Since 2013, when Utah Governor Gary Herbert established the country’s first state office of outdoor recreation (OREC), 15 more have popped up across the country, accompanied by huge fanfare, and then—silence. During the last year, the news cycle has been quiet on OREC accomplishments, prompting some to question their impact.

The reality? OREC offices are small—usually just one director or a couple of staffers. As such, their progress is slow. But over the last few years, some case studies have emerged that show just how powerful these offices can be, and what their role might look like after the pandemic ends.

A Voice for the Industry

“It’s hard to underestimate what these offices have done for giving outdoor enthusiasts, as well as the industry, a voice,” said Jason Bertolacci, a Colorado-based public affairs and nonprofit consultant who has worked alongside his state’s OREC office.

That’s because for many offices, the first line of action is listening to the unique needs of outdoor industry constituents in their states. When Axie Navas became New Mexico’s first OREC director in 2019, she drove 3,500 miles around the state over three months, talking to business owners, local governments, and nonprofits to determine how her office could better serve and help grow the state’s 200-plus outdoor companies, including manufacturers, retailers, and outfitters.

One of the main lessons Navas took from her conversations? “The potential for outdoor recreation to diversify New Mexico’s economy is pretty unique,” she said. To that end, she helped create an incubator grant fund. In 2019, among other grants, the fund provided $50,000 to a new business program at San Juan College in Farmington. The money helped launch a boot camp for outdoor industry startups that drew 54 attendees, as well as an ongoing course for eight local outdoors-focused entrepreneurs, which includes access to the college’s new maker space for prototype experimentation. According to Melissa Porch, a grant program coordinator at San Juan, the OREC support has been instrumental in teaching participants new ways to market and grow their businesses.

Grant-giving also lets ORECs support communities in individualized ways. “No specific policy lever can anticipate the exact needs of a local community, so why not put the power in locals’ hands to tell us what they want, and give them the cash to achieve it?” said Drew Simmons, chair of the board of directors for the Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance.

In its 2019 annual funding round, the Vermont OREC distributed $100,000 to two communities to boost outdoor recreation opportunities. One of them, Randolph, was able to add eight miles of singletrack, complete a new trail-information hub in a renovated building downtown, and launch a high school mountain bike team. “There’s a community vibrancy to what we’re doing,” said Zac Freeman, co-founder and trail builder for the nonprofit Rochester/Randolph Area Sports Trail Alliance. “It’s given the town a nice little boost of recreational energy.” Would the improvements have taken place if not for the OREC grant? Probably, he says, but the process would have taken at least two years longer and required even more volunteer labor.

The Power to Organize

Some ORECs initiate action through annual summits. One example: North Carolina’s annual Outdoor Economy Conference, hosted by Growing Outdoors Partnership, a nonprofit that works closely with the state’s recreation office. When a team from Wilkes County attended the first conference in 2018, they left inspired to boost their own fledgling outdoor economy, according to Wilkesboro Town Manager Ken Noland. “I realized we have a lot of these assets,” he said, referring to a growing mountain bike trail network and nearby public lands. “We just need to brand ourselves better.” Since then, the town has continued to develop trails and parks—to benefit the quality of life and health of locals as much as to draw visitors, says LeeAnn Nixon, director of the Wilkes Economic Development Corporation. Wilkesboro has also formalized a plan to recruit outdoor businesses and improve marketing efforts.

Organizational power takes other forms, too. Colorado’s OREC was able to commission a first-of-its-kind study that frames the benefits of outdoor recreation within the context of health care, says Director Nathan Fey. Last year, the office used the study to launch the Get Outdoors Employer Toolkit in conjunction with the Colorado School of Public Health. The tool kit includes a business self-assessment and recommendations for employers to use the outdoors to improve workplace well-being. More than 50 businesses participated in that first year.

Inspiring the Next Generation

One of the biggest challenges OREC offices face is instilling a lasting interest in the outdoors—especially among kids and underserved populations.

In that sense, New Mexico’s Outdoor Equity Fund has “really hit it out of the ballpark,” said Stewart Lewis, advocacy coordinator for the Outdoor Industry Association. The OREC’s founding legislation mandated a fund for underserved youth. Already, grants have helped almost 3,000 kids try everything from a day of fly-fishing to a five-week backpacking course. Last August, Gallup-based nonprofit Silver Stallion Bicycle and Coffee Works received $10,000 from the fund. They used it to create a mobile service that provides free bike repairs for kids in the adjacent Navajo Nation. “[The area is] bigger than all of New England, and there’s not one bike shop there,” said Silver Stallion Director and former pro cyclist Scott Nydam. Last fall, a team of paid mechanics, many from the Navajo Nation, fixed 428 bikes.

