travel and hospitality spending that RVers generate. New unit sales are falling, but the existing ownership is still large. The market is absolutely a bit vulnerable though, and those decreasing sales are likely to show up in the economic data in upcoming years more strongly.

Hunting, shooting, and trapping posted the largest gain among conventional activities, jumping 16.5% YOY. The category has nearly doubled since 2019, a trajectory that stands in contrast to flattening of growth curves elsewhere in outdoor recreation.

I’m not as tapped into this world, so it’s harder for me to nail down what’s driving this growth. But, election-year purchase spikes are a well documented phenomenon. Recreational and competitive shooting is also growing as a social hobby, particularly among urban residents and women, and competitive shooting clubs are growing.

Water sports are seeing a big decline. “Other conventional water activities” (paddling, surfing, SCUBA, wakeboarding, whitewater) dropped 31% from 2020 levels, driven by the same dynamic hitting RVs: a pandemic demand shock created a glut of durable equipment that doesn’t need replacing. According to the Outdoor Industry Association’s (OIA) 2024 participation report, participation is actually up, nearly 30 million Americans went paddling last year, but the economic value is falling because people already own the gear or can get it secondhand.

Hiking’s economic footprint vs. cultural visibility

There’s a disconnect between the importance we place on hiking, backpacking, camping and what the impact actually is. It’s one of the most important nuances to understand what the “outdoor industry” actually is, especially when people use the economic impact numbers from this particular report to bolster whatever point they’re trying to make.

The climbing, hiking, and tent camping category is the 5th largest of conventional activities, and the 9th largest if you include other activities. It’s responsible for 1.1% of total outdoor recreation value added.

The activities that tend to dominate outdoor media, brand marketing, and cultural conversation in one bubble of the outdoors generate less economic value than golf, amusement parks, festivals, hunting, and “productive activities” which include things like gardening. Now, you might say, “well, those things aren’t actually the outdoor industry,” but that’s a whole different conversation. If you want to use the $1.3T number, they are. If you want to strip those out, the whole story looks a lot less compelling.

A huge percentage of hiking and camping gear is manufactured overseas, while things like boats and RVs sold in the U.S. are also manufactured domestically. Those things get an economic multiplier in reports like these because there’s impact from the manufacture, sale, and use (and they’re expensive).

There’s an interesting paradox here as well: hiking, climbing, and camping doubled in absolute value from $3.8B in 2019 to $7.8B in 2024. But its share of total outdoor recreation value is stuck at 1.1%, where it’s been for the last 3 years. The activity is growing, but the other things that make up the report are growing too.

Supporting activities, primarily trips and travel, expanded from 50.1% to 51.5% of the total. Conventional outdoor activities as a whole shrank from 30.7% to 29.5%. So even if hiking sees growth, its relative economic importance is unchanged because the money spent on travel and hospitality infrastructure around all outdoor activities is growing faster.

“Supporting Activities” Drive the Majority of Economic Value

Supporting activities (travel, tourism, transportation, lodging, food and beverage, and shopping) now account for 51.5% of total outdoor recreation value added, up from 51.2% in 2023 and continuing a steady climb since the COVID-era (when people bought gear but didn’t travel).

Transportation alone generated $106.2 billion in value added, more than all conventional outdoor activities combined. The pattern is consistent across categories: people spend more getting to outdoor recreation and staying there than they do on the activities themselves.

The outdoor recreation economy is, at its core, a travel and hospitality economy. This shouldn’t be surprising. People don’t just drive somewhere to hike. They eat, they shop, they stay somewhere. The cute local coffee shop, the boutique motel, the brewery with the nice patio…that’s where most of the economic impact actually gets created.

If we break this down, the stereotypical RVer generates more economic value than the ultralight backpacker. The RV itself is domestically manufactured. The fuel, the campground fees, the restaurants and grocery stores at every stop, the longer trip durations, the shopping along the way. An RVer touches transportation, lodging, food, retail, and manufacturing in a single trip. A classic Boulderite buys a pair of trail runners (manufactured overseas), drives to the mountains, car camps for free, hikes or runs on public land, and maybe grabs a coffee in town afterward. The trail itself doesn’t generate economic value. Yes, it’s the reason people visit. But economically, the people who park at the viewpoint are generating similar value as the people on a 10-mile hike or overnight camp.

State-level Shifts

The states where outdoor recreation represents the largest share of GDP remain consistent: Hawaii, Alaska, Montana, Vermont, and Wyoming. These are economies where outdoor tourism is a major component of overall visitation. When outdoor recreation represents 5-6% of state GDP, small shifts in visitation or participation have big ripple effects.

Alaska’s jump from 4.6% to 5.3% represents the largest movement among the top states, likely driven by the continued growth of cruise tourism. Hawaii moved in the opposite direction.

The 2023 Maui wildfires devastated Lahaina, the island’s primary tourism hub, and the fallout lasted well through 2024. Visitor arrivals to the state dropped, their workforce shrank, and increased housing costs made it hard to recruit replacements. Airlines pulled capacity from underperforming Maui routes, which reduced seats to the state overall. All of that created a pretty vicious loop. When your economy is 6.1% outdoor recreation, a disruption like this hits differently than it does in a state at 2%.

California, Florida, and Texas lead in raw dollar volume, but outdoor recreation is a small slice of their overall GDPs (2-4%). What they do dominate is amusement parks — Florida and California together control over half of the national amusement park portion of the outdoor recreation economy. Theme park complexes like Disney, Universal, SeaWorld, and Six Flags produce more economic value than entire “traditional” outdoor activity categories.

Who’s Vulnerable?

When outdoor recreation represents a significant share of a state’s economy, the risks become more concentrated. Colorado at 3.3% ($18.1B total) and Indiana at 3.3% ($17.1B) provide useful examples. Both states derive similar GDP shares from outdoor recreation, but the makeup and vulnerabilities are different.

Colorado’s outdoor economy is the most snow-dependent in the country. It’s the economic engine for mountain communities across the state, driving accommodation, food, retail, and transportation spending. But that concentration is also exposure — when snowpack collapses, as this season has hammered home, so does the entire supporting tourism ecosystem.

I’ve been a bit confused by Indiana the last few years, but never really dug into why they have a high proportion of GDP from outdoor rec. Turns out, Indiana’s GDP is mostly driven by RVs, specifically manufacturing. The state produces roughly 80% of North American RVs. TIL. This means their outdoor recreation economy is highly exposed to manufacturing cycles and consumer discretionary spending. The decreases in RV sales do not bode well for future reports.

The Political Subtext

The outdoor recreation economy is massive, even adjusted for inflation. Reports like this continue to push states toward adopting outdoor recreation offices and treating the sector as a serious economic driver. But the political interests within “the outdoor industry” are more fragmented than most coverage suggests.

The RV Industry Association’s PAC recipients for the 2024 cycle: seven of eight are Republicans, most with single-digit lifetime environmental scores from the League of Conservation Voters. Two represent Indiana’s RV manufacturing corridor. Bruce Westerman, Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee and lead architect of NEPA reform legislation, is on the list. Adrian Smith (R-Neb) has fought EPA emissions standards.

The American Sportfishing Association’s recipients split between parties. On the Democratic side it includes Jared Huffman (ranking member on Natural Resources, vocal critic of Westerman’s NEPA overhaul) and Joe Neguse (Boulder, big supporter of public lands). On the Republican side, Garret Graves has pushed for expanded offshore drilling and Buddy Carter is broadly pro-fossil fuel.

These industries can support public lands and environmental protections, but they’re not environmental advocacy organizations, nor are they as left-leaning as much of the hiking/climbing/camping contingent. They back whoever is useful to their industry. Sometimes that aligns with ecosystem protection (healthy waterways mean healthy fisheries) and sometimes it doesn’t.

Some “Back of Napkin Math”

Let’s do some quick “back-of-napkin” math. If you narrowed the definition “outdoor recreation” to just “conventional” outdoor activities, it would represent $371 billion in gross output.

Supporting activities (travel, lodging, food, transportation) aren’t broken out by specific activity, but if we assume a proportional contribution, you’d get to roughly $757 billion. That’s assuming conventional activities generate supporting spend at the same rate as “other” activities like amusement parks, golf, and festivals, but I think it’s probably more likely that those generate proportionally more air travel, travel, lodging, and food spending than hiking or fishing trips. That would mean the real number for a conventionally-defined outdoor recreation economy is more like $600-700 billion. Still significant. But nowhere near the $1.3 trillion headline.

The narrative needs updating. The post-pandemic boom is over. Growth is flattening. The activities that drive the most economic value are not the ones that dominate the cultural conversation. And the political interests within “the outdoor industry” are more fragmented than some coverage suggests.

