Broadening perspectives on busy beavers ...Middle East

Jason Blevins

Outdoors/Business Reporter

Sneak Peek of the Week

CPW seeks to balance benefits of beavers with updated management, conservation plan

“We try to build like the beavers would, but their dams are bigger and better and they are maintained 24 hours a day.”

— Mark Beardsley, whose Buena Vista-based EcoMetrics builds dams that help restore wetlands and ecosystems

60,000 to 90,000

Estimated number of beavers in the Southern Rockies

It wasn’t that long ago that OG ranchers would blast beaver dams with dynamite. The old-timers saw the largest rodent in North America as a nuisance, flooding fields and clogging waterways.

Now though, there’s a shifting view on beavers. They are “nature’s engineers, hydrologists and biochemists,” says Sam Pierce, a Stanford University Ph.D. candidate whose ranching ancestors in the Gunnison Valley were dam blasters. Despite the benefits of beavers, they are still not universally welcomed on ranchland where irrigation and water rights are meticulously managed.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the agency lurching through a controversial voter-mandated reintroduction of wolves, is wading into the contentious beaver debate with plans for an overhauled management strategy for an animal considered a “keystone” species. That means an entire ecosystem could change drastically without beavers.

CPW is also tackling beaver stigma through its Beaver Conservation and Management Strategy scoping period. The agency has designated the month of August as a time to sort out some of the arguments over beavers. That involves bringing together beaver experts, beaver haters, beaver hunters and beaver proponents to weigh in on the controversial critter’s future in Colorado.

“I’ve been pleasantly surprised. So far, there hasn’t been that much controversy,” Boyd Wright, CPW’s native aquatic species coordinator, told Sun freelancer Nancy Lofholm. “People who have beaver concerns are getting their concerns heard.”

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read Nancy’s story

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In Their Words

Rob Katz’s first move as new CEO at Vail Resorts: benefits for friends of passholders

“In our minds this is a pay-it-forward type of thing.”

— Rob Katz, CEO of Vail Resorts

When Rob Katz took the helm at Vail Resorts in May for his second spin as CEO, the innovator of the Epic Pass he said he needed time to “listen and learn.”

“The thing I learned very quickly is there is more we can do to connect and communicate with our guests,” he told The Sun this week. “There is more innovation with our products to make skiing more accessible.”

Katz this week unveiled his first initiative as the returned CEO. The new Epic Friend Tickets program gives pass holders six to 10 half-priced lift tickets to share for the season. Skiers who use those discounted tickets can deduct what they paid — half of the ever-shifting day ticket price — from an Epic Pass the following season.

Skiers have “strong emotional connections” with their ski hills and skiing “is a social sport,” Katz said. He said his team heard Epic Pass skiers saying the company’s now-retired buddy pass program — which offered a limited number of tickets discounted as little 12% on busy days and as much as 45% on a handful of non-peak days — was complicated and the discounts were not significant. They also heard from skiers who maybe wanted to visit a Vail Resorts ski area but balked at the soaring lift ticket prices, which reached $329 during the busiest days last season.

Those high prices are designed to push skiers to buy early. A peak season lift ticket purchased long before the snow falls can be nearly 60% cheaper than walk-up tickets. The unlimited Epic Pass costs $1,075 for the 2025-26 ski season and a seven-day Epic Pass costs $708. Last season the company sold 2.3 million of those season passes and advanced-purchase lift tickets.

As the company’s industry-shifting season pass strategy — which was designed to push at least 75% of its annual skiers into buying season passes in the spring, summer and fall — nears 20 years old, it was time to overhaul the buddy pass system, Katz said.

The company’s Ski With a Friend and Buddy Pass programs were about benefits for passholders. The Epic Friend plan is about benefits for the friends of passholders.

“It’s a more creative approach to how we engage with a wider audience,” Katz said. “In our minds this is a pay it forward type of thing.”

Katz served 16 years as CEO of Vail Resorts before stepping away in 2021 to serve as chair of the company’s board and returned to the position after the ousting of CEO Kirsten Lynch in May after “a tough year on a lot of fronts,” he said. There was the patroller strike at Park City Mountain Resort over the Christmas holidays, growing strife in local communities and a tumbling stock price.

“But there were so many amazing things the company accomplished and many amazing things the company is doing,” said Katz, reiterating a concern voiced by investors in the last year that the company was not appropriately responding to a deluge of bad press.