Where ORECs Fall Short

At least for now, ORECs have not delivered any large-scale conservation wins. Simply put, “these things take time,” said Oregon’s OREC director Cailin O’Brien-Feeney, who had to put his own office’s strategic work on hold to address the aftermath of the state’s worst fire season on record.

In fact, we probably won’t see much new public land attributed to ORECs. What’s more likely: focused efforts on land use. For example, Colorado’s office recently helped the town of Trinidad plan for the new Fishers Peak State Park by helping set up an analysis of statewide recreation trends. Matt Moorehead of The Nature Conservancy also credits the OREC with the fact that recreational and environmental interests ultimately got equal say while designing the park strategy—a big deal for inclusive land-use planning.

The other area seeing slow progress is the expansion of ORECs to all 50 states, the ultimate dream for widespread out- door industry representation. Some states are working on it, but aligning budgets and legislative priorities, and achieving buy-in from other state agencies, is slow, especially during a pandemic. OIA’s Lewis said, “I think 2021 is going to be a pause year.”

And while existing ORECs have the potential to be a powerful national voice for the outdoors, they haven’t taken much unified action thus far. One possible avenue for future collaboration: the Outdoor Learning Network, launched in summer 2019 by the National Governors Association. Through biannual meetings, the network allows OREC directors and states considering offices to exchange ideas.

That kind of nationwide collaboration is critical to bringing the industry together on policy issues. Until then, ORECs will remain most effective at the state level—and their full potential is anyone’s guess.

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Words like “game changer” and “disruptor” get tossed around a little too easily these days, but with FutureLight, its patent-pending new waterproof/breathable technology, The North Face says it has a product to back up those superlatives. In fact, the brand believes so strongly in the material’s unprecedented breathability that it created an entire manufacturing program around it, including dedicated factory spaces in Korea. Said Scott Mellin, global GM of The North Face’s Mountain Sports division, “We had to develop our own yarn, weaving process, and lamination and finishing techniques. It took us two years to do all of that.”

Moreover, by fall 2020, The North Face will have transitioned all of its higher-end apparel, footwear, and other waterproof/breathable gear in the Mountain Sports lines from Gore-Tex and other third-party vendors to FutureLight (price point items will still use TNF’s proprietary DryVent, and Gore technologies will still appear in the lifestyle collection).

Even the technology’s debut was unconventional. The North Face launched it today, not at an outdoor industry event but at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, partnering with BMW Group Designworks for a camping trailer display.

Why all the investment? It’s partly due to athlete feedback and the desire to find a better solution to the ongoing conundrum of protection versus breathability. And part of it comes from a serious effort at brand differentiation. “My job is to create the biggest amount of difference between The North Face and our competitors,” said Mellin, who came on board full-time in January 2017. “And the way to create difference is to step out of the supply chain.”

The FutureLight Technology

At the heart of FutureLight lies an industrial process known as nanospinning. A polymer is sprayed through up to 220,000 tiny nozzles—rather than being extruded into a thin sheet of film, as most membranes are—to create a waterproof yet highly porous mesh-like membrane. The construction allows for nanoholes that allow air to pass through and moisture vapor to escape, keeping users dry and comfortable, not clammy and cold. Five different weights of membrane—depending on how many nozzles are used—allow designers to tune a garment’s level of breathability to the type of activity it’s intended for, added Mellin.

True, some other membranes make use of nanospinning, such as Polartec NeoShell and Outdoor Research’s AscentShell. But citing stats from TNF-initiated third-party comparison testing, Mellin said that FutureLight outperformed them.

Because the mesh is so delicate, The North Face’s material science and sourcing teams ended up designing custom face and backing fabrics—56 in all—as well as a new laminating process to give garments enough structure and shape. Some of these fabrics use higher denier yarn for greater abrasion resistance along with an open weave structure for more air permeability and lighter weight.

It adds a green story to FutureLight, too, as all new fabrics use 100 percent recycled materials. Motivated to increase the sustainability factor even further, The North Face also created a new PFC-free DWR treatment that maintains 80 percent of its water repellency after 80 wash cycles (and requires no consumer applications of water-polluting retreatment).

A bonus byproduct of the technology: FutureLight garments have a remarkably soft, quiet hand and mechanical four-way stretch.