If the outdoor industry wants to wield its economic influence effectively, it could start by acknowledging that the $1.3 trillion number includes theme parks in Orlando, RV factories in Elkhart, and gun shops in an election year. That’s not a criticism, it’s just what the number actually measures. I think advocacy gets weaker, not stronger, when it papers over those details.

An orange-painted Italian commuter train carrying Eliud Kipchoge, Caleb Olsen, Francis Bourgeois (the TikTok train guy), and a bunch of influencers through the Alps. Race sponsorships worth six figures. Team USA walking into the Olympics without a swoosh in sight. Nike’s All Conditions Gear (ACG) has been everywhere.

Nike relaunched ACG as its flagship outdoor brand, betting big that heritage, spectacle, and revamped product can speed run them back into the outdoor zeitgeist. But big budgets and LinkedIn posts about “world building” don’t guarantee success.

Does the spend match the substance? And will it work for trail running and the broader outdoor market, which has been dominated for the past decade by brands that aren’t Nike?

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The history of ACG

ACG has been a lot of things. It started in the late 70’s after Rick Ridgeway and John Roskelley sent back their Nike LDVs from K2 with notes on how to make them better. Since then, it’s been reinterpreted several times. Through the 90’s and 2000’s, it leaned into technical outerwear and experimentation. Errolson Hugh later pushed it toward urban techwear, and James Arizumi brought it back toward a more retro, accessible, outdoors-first identity. It’s been a rounding error on Nike’s balance sheet for a long time, but it has a passionate fanbase that cares deeply about the history and the product.

Meanwhile, the outdoor market exploded over the last decade and Nike was barely in the conversation. Brands like Salomon, The North Face, Hoka, Arc’teryx, and On built devoted communities and ate into market share from multiple directions, particularly in China, where outdoor is booming and Nike has really struggled of late.

Nike Trail launched in 2014 but never got the investment that road running did. By 2025, ACG had heritage but less reach or performance credibility, Nike Trail had a decade of underinvestment, and Nike still had no real foothold in outdoor.

Folding Nike Trail into ACG and relaunching the brand is an attempt to address a lot of issues at once. ACG has name recognition, a visual identity that isn’t just “Nike but trails,” and enough heritage to at least start a conversation about performance credibility and make a play for the outdoor crowd.

The ACG Relaunch

The rollout has been aggressive. It started at the 2025 Western States, where Caleb Olson won in a prototype of the ACG Ultrafly and the now-famous Radical AirFlow top (the one that looks like you’re wearing a cheese grater). They folded Nike Trail into ACG entirely, previewed the new brand at UTMB, expanded their athlete roster, and announced race sponsorships at Broken Arrow Skyrace ($150K prize purse) and Gorge Waterfalls ($75K).

Then came the Winter Olympics and the massive marketing push and rebrand. A PR blitz, a Mars-themed indoor ultramarathon with Mental Athletic, Team USA wearing ACG, and of course, the train.

These are the kind of things that win advertising awards and get shared on LinkedIn. For a company like Nike, this level of spectacle is almost obligatory. They need the press hits, the LinkedIn posts about “world building,” the signal to investors and retail partners that ACG is getting real investment and will put them back on track in China and the outdoor market. You don’t get that with a grassroots word-of-mouth strategy. You get it with a branded train carrying Kipchoge through the mountains.

But obligatory doesn’t mean it all lands. The train activation had insane attention to detail, but why push a non-technical carbon-plated racing shoe on a bunch of folks hiking in the snow? Why is a tennis player here wearing a one-off custom ACG kit? Why invite so many people clearly incapable of speaking credibly about trail or the Ultrafly? The Mental Athletic indoor ultra race was a wild visual, but very dystopian and high-fashion-coded, nothing like the rest of the marketing. It was something that might feel right for a Salomon or Satisfy but for Nike and ACG the collab feels less like a natural partnership and more like buying into “coolness”.

I went into the Nike store on Oxford Street and the in-store visual execution is strong. But the gap between the tentpole marketing and the in-store reality is noticeable. It’s a lot of real estate for one or two fairly niche hero pieces alongside a more standard lineup of apparel that doesn’t feel that exciting.

All Conditions?

In a lengthy Bloomberg interview during the Olympics, CEO Elliott Hill talked about ACG in terms of “the trail running consumer” and “the outdoor market opportunity.” Not much about the style-forward audience who kept ACG culturally relevant for two decades. That feels intentional: the lifestyle side will only grow if the performance credibility is there. They’re not abandoning that crowd (the trail/hike/explore categories on the site make that clear) but performance is center stage right now.

That story has a few gaps right now. The flagship product of the entire relaunch is the ACG Ultrafly 2, a $260 carbon-plated trail racing shoe. Hill told Bloomberg that the shoe and its carbon plate brings “innovation” and “newness and freshness” to trail running. In a Huckberry Gear Lab segment that doubled as a long Nike ad, the host called it a “high-performing 4x4 SUV.” ACG’s footwear director framed it around “the everyday athlete.”

But…carbon plates have been in trail shoes since 2021, and plenty of brands are on their v3 or 4, with new, varying approaches to carbon plates. Some recently popular shoes like the Prodigio Pro (arguably the consensus best trail shoe of 2025) and the Norda 005 are instead focusing on advanced foam compounds and avoiding the stiffness and instability issues that plates can cause on technical terrain.

Believe in the Run called the Ultrafly “Some Conditions Gear,” specifically flagging stiffness and instability from the carbon plate. It seems to be a big improvement over the original, and a great shoe for fast, non-technical trails. It’ll be great for certain people in specific contexts. But a super-shoe-price-point, carbon-plated racer with 3mm lugs is not an everyday shoe for most people, not revolutionary, and it’s definitely not a 4x4. I think the upcoming ACG Pegasus or Zegama are the models that will bring the mass appeal (and better collab crossovers) for ACG, not the Ultrafly.

All Audiences?

Open the website and it feels like two different brands sharing the same name. The trail line is bright and offbeat, while the Hiking and Explore categories lean more gorpcore, with earth tones, on-trend flash-lit photography, and oversized fits. The problem is how it all sits together. Technical gear, gorpcore pieces, and basic activewear all appear side by side. It feels like multiple brand decks merged into a single Shopify collection.

These are on the same homepage

The trail tone feels deliberately un-Nike, which is probably the point. You can see the new ACG trying to channel the original’s irreverence, but I think the original had an edge and perspective that made it unique and isn’t replicated here .

When a brand known for athletic intensity tries to reposition itself as the “look how zany I am” outdoor friend, it feels a bit like something that felt safe and tested well in a agency deck. I hope they bring a bit more of the OG swagger back in future marketing.

Nike’s End Goal

Salomon is an obvious comparison, because they’ve managed to be both a credible performance trail brand and a fashion/lifestyle brand at the same time. But that crossover was slow and grew out of both organic adoption and deliberate choices over the last decade.

The North Face might actually be a better, though, because TNF operates at a scale more like what Nike is targeting. You see their puffers on every other person in London and New York, but the reason that works is because their performance history and story is what drives their lifestyle sales.

ACG has some of that history, but not at the right scale. It feels like Nike is trying to speedrun that journey, pitching ACG simultaneously to gorpcore fans, trail runners, hikers, the fashion-adjacent Olympics audience, and the Chinese outdoor market, all with one brand and one launch window.

Why I’m Keeping Tabs

I’m stoked Nike is investing in trail running and outdoor, and you’ll catch me watching for new releases. Most trail running brands don’t have this level of budget. That investment raises visibility for the entire sport and buys goodwill with the community. Yeah, the train is flashy, but high-dollar race sponsorships and prize purses are a massive boon to a sport figuring out growth and professionalization.

The catch is whether Nike sticks with it. They have a history of giving up on things, and the visual/marketing side of ACG feels a bit ahead of the product right now. Hill told Bloomberg “you’ll see us extend beyond trail running moving forward.” It’s hard to see exactly how committed they are and the exact shape of what ACG wants to be.

Success for ACG probably looks less like beating Hoka in trail and more like competing with the Amer Sports portfolio and The North Face for outdoor lifestyle. I suspect the size of the trail-specific market isn’t enough to keep Nike heavily engaged unless it’s doing double duty by building technical credibility for the lifestyle side of the line. The question isn’t really “trail running or gorpcore?” It’s whether Nike can become one of those brands that’s both credible and cool across outdoor categories.

Underneath all of it is China. The first standalone ACG store is opening in Beijing, not NYC, Portland, or London. China’s outdoor market is booming, and Nike has posted consecutive quarters of revenue declines there, while other outdoor brands have seen massive gains. ACG gives them a way to re-enter with a brand identity that is less weighed down by “Nike.” Trail running is the story for credibility. China is the story for revenue.

But, I just want to see what ACG looks like two years from now, when the launch halo has faded, we’ve seen multiple seasons of product, and the whole thing has to sustain itself on new, interesting releases and community interest rather than marketing budget.