The 58-year-old who has spent more than 30 years with Vail Resorts as either a board member or CEO, said improvements in local resort marketing are on deck. That’s a shift for a largely centralized company that has focused on selling its Epic Passes that offer access to now 71 owned and partner resorts in 14 states, Australia, Canada, Europe and Japan. The Epic Pass-first approach has left some resort communities pining for the ski area partner they once had. Expect to see the company highlighting more of its individual resorts in the future, Katz said.

“We have got to make a stronger emotional connection with our guests and elevate our resort brands individually more than we have in the past,” he said.

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

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Breaking Trail

Slow and steady hike for Colorado 14er traffic

“We have an awful lot of people out there hiking 14ers, but we are not overwhelmed by it.”

— Lloyd Athearn with the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative

265,000

Number of hiker days on Colorado 14ers in 2024

Let’s swerve from a publicly traded company that needs to show investors consistent annual growth to a group that is not too worried about impressive increases in yearly numbers. The number of days hikers spent scaling Colorado’s tallest peaks in 2024 is about the same as it was a decade ago.

And that slow increase in traffic on Colorado’s 14ers in 2024 — estimated at 265,000, up 1.9% over 2023 — is a good thing.

“I think 260,000 to 300,000, that seems like where the natural boundaries are at the moment,” said Lloyd Athearn, the longtime boss at the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, which, since 2014, has deployed trailside infrared counters to estimate annual traffic on the state’s highest peaks. “There is a sense we are hitting an equilibrium point. We have an awful lot of people out there hiking 14ers, but we are not overwhelmed by it.”

The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative formed in 1994 and has built 40 trails on 37 of the state’s 58 highest peaks. Those trailside counters — 23 of them now on trails leading to 22 14er peaks — counted 415,000 hikers on alpine trails in the summer of 2020, when the pandemic drove record numbers of people outdoors.

That was a big year for 14ers. Maybe too big. In the years since, landowners have closed access to popular 14ers and communities have clamped down on trailhead parking. Efforts to limit crowds and manage access — combined with slower population growth and changing demographics in Colorado — have tamped down 14er traffic. The 2024 numbers mirror those from 2015.

The transfer of nearly 300 private acres atop Mount Democrat to the Forest Service cleared access hurdles for the popular Declibron Loop, increasing traffic in the Mosquito Range by more than 50% in 2024, which offset declines on other peaks.

And again, that return to a typical 14er hiker’s pace — slow and steady — is nothing to worry about, Athearn said. Nearly 40 years ago Colorado’s then-Gov. Dick Lamm warned we were “loving our 14ers to ruin.”

Athearn points to a growing list of reasons behind the decline. Timed reservations at Rocky Mountain National Park to access Longs Peak and the same limits on the road up Mount Blue Sky curtailed heavy crowds on the popular 14ers. Land managers are working to limit roadside parking around the trailheads for Mount Bierstadt and Grays and Torreys peaks. Baby boomers aging out 14er hiking while younger generations deal with families, jobs and homes. Communities feeling overwhelmed by crowds. (For example: Breckenridge requires Quandary Peak climbers to use a shuttle to reach the trailhead of the 14er that draws 25,000 to 30,000 annual hikers.)

“I think there was a shock with people seemingly everywhere in 2020 and we are seeing more communities working to better manage crowds,” Athearn said.

The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative had a budget around $2.4 million last year, which is up from less than $150,000 when it formed in 2004. About 10% of that comes from the federal government. Still group deploys nearly two dozen seasonal trail builders and later this month will open a new section of trail on Mount Shavano after four summers of work on trails leading to summit land the initiative purchased in 2016.

“It is federal land but most of the money to protect it comes from individuals and communities who recognize the value and importance of these lands,” he said.

The Playground

All time high for Americans outside

“The best marketing campaign the outdoors ever had was COVID.”

— Kelly Davis with the Outdoor Industry Association

181.1 million

Number of Americans who recreated outside in 2024

More than 180 million Americans went outside to recreate in 2024, setting an all-time record with more than 58% of the country aged 6 and up playing outdoors.

That’s a big deal for outdoor advocates who spent decades laboring to get more than half the country outside.

“I want to beat caffeine. That’s my goal. 73%. That’s the big number,” said Kelly Davis, the wise-cracking statistician for the Outdoor Industry Association, or OIA. “We already killed flossing. That was 30%.”

