If the goal is South by Southwest for the outdoors, the Outside Summit and Outside Festival last week in Denver is a solid step in that direction.
Attendance at the four-day event — two days of an outdoor industry gathering and two days of a festival in Denver’s Civic Center park — drew 35,000 people, nearly doubling attendance from the debut event last year.
A two-day Outside Summit preceded the two-day festival. The summit featured speakers and panels for 950 outdoor industry business leaders, policymakers and athletes. In the days around the event, the Adventure Travel Trade Association held its annual meeting, the seventh annual Elevate Conservation gala gathered 20 outdoor advocacy groups, national and local politicians held meetings, Trout Unlimited held its annual Troutfest at Coors Field and there was a speed climbing competition on 16th Street.
In its second year, the Outside Festival — sponsored by the media-shifting Outside Inc. in partnership with the Colorado outdoor recreation office and Visit Denver — has grown into a weeklong outdoor industry affair.
Carly Nixon, 32, from Minneapolis, Minn., poses for a portrait in an REI hammock bubble Saturday, May 31, 2025 at Outside Festival in Civic Center Park in Denver. Nixon is carrying a purple, plush totem named Bubbles so that her friends can more easily find her in a crowd. (Alyte Katilius, Special to The Colorado Sun)And the festival in Civic Center park swelled to near maximum capacity Saturday and Sunday, with companies and speakers filling the moments between music. Attendees sprinted to line up and hear climbing legend Alex Honnold speak. Swimming icon Diana Nyad hosted a walk that drew hundreds. Snowboarding mountaineer Jeremy Jones hosted talks. Mountain biking superstar Rebecca Rusch showed folks how to quickly change a tire.
“We’ve tapped into something far bigger than a festival,” said Robin Thurston, the entrepreneur who has brought dozens of outdoor magazines and companies under the Outside banner. “This is becoming a movement.”
When the Outdoor Retailer trade show pulled out of Denver and returned to Salt Lake City in 2022, Colorado’s outdoor industry wondered if it was losing its perch as a national hub for the surging outdoor recreation economy. Outdoor businesses pined for an event that blended business dealings with something consumer-facing. The call from Colorado was to create a South by Southwest for the outdoors, an event that included business, networking, education, films, speakers and, of course, a massive party. The South by Southwest conference in Austin has done just that, growing into a global weeklong event that draws more than a half-million attendees who pretty much take over the Texas capitol.
Attendees wait in line to purchase refreshments Saturday, May 31, 2025 at Outside Festival in Civic Center Park in Denver. (Alyte Katilius, Special to The Colorado Sun)Thurston sees future iterations of the Outside Festival following that path with multiple locations across the city.
“It’s clear that people need this type of interactions, these in-person moments, whether it’s the industry or consumers and that’s what we are excited about creating,” Thurston said. “These Outside days are emerging as the South by Southwest of the outdoors, a multiday, multiseason experiential platform that anchors a new era of connection, innovation and culture.”
Here are a couple highlights from the Outside Summit.
A pitch competition
The Summit kicked off with a sort of “Shark Tank” competition among five up-and-coming outdoor entrepreneurs making pitches for a $100,000 top prize and $50,000 second-place award. And Colorado innovators cleaned up in a competition that drew more than 200 applications.
Kyle Siegel, a mechanical engineer who worked with SpaceX, won the Outside Ignite competition with his Carbondale-based Raide Research packs. Siegel’s Raide packs impressed the competition’s panel of judges with lightweight, technical designs. Raide’s packs have won several awards since Siegel founded the company in 2023, with a backcountry skiing pack that allows access to avalanche safety tools without removing the pack and the innovative Safeback SBX system that can pump air into a skier’s face during a burial.
“We are 100% focused on building the best apparel and equipment on the market,” said Siegel, who this week hired his first employee. He said he would be using the new investment to grow his inventory and create jobs.
Second place and the “people’s choice” award from the hundreds of summit attendees gathered in the Denver Public Library went to Campfire Ranch, a Gunnison River Valley company with a growing stable of outdoor locations that offer lodging, campsites, gear rentals and guided adventures.
“We concierge the outdoors for you and your crew,” said Degenhard, who founded Campfire Ranch in 2020 with a renovated Gunnison-owned campground on the Taylor River, with campsites, gear and guides. Today Campfire Ranch has an eight-person backcountry cabin on Red Mountain Pass and an eight-bedroom lodge on 17 acres surrounded by hundreds of miles of mountain bike trails outside Bentonville in northwestern Arkansas.
Campfire Ranch offers rentals in a backcountry ski hut on Red Mountain Pass as part of its plan to ease outdoor adventure challenges to Millennial and Gen Z travelers. (Courtesy)Degenhard said Campfire Ranch aims to ease travel for millennials and Gen Z travelers by offering outdoor gear and expertise at a growing list of locations. Campfire Ranch’s Taylor River location hosts about 1,000 visitors a year for camping, fishing, biking and paddling trips. He wants to grow to 10 locations soon and scale to 25 properties in 10 regions by 2030, when his team could host as many as 100,000 visitors a year.
“You can go spend $1,000 at REI but at Campfire Ranch you can have everything you need for about $250 and you can split that between six people,” he said. “So you can really go and try on camping without having to buy all the stuff. And for experienced folks you can fly in and not have to haul your own gear.”
A new ski resort model in Utah
Reed Hastings co-founded Netflix and was looking for his next chapter when he went snowboarding at Utah’s Powder Mountain. The owners were losing money — $5 million to $10 million a year, he said in a discussion at the Outside Summit. So the billionaire in 2023 bought the nearly 8,500-acre ski area, which is the largest in North America. Hastings later bought more acreage to give him close to 13,000 acres of skiable terrain.
Hastings, whose creation of Netflix made him a billionaire, has hatched a one-of-a-kind plan in the ski resort realm. Instead of partnering with Alterra Mountain Co. or Vail Resorts to join those companies’ massive Ikon and Epic pass programs and fill the resort with skiers, Hastings is pursuing a public-private business model. He’s selling about 600 $1 million lots to skiers who will build slopeside homes and pay as much as $100,000 a year for memberships to access private slopes. And that revenue will support public access to the rest of the mountain.
“I knew nothing about ski resorts. I knew nothing about real estate,” he said, joking that when he purchased the ski hill up the road from Snowbasin and the private Wasatch Peaks Ranch ski areas he didn’t know the difference between a plot or a plat. “This is a passion project more than a business plan. We are wanting to show a model that can thrive outside the Epic-Ikon model.”
Artist Davina Semo has installed three perforated bronze bells in tree runs at Powder Mountain as part of the ski area’s work to blend art and skiing at the Utah ski area. (Courtesy Tristan Sadler / Powder Mountain)Part of the plan includes the nonprofit Powder Art Foundation, which sprinkles art installations across the public ski area. The magic carpet surface lift at the beginner slope is a light-filtering sculpture. Some of the tree runs have tiny speakers that play bursts of music — a woman singing, for example — for about a minute every half-hour. Six-foot tall cast-iron bells are tucked into woody enclaves. On one chairlift, a chair has been replaced with a carousel horse. There are sculptures and interactive art installations spread across the ski area.
“Think of it like art as Easter eggs,” said artist Alex Zhang, the chief creative officer of the Powder Mountain project.
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