Why do I mention this? Well, earlier this week, the founder and creative director of French running brand Satisfy, Brice Partouche, publicly shared a DM exchange with Nash Howe of Currently Running to his Instagram story. At the center of the callout was Partouche’s frustration that Currently was ripping off Satisfy and selling it at a lower price point. He called Currently…you guessed it…”parasites.”

I think the space is big enough for both Satisfy and Currently. This might be a bit niche, but the way it played out brought up some interesting conversations around Satisfy, brand building, and the state of “running culture”.

Currently vs. Satisfy

Currently is relatively new running brand started by Nash Howe. In interviews he tends to come across as earnest, passionate about running, focused on community, and acknowledges inspirations from the other big players in the space. The brand has grown quietly and organically over the last year. On the product side, their shorts use similar fabrics and have a strikingly similar silhouette and palette to Satisfy’s Space-O line at significantly lower price points. Did they take heavy inspiration from brands like Satisfy and Bandit? Yes, pretty clearly (Nash has said as much). Is their belt a (very) close replica of Satisfy’s Space-O belt? Hard to argue otherwise.

But Satisfy didn’t invent Space-O. They trademarked a brandable name for a fabric that other brands can source. Same with Ghost Fleece, which is Polartec Alpha Direct, and Auralite, which is Deltapeak. Their Ghost Fleece is effectively a “reinterpretation” of pieces brands like Senchi Designs have been making for years. The creative work wasn’t inventing new materials. It was mythologizing and branding existing ones. They’re impressively good at it, but it’s not the same as ownership or exclusivity.

Currently’s approach, a scrappy operation building a brand through social and direct relationships, is becoming more common. The barriers to entry to create a brand keep dropping and methods of sourcing fabrics, managing factory relationships, and running DTC stores, are increasingly more accessible. When I look at their website I see the inspiration from Satisfy and others, but I don’t really see Satisfy. But I don’t see anything particularly unique, either. I see a brand pulling from the same broad pool of references that a lot of running brands are pulling from right now: muted palettes, split shorts, similar fabrics, similar imagery. Does Currently feel meaningfully differentiated? Not especially. But it’s far from alone in lacking a truly unique, strong identity.

If a smaller brand iterates faster on product details and offers a similar silhouette at half the price, that’s not “parasitism”. That’s market pressure. Some of the feedback I’ve seen even suggests that Currently’s shorts, despite using similar fabrics, are actually better than their Satisfy equivalent.

Credit Where It’s Due

Partouche founded Satisfy with a vision: running as creative act, not a competitive performance grind. The running industry at the time was, in his words, “all performance, winning, and bravado.” Satisfy offered a new visual approach to a somewhat stagnant industry. Their MothTech t-shirts, cotton with “body-mapped” ventilation holes (whether you love them or think they’re ridiculous), are genuinely iconic in the sport-meets-streetwear aesthetic.

Satisfy genuinely resonates with a lot of runners. Their aesthetic feels casual rather than obviously athletic and you can (maybe) wear it to a coffee shop without looking like you just came from a track workout. The people who love Satisfy really love it. They’re not being duped; they’re buying into a brand that speaks to how they see themselves as runners.

I get the appeal. Anytime I’m in a running shop, I enjoy checking out the new Satisfy releases, and I think they’ve done more to push running style forward than almost any brand in the last decade. I just can’t personally justify the cost, and some of the styles just don’t feel me.

The same things that resonate with one group can alienate others. Satisfy’s branding and communication has put it in a category of apparel that says something about you if you wear it, and not everyone is comfortable with what it says. I showed up to a Satisfy-affiliated run club in London once and, while I had a great time, the implied status related to wearing $1000 worth of running kit felt weird. The brand has cultural baggage that not every runner wants to carry, especially at $260 for a pair of shorts. Currently’s Satisfy-esque aesthetic at a cheaper price point, without the Satisfy brand baggage, makes it a perfectly viable alternative for a lot of people.

The brand is full of borrowed references. Partouche has said that he “likes to move between cultures,” and the elements people tend to associate with the Satisfy draw from decades of fashion, military surplus, punk, Americana, and streetwear influences. The whole “French fashion brand co-opting punk and Americana for overpriced tee shirts” doesn’t sit well with everyone, but what Satisfy did, and did well, was take those references and build them into a new identity attached to running.

While there’s plenty to debate about how brands choose to copy or innovate, this is how fashion has always functioned. There’s an interesting principle called the “piracy paradox” that posits that the fashion industry thrives because of remixing, referencing and copying, not despite it. When a design gets widely copied, it loses its cool, which pushes the originator to make something new. And, enough versions of a particular look need to exist for people to recognize it as a trend in the first place. The fashion cycle ends up being moved forward by copying, not killed by it.

I think the fact that other brands are riffing on the aesthetics Satisfy helped define, is evidence that Satisfy succeeded. It’s probably annoying, and may or may not be cutting into Satisfy’s bottom line, but it’s also inevitable. It’s a signal to keep pushing forward, not a reason to publicly attack a one-person operation.

There’s a whole swathe of running brands that exist mostly as graphic tees, similar branding, and an Instagram account with motion blur photography. There is a lot of homogeneity across the “cool” running world, in both branding and product. There are only so many colors and ways to design a singlet or a pair of shorts. Most of these brands won’t succeed because, well, building a successful brand is hard, regardless of where your inspiration comes from. Currently will be up against the same odds. But remixing, experimenting, trying and failing is what pushes everyone forward.

Ironically, Partouche used a Fugazi lyric in one of his callouts about Currently. Fugazi was an influential punk band in large part because of how far they took their anti-commercial ethos, famously capping ticket prices at $5-10 and refusing to sell merch. Using their words to defend $260 shorts is…a choice.

It’s easy to celebrate borrowing and remixing when you’re the one doing it, and harder when someone else does it to you.

Who cares?

The running market has gotten big enough to hold a lot of different subcultures. Satisfy and Currently can coexist. So can fans of Tracksmith, Bandit, Janji, tiny sunglasses, Evo SLs, and the people who don’t care what brands are currently “cool” in New York, London, or LA. Add to that the people that love the running aesthetic but aren’t runners at all, and you’ve got quite a melting pot.

The “cool” running world remains a small fraction of the overall running market, which is actually dominated by Nike, Adidas, Brooks, Hoka, and the other big performance brands that most runners buy from their local run specialty shop.

But the fact that I’m even writing about a DM exchange between two brands most runners have never heard of says something about the influence this segment has. Fashion is a legitimate component of sport and activity, and the people who care about it care a lot. What happens in this corner of the running market tends to influence what shows up at bigger brands and retailers a few years later.

Satisfy helped define a look that’s been filtering into other brands and the broader market for a decade. Conversations like this one, even if they feel a bit like too-online, made-for-Substack inside baseball, can be interesting in the long view.

Let’s All Play Nice

None of this needed to be public. Public beef with a scrappy upstart almost never goes the way the bigger brand hopes. And it rarely looks good when the person calling someone a “parasite” has built their own brand, in part, from appropriation.

Ten years ago, if you wanted running gear that didn’t look like traditional running gear, Satisfy was one of the few options. Now, there’s a whole ecosystem of brands at different price points, different attitudes, different communities. The question for Satisfy isn’t whether Currently is copying them. It’s whether they can maintain their relevance in a market that’s gotten bigger, messier, and more competitive.

Read Part I here: The Ski Industry’s Climate Reality.

When does a ski actually lose performance?

One of the most interesting sessions for me came from Yessica Kurock and Alexis Lussier Desbiens at the University of Sherbrooke. Their lab has been building out standardized testing equipment and methodologies for skis. Basically, we as skiers love talking about ski performance and nitty gritty characteristics (flex, stiffness, edge hold, durability, etc) but we don’t really have a consistent way of quantifying those things. For a surprisingly long time, everything has been mostly subjective assessment, aka someone at Blister gives the ski a nice bend and tells you what the flex feels like.

Sherbrooke’s lab has developed devices that test skis in a much more scientific manner and can track actual base characteristics and performance loss over time. They tested their mathematical models against Blister scores and found only 10-15% error in describing ski feel, which is impressive for a purely mechanical measurement (and compared against subjective, if trusted, opinions). A lot of this work has been captured at https://soothski.com, where they offer a detailed comparator of skis they’ve tested. It’s a bit raw on the design and UX, but cool to look at if you’re interested in figuring out what exactly about a pair of skis you like, and what other skis might have similar characteristics.

But, what really caught my attention was the research survey on ski usage that Kurock has been conducting. She collected responses related to ski use and replacement from 1,217 skiers and 130 rental shops across 41 countries, covering nearly 180,000 skis in total. A few standout stats:

Rental shops replace 68% of their economy skis for cosmetic damage. Not because the skis lost performance or because they broke down performance-wise. But because the topsheet looks beat up. Which, makes sense on the surface. It’s probably easier to rent skis that don’t look overly used, regardless of performance.