The latest participation report by the OIA showed a 3% increase over the previous record in 2023. Since 2019, there have been 27.5 million new participants in outdoor recreation, with seniors, young adults and people of color leading the growth. But the frequency of outdoor trips by those newcomers and core participants is dwindling.

The recreation economy largely revolves around those core outdoor recreation fans. After a decade-long slide in that key demographic, the number of avid participants climbed by 5 million in 2024. But across the board, people are not getting outside as often. The average American recreates outdoors about 65.2 days a year, the second lowest showing since OIA started tracking participation in 2012.

But hidden in that declining frequency is a rising wave of new arrivals. Those casual participants may not log 50-plus days running on the trail, but they reflect a hidden treasure for an industry that has long focused on the grizzled vets who are pretty much always buying new stuff. The casual outdoor recreation participants — the folks who are mostly women and testing the waters with first-ever camping and fishing trips, trail runs and hikes — represent “a huge opportunity” for the outdoor recreation realm, Davis said.

She’s worried about how Americans will react. The pandemic spiked outdoor activity.

(She says: “The best marketing campaign the outdoors ever had was COVID.” Told ya she’s a wiseacre.)

But this looming economic slump and rising prices on essentials, Davis said, will see people “choosing between medicine and food.”

“When that happens, stuff for outdoor recreation is not very high on the list,” she said. “This one just feels different.”

The Guide

Could the slashing of federal bureaucracy eliminate the annual economic analysis of outdoor recreation?

“There’s a fear we could be swept up in the agency downsizing.”

— Jessica Turner with the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable

That participation report is a big deal for the outdoor recreation economy. So is the annual study from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, which last year showed outdoor recreation spending supporting 5 million U.S. jobs as part of a $1.2 trillion economy. The BEA study that launched with federal legislation in 2017 shows the outdoor economy has grown 36% since 2012.

Those economic numbers anchor the establishment of now 24 outdoor recreation state offices and underpin the Expanding Public Lands Outdoor Recreation Experiences Act — or EXPLORE Act — the largest outdoor recreation legislation package unanimously passed by Congress last year.

But the Trump administration’s overhaul of the federal bureaucracy could eliminate the annual report from the BEA. Federal and state outdoor recreation advocates are mounting a campaign to convince both federal lawmakers and the president to support the analysis of outdoor recreation, which accounts for 2.3% of the nation’s economy.

“The work by BEA staff annually is vital to the outdoor recreation industry and has helped our manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, service providers and outfitters better understand economic trends that they can strategize around and, ultimately, grow jobs and economic resiliency in every corner of the country,” reads a letter sent to federal lawmakers last month from the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, a group representing more than 110,000 outdoor businesses and several dozen national organizations.

A similar letter was sent by the Confluence of States representing a growing number of state recreation offices, urging lawmakers to support funding for the BEA’s Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account. That letter outlined noted outdoor recreation’s oversized impact on rural employment and how the annual BEA data “catalyzes new initiatives for outdoor access resulting in recruitment and retention of talented employees to our states and job creation that bolsters economies of all sizes, especially in rural recreation communities.”

Congress is listening. All 2026 budget numbers keep the BEA funding intact.

But the shake-up at the Bureau of Labor Statistics could threaten that funding. Trump fired the head of the bureau this month after the federal July jobs report showed slow employment growth. Trump’s new nominee to head the bureau — conservative economist E.J. Antoni — supports the president’s assertion that the bureau’s methodology, modeling and statistical assumptions are flawed and unreliable.

Still, Trump has cited the bureau’s numbers on outdoor recreation. His July 3 Make America Beautiful Again executive order establishing a commission to help remove bureaucratic inefficiencies around conservation and federal management of public lands cited the $1.2 trillion numbers from 2023.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz also have cited the Bureau of Economic Analysis numbers in support of new policies surrounding the management of public lands.

“They are quoting our own numbers. People are actively using these numbers to show the importance of the outdoor recreation economy,” Jessica Turner, the head of the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, told The Sun. “There’s a fear we could be swept up in the agency downsizing that is certainly happening in the Commerce Department and Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

Since 2017, economists at the BEA have studied outdoor recreation, developing relationships with industry leaders to build models to gauge the scope of the growing recreation economy. That build-up took a couple years, Turner said.

“I just wonder if the agency will actually be there or the people will be there to run the report,” she said. “We are super concerned about that.”

–j

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