Consumers, on the other hand, often replace based on a perceived loss of performance or just plain wanting something new. For Alpine skis, 46% replaced their skis because of “performance loss” and 42% to access new, better technology. For more intensive activities like touring, freeride and park, broken skis are a much stronger driver of replacement, with performance loss at a slightly lower rate.

I asked Kurock if they had data showing whether the replaced skis had actually lost performance. Not quite yet–that would require testing and re-testing skis over time alongside surveys, and they don't have the capacity right now. But if I had to guess, most consumers use "performance loss" as a convenient way to justify a new pair of skis. We're not actually that good at knowing when our skis stop performing and when we just want something new.

This opens up real questions for circularity. If cosmetic damage is a top driver of rental replacement, could we design more durable topsheets? Replaceable ones? If a ski has years of useful life left, how do we shift end-of-life behavior toward reuse instead of storage units and landfills? A significant amount of the shops surveyed said that their end-of-life solutions for rental skis involved mostly, often, or sometimes being trashed.

Designing for disassembly

Simon Jacomet from Jacomet Ski and Gian Reto Marugg from Covestro demonstrated SkiCycle+, a new system that uses thermoplastic adhesive films instead of epoxy resin to make skis. Epoxy is permanent; once a ski is pressed, those layers are fused together and can’t be separated into anything useful, which makes things difficult/impossible to re-separate for recycling. The thermoplastic adhesive is reversible. You can heat the ski, bend it, and the layers will come apart cleanly. That means each component can enter its own recycling stream.

The same property could theoretically also enable mid-life repair. If 68% of rental ski replacements are cosmetic, could there be a system where you can pull off a damaged topsheet and press on a new one without replacing the whole ski?

But, the distribution mechanisms in the ski industry aren't designed to take skis back or reprocess them. The technology is brand new, and it still needs to be proven at scale and adopted by manufacturers who have no particular incentive to switch from epoxy.

Grand Massif’s 2035 Plan

One of the most impactful presentations came from Frédéric Marion, general manager of Grand Massif, a network of resorts in the Haute-Savoie. Marion outlined the resort’s “Resilience 2035” strategy, which actively plans for a 30% reduction in resort capacity due to climate change.

This wasn't a sustainability officer presenting a plan or pilot project. This was the person running the resort saying: I made a decision and this is how we're going to operate moving forward. Grand Massif is modeling significant reductions in skiable terrain and actively stress-testing the business model. There was a contrast between Kitzbuhel’s “We’re testing electric snow grooming machines” and Grand Massif’s “The models look really bad and we’re actively having conversations with local businesses and our community about how we’re planning to shrink the resort to stay responsible and operational”

Multiple attendees I spoke to specifically called out Frédéric’s presentation as a standout, which tells you how rare it is to see that kind of full, committed action is across the industry. I'm hoping to speak with him soon for a deeper dive on the specifics and scope of their plan.

Recycled Carbon Fiber

Fairmat presented their recycled carbon fiber technology, which is production-ready and currently being used in equipment like DPS skis and CAPiTA snowboards. They use aerospace-grade carbon waste and mechanically recycle it without chemicals or high heat, then use AI-driven sorting to keep the output consistent. Fairmat's material produces roughly 3.4 kg CO₂e per kilogram versus 66.7 for virgin carbon fiber.

The Circular Economy

Sarah Dodge, from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, presented on circularity and the gaps between idea and implementation (the "valley of death") — R&D funding is available early and proven-at-scale technology attracts big investments, but in between there's a desert where demonstration-stage projects die. Felt particularly relevant given some of the technologies presented during the conference. Her examples of companies with circular success: IKEA reduced carbon emissions by 30% while growing revenue by 20%, and they've shipped over 25 million free replacement parts to extend product life. Arc'teryx's ReBIRD program doubled its business YOY, and is having to limit how many people can visit their centers. And Vinted (resale platform) became the number one clothing retailer in France in early 2025, ahead of Amazon, Shein, and H&M. (They already have a dedicated ski equipment category).

UTMB’s emissions approach

Fabrice Perrin from UTMB presented on their findings and plans around participant travel emissions. For the UTMB Mont-Blanc race, air travel accounts for 86% of the event’s emissions impact, with car travel another 13%. Their latest strategy is giving a 30% bonus on lottery chances for runners who comply with low-carbon mobility requirements, a compulsory carbon contribution from every runner and partner, and proof of residence verification to confirm compliance.

The whole verification process behind this sounds complicated (They mentioned developing AI to check the consistency of travel documents, which I’m a bit skeptical of), but it’s an interesting approach. Is it perfect? No. But they’re trialing it at their biggest, most high-profile event, the one that drives the most emissions, not a smaller race where the stakes are lower.

Who was in the room (and who wasn’t)

The room was full of people with deep technical knowledge and genuine commitment: sustainability officers, product folks, researchers, and material and recycling startups. But it felt like the leadership-level presence was light on the brand side. No C-suite. Nobody from sales, business, finance, etc. Many of the roles who have the most influence over what a company actually makes, and how they make it weren’t there.

That’s not a criticism of the conference. This is one of the (if not the biggest) challenges with all sustainability work. None of these innovative approaches scale until people goes back to their company and convince execs who are probably focused on selling more product year over year that adopting new approaches and technologies are important enough to make meaningful changes to legacy business models.

A few final observations

• Most people I spoke with agreed that Decathlon is doing some of the most interesting and significant work in sustainability and circularity right now, but consumers have largely no idea. They're the world's largest sporting goods company by revenue, they've achieved a 13% reduction in absolute carbon emissions, and their circular work is growing. They had an ill-fated foray into the US market, but their running brand Kiprun is making an attempt stateside this year.

• The summit is focused on hard goods, and this year they expanded to include federations and more materials tech. But, I’d be interesting in seeing representatives and talks from soft goods in future years. Some of the most ambitious brands on sustainability and circularity (Houdini, Norrona, Patagonia, etc) have strong ties to the ski industry and are primarily soft goods companies. It might dilute the “ski” focus a bit, but the problems are shared.

• I think destination marketing organizations would be a meaningful addition to the conference. We heard from Kitzbühel and Grand Massif, and from ski federations, but an interesting bridge might be organizations like Switzerland Tourism, Visit Austria, or more local DMOs. That “one level higher” perspective on the economic impacts of skiing combined with tourism/marketing changes and challenges might be a useful one.

Is it true? Hard to say. What does exist is a large body of evidence showing that people get injured training for marathons at extremely high rates, regardless of whether they use apps or not. Add to that the a massive influx of new runners and a running culture in flux, and it becomes easy to see why this narrative has taken hold.

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A Lot of People Run, and a Lot of People Get Injured

Marathon participation (and running in general) is exploding. In the US alone, there were over 430,000 marathon finishers in 2024, exceeding pre-pandemic levels. Major races are setting participation and application records, and platforms like Strava report double-digit growth in marathon participation year over year. The 2025 London Marathon was the largest mass-participation marathon ever, with more than 56,600 finishers, and over one million applicants for the 2026 race.

But with that growth, across decades of research, different countries, and wildly different runner populations, the conclusion is remarkably consistent: training for a marathon injures a lot of people.

According to one study of runners preparing for the Utrecht Marathon and Half Marathon, nine out of ten participants reported an injury or illness symptom during a 16-week training period. Other research found that roughly 40% of marathon trainees sustain at least one injury, and some studies report yearly injury rates as high as 90%.

A separate study examining New York City Marathon runners found that 48% experienced injuries that impaired training, while about 9% suffered major injuries that prevented them from finishing the race.

These are extremely high injury rates, and they appear largely independent of whether runners use training apps.

Are Training Apps to Blame?

When millions of people are running, and somewhere between 40 and 90 percent of them experience injuries along the way (depending on how they’re measured), you’re going to see a lot of injury stories. As training apps like Runna grow in popularity alongside running itself, seeing correlations becomes unavoidable. Add social media algorithms that reward influencers and their dramatic narratives (and the subsequent responses to them), and every stress fracture starts to feel like evidence of a systemic failure.

But are runners using Runna getting injured at higher rates than runners following a PDF plan they downloaded from the internet? Higher than runners following a training schedule from a book? Higher than runners winging it based on advice from their local running club? Or even higher than runners using a coach? We don’t really know, because no one has studied this in a way that would actually answer the question.

The criticism of Runna rests mostly on anecdotes amplified by social media. Critics tend to point to concerns about ramping up intensity and volume, but there are no comparative studies showing that users of training apps (Runna or otherwise) get injured at consistently higher rates than runners following alternative training methods.

I did find one peer-reviewed study that looked directly at the relationship between running-related technology and injuries. It involved 282 recreational and elite long-distance runners and found that runners who used running-related technology “most of the time” or “always” had higher odds of reporting a running-related injury than those who used it less often.

But, RRT in this context meant almost everything. GPS watches, smartwatches, training apps, and platforms like Strava were all grouped together. If you tracked your runs in any way, you counted as a technology user. The study was cross-sectional, capturing a single point in time, and couldn’t establish causation.

There is likely a simpler explanation. The growth of running brings a growth in new, inexperienced participants. Runners who train more, push harder, and set more ambitious goals (that they may not be ready for) are both more likely to use technology and more likely to get injured. Runners are often being told to “listen to their bodies,” in order to avoid overtraining. But that advice is especially difficult for beginners who have no clear sense of what it actually means, or which signals are genuinely a problem vs manageable.

Interestingly, runners who used their data to modify their training did not show a higher injury risk, which lends credence to the idea that more experienced runners simply had a better idea of what to do with their data to help decrease their liklihood of injury.

That doesn’t mean the critics of apps are wrong. It’s almost certain that some plans push too hard for certain runners. But it’s incredibly hard to tell if it’s demonstrably worse than a bad coach, plan template alternatives or no plan at all.

The Runfluencer Problem

I think negative reactions to Runna are also a response to changes in running culture more broadly. The explosion of running-related content has created a world where platforms are saturated with influencers offering contradictory advice, delivered with absolute, often unearned, confidence. And for many, Runna is associated with that world due to their partnerships with influencers.

Everything must be Zone 2. Strength training is either essential injury prevention or a complete waste of time. You must run fast. You must run slow. High mileage is the answer. Low mileage is the answer. You should be a “hybrid” athlete. You should do these specific exercises. It changes week to week.

This advice comes from people whose credentials range from “ran a fast marathon once” to “took a weekend coaching certification” to “has 50,000 Instagram followers.” The signal-to-noise ratio is absolutely terrible, and the algorithms reliably amplify confidence over accuracy.

Good lord, give me the confidence of a 20 to 30-year-old man who ran a three hour marathon and now speaks in absolutes about training topics that are fundamentally nuanced.

Runna ends up as an easy target because it embodies several things people are already annoyed about: influencers, AI, monetization, and the intrusion of more technology into an activity that is simple at heart.

What AI Might Be Good At

One case against algorithmic training plans rests on the assumption that running is too individual, too context-dependent, too human for an algorithm to handle properly. A good coach, the argument goes, can see patterns that data can’t capture.

The problem is that most runners don’t have access to a great coach who knows them well. Coaching with that level of attention is expensive. For most recreational runners, the real choice is not between Runna and a great coach. It’s between Runna and the time and annoyance of manually modifying a generic plan found online, or training based on fragmented advice absorbed from templates, friends, and social media.

It’s worth pointing out that Runna plans aren’t exactly “AI-generated” in the way that some people might assume. Plans are still designed by humans and professionals, similar to plans you might find online and modify yourself. They use AI to monitor progress and adjust training recommendations based on how you’re performing, but the plans themselves are designed by humans, and likely not too dissimilar from what a coach would prepare.

It’s not better than a coach who knows you, but it’s selling convenience and just enough structure in a more affordable package. Does it adapt as quickly or as effectively? Harder to say.

Pattern recognition across large datasets is actually one of the things AI is pretty good at. In a previous role, I worked on a feature that analyzed thousands of municipal permit comments to identify recurring failures. At scale, LLMs were able to surface patterns that no single reviewer could reliably detect.

In theory, using AI to learn from millions of runners while reviewing one individual’s training could identify early warning signs of overtraining or injury risk that even experienced coaches might miss across large rosters. Runna may not be implementing this particularly well yet, and it is certainly not a panacea. But the idea itself is not obviously misguided.

The Middle Ground

The honest answer is that we don’t know whether Runna is injuring people. I hope someone is working on that particular research. What we do know is that running, especially marathon training, injures a lot of people, and it always has.

Runna feels like a convenient target because it sits at the intersection of several modern anxieties, but helping large numbers of new, inexperienced people train for demanding distances without getting hurt is genuinely difficult. No app, coach, or philosophy has solved that yet.

The summit brought together people who are serious about working on hard problems. Ski resorts, brands, startups, advocacy groups, and material innovators were all in the same room, learning from each other and trying to figure out what collaboration around sustainability and climate work actually looks like.

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The summit came at a particularly sobering moment. Many presentations highlighted how poor the ski season has been in the Western United States. Europe is doing better overall, but as of mid-January, conditions were still fragile, especially in Italy.

Day 1 opened with broad, high-level perspectives. Auden Schendler, author and former VP of Sustainability at Aspen Ski Co, set the tone, followed by Ben Aidan of POW Europe, Nick Sargent of Snowsports Industries America (SIA), and Jerome Pero of Federation of the European Sporting Goods Industry (FESI).

Oliver Fritz, senior economist at WIFO (a non-profit, independent economic research institute in Austria), grounded the overarching issues in economics. He presented data on climate trends, the ski industry, and economic impact. For me, this was the highlight. Not because the news was good. It wasn’t. But it provided a clear picture of what is actually at stake, which is essential for evaluating the work the industry is doing in response.

The Economics Are Hard to Track

At a global level, skiing still looks healthy at first glance. There are ski resorts in 68 countries across nearly every major mountain range. Participation looks stable, with roughly 390 to 400 million skier visits per year worldwide. Equipment sales continue to hover around 10 million pairs annually, even after the post-pandemic inventory correction that drove an 11% decline in the 2024/25 season.

But, only a small fraction of resorts account for most skier visits. Just over 13% of global resorts generate nearly three quarters of all skiing activity. The industry is starting to cluster around altitude, latitude, and narrowing windows of snow reliability.

The overall impact of the industry is also poorly measured, which makes it harder for anyone to understand what's actually at risk. Lift tickets and ski resort revenues by themselves only capture a small fraction of the overall economic activity related to skiing. The real impact shows up when you include lodging, food, transport, retail, and induced spending across regional economies. Skiing affects regional employment, public services, and population retention. In many European mountain communities, it's the primary economic engine keeping villages alive.

Unfortunately, there isn't a clean global accounting of ski tourism's contribution to GDP. Countries measure it differently, if they measure it at all. In the US, it falls under the "outdoor industry satellite account," (which I’ve written about before) which groups everything from amusement parks to skiing to horseback riding to gardening. That generalization is why the "$1.3T outdoor recreation industry" is one of my least favorite, oft-cited stats in the industry.

Where data is more comprehensive, we do get a slightly better picture.

In the US, annual recreation revenue related to snow tourism is estimated at around $4 billion. In Austria, lift ticket revenue alone sits around €1.3 billion annually, but total tourism expenditure tied to skiing is over €8 billion, representing about 30% of the country’s tourism-induced GDP.

Skiing is an economic backbone of large parts of the Alps and specific geographic regions worldwide. The infrastructure supporting it, like lifts, snowmaking systems, access roads, and purpose-built accommodation, represents multi-generational commitments. So many things: local tax bases, public services, and property values, all depend on reliable winters.

What the Climate Data Shows

TLDR; Nothing good.

Across the Alps, warming has occurred at roughly twice the global average. Austria has experienced close to 3°C of warming above a 1850-1900 baseline, compared to about 1.5°C globally. Most of this warming has occurred since 1980, and winter temperatures are rising faster than any other season.

Ski seasons worldwide have already shortened, despite common claims that they are simply “shifting later” rather than becoming shorter. In the United States, comparisons show that season lengths have shortened by five to seven days on average, and there are possibilities of losses up to 33 days under low emissions projections. Similar patterns are evident across Europe.

Mitigation matters, but won’t eliminate impact in the coming years. In scenarios where we’re able to significantly manage emissions, warming continues but remains somewhat constrained. In the moderate and high emissions pathways, temperature increases will push snow conditions past critical thresholds across much of the world.

One of Fritz’s central points is that conditions will worsen regardless of what we do. The difference between scenarios is whether that worsening is manageable or catastrophic.

The Christmas Window

One way climate change destabilizes skiing is not through outright disappearance of snow, but through inconsistency.

A marginally shorter season is something the industry has learned to manage. Mega-corps like Vail and Alterra are able to hedge against variable seasons by pooling resources and revenues and selling season passes ahead of time, this isn’t a viable long-term approach, nor does it work for smaller resorts.

Data shows not just a loss of snow days, but an increasing variance around when snow arrives, how long it stays, and whether it aligns with time periods that matter the most from an economic perspective. Businesses, not just in the ski industry, operate on predictability.

The Christmas and New Year holidays sit at the center of this problem.

That window anchors the entire winter. It’s when staffing levels are set, drives a large portion of annual revenue, and is a time culturally associated with skiing. Historically, this period has been reliable enough that both consumers and resorts could plan around it with some confidence.

Under moderate emissions projections, without improved snowmaking capacity, reliability of Christmas snow in Alpine regions could fall from historical norms to 65% of resorts by 2050. In higher emissions scenarios, it collapses even further.

If Christmas reliability drops, changing behaviors can have knock-on effects. Families might delay bookings until conditions are confirmed, compressing demand into shorter lead times. Cancellation risk increases. Staffing becomes more difficult as seasonal workers face uncertain hours and resorts aren’t sure how much staff they’ll need.

This doesn’t even need to become a consistent trend. Years like this year in the Western US are likely to have knock-on effects almost immediately. How many people now have sub-par Christmas holidays anchored in their recent memory? Do you think they’re more or less likely to plan a Christmas trip around skiing next year? It doesn’t matter if there are good snow years mixed in with bad ones, the erosion of predictability can wreak havoc on balance sheets and in the minds of consumers.

Capital, Concentration, and Closures

Changes won’t affect all resorts equally. Elevation, latitude, and terrain diversity will increasingly be tied to the long-term viability of resorts, with high-altitude resorts above 2,000 meters (in the Alps) likely to retain viability longer. Large, interconnected ski areas with a wide elevation range have the flexibility to shift operations around based on conditions.

But lower-elevation resorts face a very different reality. Under even moderate warming scenarios, many already approach collapse. 186 French ski resorts have closed already, mostly for reasons already outlined above.

This uneven impact has the potential to create both stratification of capital and funneling effects rather than a general decline.

Investment will concentrate toward places at higher altitudes or with more favorable climates that have a longer shelf life, making it hard for smaller or lower results to attract the capital needed for investment in snowmaking or other adaptations.

Visitation will probably follow similar trends as lower altitude resorts are unable to compete, provide comparable experiences, and eventually close. This means that employment across the industry will both shrink but also concentrate. The ski industry will start to contract geographically (it’s already happening), even if overall participation looks stable in the short term. Resorts that survive will gain market power (and crowds, and the ability to raise prices because there are fewer options).

In Europe, ski-related infrastructure and real estate (lifts, snowmaking systems, resort housing, etc) represent an estimated €120 to €175 billion in capital. Under high-emissions scenarios where a majority of resorts become economically unviable, a significant share of that capital loses its economic purpose.

Housing markets might split between between high-altitude locations that retain value and lower-elevation communities that lose everything. Municipal budgets will weaken as tax bases shrink. Public services become harder to sustain. Younger residents leave in search of stable employment.

The Long-Term Participation Risk

The participation decline that Fritz outlined is a bit of a domino effect.

Maybe it’s obvious to point out, but the first participants the industry will lose are the most price-sensitive ones. If costs will continue to rise as resorts attempt to price in the impact of fluctuating seasons and visitation, the casual and occasional skiers will be the first to stop coming back.

Lower-elevation, small-scale, and closer to population center resorts serve as entry points for beginners and families. When these hills close, you lose pathways and opportunities to experience the sport at all. Parents ski less often. Children are never introduced. This participation loss can compound. A bad season affects participation and revenue in the short/medium term. A broken pathway for new skiers affects the future customer base.

What Comes Next

Tourism depends on climate stability, but tourism emissions are growing faster than the global average. Long-haul ski travel and other transportation is the dominant source of ski industry related emissions. As skiing concentrates into fewer viable destinations, travel distances will increase, intensifying emissions and accelerating the instability the industry depends on avoiding.

The industry has power to influence and intervene on things like transport access, pricing structures, rental/ownership models, circularity, material innovation, and advocacy.

Work is happening, and I’ll cover a few of the different approaches highlighted at the conference in future newsletters. It remains an open question whether those efforts are happening at the scale, speed, and urgency the problem demands.

This isn’t one of those times for nuance. Minneapolis is not that kind of story.

Alex Pretti was murdered by undertrained thugs that this administration has given carte blanche to do as they please, constitutional rights be damned. Government officials are fabricating narratives directly contradicted by the video evidence we’ve all seen. ICE is fueling fear and escalating violence wherever they go.

I’m just a guy with a newsletter, but it didn’t feel right to just move on to the next scheduled content. Call your reps, support, and take care of yourselves and each other.

– Kyle

The “Public Lands Caucus” fails its first major test.

In 2023, the Biden administration imposed a 20-year ban on mining near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in response to a Chilean mining company’s proposal to mine copper, nickel, cobalt and other precious metals in the area. The ban was supported by conservation advocates on both sides of the aisle, in large part due to likely sulfuric acid pollution from mining activities.

Last May, the Public Lands Caucus was formed with the stated mission to “work across the aisle to advance policies for the conservation of and public access to public lands.” This was supposed to be a bipartisan coalition in Congress that could find common ground on conservation.

Last week, the House voted 214-208 to remove the ban on mining adjacent to the Boundary Waters. The decision carries consequences not only for the Boundary Waters but for other protections around the country. Republicans used the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn the ban. If Congress establishes that it can overturn protections with simple majority votes (enabled by the CRA), then every protection around the country becomes vulnerable.

And how did the Public Lands Caucus vote on this issue? Straight down party lines. All Republicans voted to allow mining. All Democrats voted against.

The caucus wasn’t tested on an issue where there might be disagreement about trade-offs. It was tested on the question of opening one of America’s most popular wilderness areas to mining operations and almost certain pollution–something opposed by both conservative and progressive outdoor advocates.

Ryan Zinke (Republican rep for Montana and former Secretary of the Interior), the caucus co-chair, didn’t just vote for the mine. He actively pressured colleagues to support the repeal. This isn’t just about Zinke (Wes Allen wrote a great piece focused on his involvement in more detail). When someone can simultaneously claim the mantle of a public lands champion (when it affects Montana and therefore his re-election odds) and also work to open the Boundary Waters to mining, it tells you that “conservation” has become so malleable it can mean nearly anything.

The messaging isn't the problem

Last year, I wrote about an advocacy organization called Nature is Nonpartisan (NINP), which formed with the goal of building bipartisan support for conservation. The effort includes familiar names from progressive environmental groups alongside conservative commentators and former Trump administration officials. Their homepage calls on supporters to “Take the pledge & tell your elected leaders that the environment is too important for partisan politics.”

I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I still think the impulse is right, and there are millions of people from both parties who care about public lands. But the problem isn’t whether people of either party care. The problem is whether that care produces meaningful outcomes.

It sure doesn’t seem like it.

Broad polling support for public lands protection (like 75% of Americans opposing public lands sales) doesn’t reliably translate into votes or opposition in Congress when in conflict with Trump or extractive interests. That support might help making things slightly less bad, but it’s not a bulwark against the power that Congress and this administration have to wreak havoc, no matter the “will of the people.” The Public Lands Caucus is just the most recent example. ANWR drilling, NPS cuts, the list goes on. The rollbacks the administration has been able to enact unilaterally with control of federal agencies is…extensive.

Even seemingly perfect political conditions for collaborative work around the Boundary Waters–strong bipartisan constituent support for protection, polling majorities, and a supposed public lands caucus–couldn’t overcome party lines.

In another example, Trump recently vetoed a bipartisan bill to finance clean drinking water for 50,000 Coloradans in a conservative district. The bill passed both chambers unanimously. Trump vetoed it anyway, likely as political retaliation against Lauren Boebert, who spoke out about releasing the Epstein files.

When the veto override came up for a vote, only 35 Republicans supported, and it fell short of the two-thirds majority needed. An extremely straightforward bill that had unanimous support weeks earlier couldn’t get enough Republican votes because crossing Trump was too politically risky.

This is why I worry about focusing on “messaging.” Messaging is important, and there are improvements to be made in how we talk to various groups about conservation, but I don’t think it’s the root problem we face at the moment. The Boundary Waters vote wasn’t a communication failure or a failure of both progressive and conservatives to align on an issue. The political will to protect public lands and the environment exists. It just exists almost entirely within one party’s elected officials.

I know that we need to keep working across the aisle on conservation, and I remain supportive of that work. Modern conservation is full of compromises.

NINP, as well as other conservative-leaning influencers and groups, are quick to drum up support/petitions/etc opposing the sale of public lands or in situations like the Boundary Waters. What they’re less quick to point out (or avoid completely) is the role they played in electing or platforming who was responsible (Republican lawmakers), and preferring to just reference “Congress” and recommend “contacting your representatives.”

It feels a bit like standing in a china shop and saying “We won't tell you not to put the bull in the shop, because that would be rude (and we brought the bull here). But we'll say ‘It’s awful that things are being broken’ once it's inside.”

We can’t pretend that both parties produce equivalent outcomes when holding power in Congress or the Executive.

What actually matters

A lot of people on both sides sat out the election in 2024, undermined progressive candidates, or voted third party because they were “so disillusioned.” And now, much like the media, they all get to generate an unending feed of outrage content as the administration and lawmakers they enabled are dismantling the things they claimed to care about.

Len Necefer wrote this week about how how outrage isn’t power, saying, “The people who voted “uncommitted,” or sat out, or told others that voting was complicity—they got to feel righteous. They got to perform moral clarity on a platform optimized to reward that performance. And they got to do it from a position of relative safety: citizenship, resources, mobility, options…This is not abstract. Today, it’s violent deportations. That’s defunded programs. That’s judicial appointments that will shape the law for decades. That’s the slow strangulation of the administrative state by people who understand exactly how power works and don’t need you to be morally perfect—they just need you to be absent.”

So, can we actually enact meaningful change as “advocates for the outdoors”?

I think the honest answer is: only if we’re willing to do the boring work of electing people who will hold the power that can affect positive conservation outcomes. That means voting, every time, even when the options aren’t perfect. As Necefer says, “if your politics is mainly a posture on the internet, you will be out-organized by people whose politics is mainly a plan in the real world.”

I’m not going to stay negative; I want pragmatic, non-partisan collaboration to produce conservation wins. I don’t want to tear down conservative advocates–they’re an important part of the equation around conservation. I hope future efforts will find more success. I hope NINP builds more successful outcomes, even if I’m currently less enamored with their approach.

The Boundary Waters vote isn't the end of bipartisan conservation work, and it still needs to pass the Senate. But for me, it’s a repudiation of the idea that we can find common ground and expect positive outcomes for nature without addressing the truth in front of our faces: until Republican politicians can reliably stand up to their party leadership, dear leader, and business interests, "Nature is Nonpartisan" will remain an aspiration divorced from how political power actually works. Don’t get fooled again.

And yet, my main takeaway was this: even when the problems are bigger than any one company or initiative can realistically solve, there are people trying.

Is every project good enough to drive the kind of radical change we actually need? No. But is the right response to throw up our hands and say, “what’s the point,” or to tear down anyone who is doing their best in an incredibly constrained system? For me, also no.

The world could use a little hope. There's enough chaos and bad news without tearing down the brands that are at least trying, even if they're not single-handedly solving the climate crisis.

Which brings me to a piece that’s been making the rounds this week, and to the reaction it sparked.

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Is Patagonia just a marketing trick?

Foster Huntington, who worked at Patagonia for about a year and a half in 2012–2013, published a thoughtful essay about his experiences there. It gained significant traction (particularly on Substack), with reactions ranging from “I’ll never buy Patagonia again” to people treating it as a shocking revelation that Patagonia is, in fact, a business, with all of the internal politics and issues that entails.

The piece highlights a few key experiences that resulted in his disillusionment with Patagonia. Yvon Chouinard was particularly harsh in a design meeting. The company had brand guidelines around not showing fossil fuel consumption in marketing. Patagonia did contract work for the US military from US-based factories but still did the majority of production offshore. The growth of the company is at odds with its messaging and marketing around conservation and climate change.

My purpose here isn’t to refute any of Huntington’s critiques; I enjoyed his prose and perspective. Most are fair, and some, like the outdoor industry’s relationship with the military and the challenges of US-based technical manufacturing have been covered extensively. I’m more interested in the reaction to his piece.

I’m not Patagonia’s biggest fan. I’ve written critically about them before, especially around the time they restructured ownership. I pointed out that conservative billionaires have used similar tax strategies, and that there is reason to be cautious about elevating Chouinard as one of the so-called “good billionaires.” I think Patagonia sometimes sucks up a disproportionate amount of oxygen in the industry, overshadowing the work other companies are doing. I’ve also questioned whether their marketing accurately conveys the scale of the challenges they face.

But even if we acknowledge the very real contradictions at the heart of their business model, there is little question that Patagonia is pushing the industry forward, and they’re doing more than 90% of similar brands.

Here’s what Patagonia’s scale has enabled: $140 million to grassroots environmental groups since 1985 through 1% for the Planet, which they co-founded. The ownership restructure sends an estimated $100 million annually to environmental work. They co-founded the United Repair Centre, whose repair infrastructure handles tens of thousands of items each year across multiple brands. Their Reno facility repaired 175,000 items last year. Worn Wear kept 212,000 products circulating. And that’s before you get into the activism and material innovation that’s pushed the entire industry forward. None of that means they’re solving climate change, or even hitting their own targets consistently.

Their own 2025 Work in Progress Report highlights many of the contradictions about their business pretty brutally. It shows they hit only 6% of their goal to source 50% of synthetics from secondary waste. They recover less than 1% of clothes designed to be recycled. Scope 3 emissions (supply chain stuff they can’t fully control), represent 99% of their environmental impact.

In my view, their failures don’t negate the work they’ve done in material innovation, repair infrastructure, or funding activism. Those are non-insignificant things that were driven by Patagonia’s growth as a brand.

Why does Huntington’s perspective resonate?

Huntington has spent years building a reputation as a kind of wandering outdoor philosopher-poet. He’s the “original” #vanlife guy, who opted out of a traditional path and built a life and career on his own terms. In many ways, he embodies the exact lifestyle Patagonia markets: authentic, adventurous, anti-corporate. When someone with that kind of credibility publishes a “behind the curtain” essay, it carries more emotional weight than a straight reporting piece.

This topic in particular resonates because it taps into something that many of us already feel: that sustainability marketing is mostly bullshit, that companies claiming to do good are just optimizing their image, and that there is always a more cynical truth lurking beneath the surface.

We love a good takedown, especially when it targets companies that market themselves (explicitly or implicitly) as better than the rest. There is often a weird sense of satisfaction in watching a “too good to be true” brand mythology collapse, in realizing that the emperor has no clothes. Or, in this case, that the clothes were made in the same factories as everyone else.

The “making a jacket that’s marginally less bad for the environment is a mechanism to stop global warming is akin to believing that the solution to alcoholism is drinking light beer” quote is catchy and damning. It works because it’s true, if lacking a bit of nuance.

But the path from where we’re currently at to a non-extractive (or even less extractive) economy will require companies like Patagonia working within the current system to invest in infrastructure, proofs of concept, new technologies, and activism to make a transition even remotely possible. That work will be imperfect by definition.

Scale creates leverage that can have different impacts than individual consumer choices. It's not just "marginally less bad jackets", it's using market position to shift supplier practices, fund litigation and activism, and help build infrastructure that makes alternative models more feasible in the future.

Systems aren’t going to transform overnight, no matter how much we want them to.

Writing off imperfect work

My concern is that for some readers, Huntington’s piece seems to function as permission to write off everything Patagonia has done as some kind of decades-long, carefully constructed con, all because the company fails to live up to expectations. Those expectations are partly of their own making, and partly a creation of consumers and media who elevated Yvon and the company to unhealthy heights of hero worship.

I’ve seen more than a few reactions that revolve around “Never buying Patagonia again”, or treat the revelation that Patagonia is a business as a huge betrayal. There’s a sense of despondency, that they’re “just another big bad brand that only cares about money.” I’ve seen too many reposts on this topic from people who are connected to gear development, purchase, advertising, promotion, and influencing, even if the companies they work with can’t hold a candle to Patagonia’s track record.

The average consumer doesn’t buy a new jacket because they want to solve climate change. They need (or just want) a new jacket. Given that reality, shouldn’t we want them to buy from a company that is at least trying to do better?

After all, what’s the alternative? If your goal is to not buy anything, and focus on secondhand and repair, amazing. Else, there are few brands to support that are objectively better. Even Patagonia’s most ardent detractors in the industry will begrudgingly acknowledge that they’re doing most things better than anyone else, they’re just annoyed by the marketing that can feel “over the top”.

The tensions are real

Huntington is right on many fronts. The most sustainable jacket is a used one. We need bigger, more radical shifts in how the clothing industry functions in order to affect real change. Patagonia’s workplace culture may well have been exactly as he described, and Yvon might be a bit abrasive. The gap between their brand marketing and operational reality is real, and it can be jarring, especially if you were influenced by Let My People Go Surfing or don’t keep up with their progress reports. Selling jackets won’t solve climate change. I’ve received emails from people at Patagonia who acknowledge wrestling with that tension every day.

But here’s a simple thought exercise: would the industry (or world) be better or worse if Patagonia didn’t exist? Or if they never grew beyond where they were at 10 or 20 years ago? An accounting based purely on the emissions math might say yes, but I find it harder to answer.

Would workers benefit from one less buyer influencing Fair Trade certification? What would grassroots organizations (Patagonia supported 842 in FY25) lose if funding from Patagonia disappeared? Would the shift away from PFAs have happened as quickly without Patagonia’s investment in research and development, or the pressure placed on the rest of the industry? Would issues like Jumbo Wild, Bears Ears, and dam removal have received the same amount of grassroots support?

The world is, undeniably, a bit fucked right now. All I’m trying to hold onto is the idea that imperfect efforts still matter.

We can criticize. We should criticize. These are worthy discussions. Everyone has their own line, and if feeling tricked by Patagonia’s marketing is yours, that’s absolutely valid. But we should also be capable of acknowledging effort, even when it’s flawed or falls short.

Perhaps that’s naive. But the alternative is writing off everyone who’s not solving everything perfectly, and I think that leaves us with nothing except our own sense of moral superiority, a few reshares, and a world that stays exactly as broken as it is.

This week I’m highlighting a UK-based company working in conservation; I know many of you are in the North America, but I want to be sure I occasionally bring a more global perspectives to issues affecting the outdoors, travel, and conservation (especially being based in London). Thanks for reading.

Kyle

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Abbey Dudas, marketing manager at Oxygen Conservation, a UK-based company that’s trying to prove something that sounds almost oxymoronic: that conservation can be profitable.

Oxygen bought its first estate in 2021, and four years later, they’ve acquired 14 estates totaling 50,000 acres across the UK. They made headlines when they sold carbon credits at £125 per ton, a world record that’s roughly 5x the market average.

But the question hanging over the entire operation isn’t whether they can command premium prices for carbon credits. It’s whether the model itself (venture capital meets conservation) can survive contact with the messy realities of making land pay for itself.

Three Models, Different Trade-offs

There are a couple of different ways that (roughly) similar approaches are is in action today.

The Tompkins Conservation Model: Buy it, restore it, donate it to the public.

When Doug and Kris Tompkins wanted to preserve Patagonian wilderness in the 1990s, they spent millions buying land in Chile and Argentina. The approach was straightforward: use their wealth to acquire land, restore ecosystems, then transfer it to the state as public land. Tompkins Conservation has donated over 2 million acres and helped create or expand 16 national parks. It’s a fully philanthropic approach with no goal of financial return. Kris Tompkins called it “capitalist jujitsu” in her 2020 TED Talk.

The Ted Turner Model: Individual-driven ownership. Buy it, work it, protect it.

Ted Turner owns 2 million acres across 15 ranches in the American West. The model combines conservation, hunting and fishing, and luxury ecotourism. Turner placed one of the largest conservation easements in U.S. history on his flagship Flying D ranch, permanently protecting it from development. But, the land is private. If you want to see it, you need to book a stay at a Turner Reserve property, where a single night can run you upwards of $1300.

The Oxygen Model: VC-backed ownership. Buy it, restore it, and then…profit?

Oxygen is backed by private investors who want to have a positive impact on the environment. They’re working toward what amounts to a proof of concept: that you can restore degraded ecosystems, generate carbon credits, run ecotourism operations, develop renewables, and practice regenerative agriculture while delivering returns that justify the initial capital investment.

They’re not alone. Gresham House, already the UK’s largest forestry manager with over 165,000 acres, and others, are making similar bets on natural capital. But Oxygen’s ambitions are particularly aggressive: they’re targeting 5x growth over the next five years, that’s 250,000 acres. It would make them one of the UK’s largest private landowners.

How Oxygen’s Model Works

Oxygen’s process starts with identifying degraded land like former shooting estates, overgrazed moors, drained peatlands, or plantations of non-native trees. As an example, beer company Brewdog originally purchased a Scottish estate in 2020, pledging to plant millions of trees as part of a brand carbon-reduction narrative. But, after sales declined in recent years, those initiatives were on the chopping block and Oxygen recently took over the Kinara Estate.

Oxygen then models the “natural capital” potential, which might include carbon sequestration, biodiversity net gain credits, and revenue from ecotourism or renewable energy projects.

The revenue model is diversified by necessity; each property will have different characteristics that lends itself to a tailored approach. Carbon credits make up a significant portion, they’ve sold credits under the Woodland Carbon Code and Peatland Code, UK government-backed standards that require rigorous verification. But, they’re also developing wind projects, running farm partnerships that practice regenerative agriculture, and operating ecotourism properties in Devon and Scotland.

The UK’s regulatory environment makes this model easier than it would be elsewhere. Both the Woodland Carbon Code and the Peatland Code have strict requirements: projects must demonstrate “additionality” (the carbon savings that wouldn’t happen otherwise) and “permanence” (commitments lasting 35-100 years for woodland, 30+ for peatland).

Average prices for UK carbon credits have more than doubled from £11 per ton in 2020 to £26.85 in 2024 (significantly higher than the global average of around $7 USD). Credits can’t be sold when trees are planted, only years later when they’ve actually sequestered carbon.

Oxygen’s £125/ton record came from selling what they describe as a “premium” product on their Leighton Estate: not just carbon, but verified restoration work with drone monitoring, GIS tracking, habitat creation…and a compelling story.

That premium is also likely driven because the credits can feel more “tangible.” Being located in the UK provides a sense of place, connection, and reality to buyers that is less easily replicated with an anonymous hectare of forest in South America.

Access, Conservation, and Decision-making

The Tompkins model prioritizes more universal access. Their donated lands became national parks. The Route of Parks in Chilean Patagonia now spans 1,700 miles encompassing 17 national parks.

Turner’s model restricts access but generates income through selective tourism. You can visit a Turner Reserve, but you’re paying a premium to do so. The trade-off is that limited visitation reduces impact on sensitive ecosystems while funding ongoing conservation work.

Oxygen lands somewhere in between. Access can vary; some properties remain private, others have ecotourism, and they’re also exploring partnerships with Camp Wild (similar to Hipcamp in the US) to provide wild camping access on other estates.

But fundamentally, these are private lands.

If Oxygen determines that certain areas need to be off-limits to maintain ecological value, that’s their call. If they decide to scale back public access to maximize carbon sequestration, they can do that as well.

The speed of decision-making this enables makes private conservation attractive. ”We have this ability to make decisions quickly, to do it at pace, do it at scale,” as Dudas puts it. But that cuts both ways. This is in contrast to community-based or federal/public ownership, where consensus-building can take years but also ensures that diverse stakeholders have input. That kind of engagement can lock up decision-making, but the people involved are typically the people who actually live on or near the land, whose livelihoods depend on access, and who have been there for generations.

Plans to build a wind farm in partnership with Low Carbon on Oxygen owned lands in Scotland have met with mixed community feedback, with concerns about culling a herd of feral goats (Oxygen identified as detrimental to the ecological landscapae after an 18-month review), aestheics, and other local recreation challenges. Some who work in rewilding and ecosystem restoration in the UK express a cautious pessimism about their approach, both from a funding perspective and how they approach partnerships and development. Oxygen has anticipated much of this feedback and has a ‘Criticize Us’ section on it’s website addressing some of the common issues.

The Original Question

All of this brings us back to the question we started with: Can conservation turn a profit? And, should land need to make money?

“In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to make a profit on it,” Dudas acknowledges. “Conservation shouldn’t have to make profit. But at the moment, we live in a society where, unfortunately, it’s very profitable to destroy the planet. So we’re trying to find an alternative.”

That’s the pitch, essentially. If conservation can compete economically with extraction and development, then capital can flow to ecosystem restoration. Pension funds and institutional investors can have a viable reasoning to put money into restoration projects rather than fossil fuels.

But there’s an obvious danger here. Once you go down the VC-backed rabbit hole, you’re inevitably subject to pressures around scaling, maximizing revenue, and more – no matter whether you’re a tech startup or conservation organization.

Do they scale to hundreds of thousands of acres? Do they eventually exit by selling estates to other investors or taking the company public? The stated goal is to operate at “a landscape scale,” and eventually expanding to the US where there’s more land available. But conservation at scale requires permanence—a timescale of decades, centuries. Markets operate on quarterly reports and exit strategies, and that’s where the bulk of my skepticism about Oxygen lies. I’ve been at enough startups to know see what VC demands gan do, and know that changes in ownership often promise stability but later bring significant disruption.

This is a structural challenge that venture-backed conservation can’t easily escape. Philanthropists like the Tompkins can afford to be patient; their investment has no expectation of financial return. Turner’s model is owner-financed with no external investors demanding exits. Once you bring in institutional capital with return expectations and debt requirements, you’re inevitably forced into making different decisions even if your intentions are good.

Answers will take time

It’s far too early to have a clear answer about whether Oxygen’s model “works.”

The regulatory and carbon credit environment in the UK is more friendly to this approach than in most countries, and demand for high-quality carbon credits appears to be growing. But the voluntary carbon market is not without issues, and the history of conservation is littered with projects that looked promising until they weren’t.

The question of what we should do with land (who should own it, how it should be restored, who gets to access it, and whether it needs to generate returns) won’t be settled by any single for-profit company, NGO, or business model. We should be open to new approaches and experimentation in the conservation space; not everything is going to work. But we can be equally discerning about them. Every approach reveals what we’re willing to compromise to protect what’s left.