FutureLight Field Testing

North Face athletes have been using FutureLight in extreme conditions around the world, but the real proof is in the numbers, acquired both through in-house and third-party testing. Said Mellin, “What we typically see in most garments is air permeability at 0.01 to 0.1 cubic feet per minute. FutureLight has between 1 to 2 CPM. That’s the magic zone for allowing heat to dissipate through the garment without affecting its windproofness.” (By comparison, he noted, a soft shell typically has 25 CPM). Underwriters Laboratories, which primarily tests first responder gear, determined that FutureLight exceeds the waterproof standard used for firefighter uniforms.

Retailers who have previewed the product give it high marks, too. Said Wes Allen, owner of Sunlight Sports in Cody, Wyoming, “It’s the best breathing waterproof/breathable I’ve ever been in.” While having to posthole out of deep snow when snowboarding recently, “I didn’t unzip a thing,” he continued. “My goggles fogged, my helmet got really wet, but there wasn’t a single drop of moisture inside my jacket.”

Will FutureLight Surpass Gore-Tex as the Gold Standard?

How will this new technology affect The North Face’s longstanding partnership with Gore, which dates back to the 1977 introduction of TNF’s Mountain Jacket? Mellin said he’s been forthcoming about the company’s emerging technology platforms and that The North Face remains committed to using Gore-Tex in its lifestyle division. Yet, he added, “FutureLight is the most advanced breathable waterproof technology in the world. It’s a quantum leap forward in performance and sustainability. We firmly believe it is better than Gore-Tex in every technical aspect and provides the consumer with a completely new system of benefits.”

When asked for a statement, Gore responded simply, “Gore does not engage in speculation about other brand’s technologies nor publicly discuss details of its relationship with licensees.”

For Fall 2019, The North Face will introduce 37 SKUs with FutureLight, including outerwear, single-wall tents, and gloves and mittens. Look for more innovation in different categories down the pipeline.

Is all the hype justified? Noted Allen, “You want to be a little cynical about this—we’ve all been down this road before—but this time I think there’s actually something really different. I don’t mean to sound like a complete fan boy, but it’s great stuff.”

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Living in a mountain town, where many pursue high-risk, high-reward activities, one can become oddly accustomed to untimely death. But in Aspen, Colorado, this summer, an unusual number of fatalities on 14ers in the surrounding has sparked debate among local officials. Who, exactly, bears responsibility for these tragedies? And what exactly should be done to prevent them? 

Since the end of May, two climbers have died while attempting the Maroon Bells, the iconic pair of 14,000-plus-foot peaks southwest of town, and five have died on 14,131-foot Capitol Peak, a few valleys to the west. The deaths include a young local couple who fell while apparently trying to find an alternate route down from Capitol’s summit, and a 21-year-old from the Denver area who was attempting his first 14er and fell in almost the exact same spot as the couple the week prior. Just when it seemed like things had calmed down, another climber got off-route and had to be plucked off the mountain by helicopter. 

In the wake of these accidents, the question is: Should public-land managers do more to control how hikers recreate in these places, or is it up to hikers to assess the risk for themselves, then act accordingly? 

It’s a hot debate throughout Colorado right now. On one side are people like Joe DiSalvo, who thinks officials are doing a poor job warning people of the dangers of the high country. He cites the fact that since 2013, 16 people—including the seven this year—have died on the Maroon Bells and Capitol Peak, according to data compiled by his office. “If we had 16 deaths in four to five years on the highway, I guarantee you I’d have a line of people out my office door saying, ‘What are you going to do?’” says DiSalvo, who takes the lead on search and rescues and decides when to send volunteers from into the field. “It’s a public safety hazard. These numbers are saying we’re not informing people well enough.” 

The , along with the , took the rare step of issuing a press release about the summer’s tragedies. “There’s a frustration and a concern that people are getting in over their heads,” says the tourism office’s executive director, Cathy Ritter. “Colorado isn’t a sanitized experience. The adventure is real, and you need to be prepared for it.” 

Add inexperienced hikers to the Elks’ rugged topography and you get a formula for tragedy. The seven 14,000-foot-plus mountains in the range—known for its rotten, loose rock and jagged summits—are a big step up from popular 14ers like or , where mellower hiking trails lead to the summits. Consequences of a wrong move or an error in judgment can be high. “I have a huge sense of respect for the mountains around here,” says Mike Marolt, a fourth-generation Aspenite who, with his brother Steve, was the first American to ski from above 8,000 meters. “They’re more dangerous in a lot of ways than the stuff I do in the Himalayas and the Andes.”  

Hikers have access to reams of information about how to climb these mountains, including the in-depth website , which offers trip reports and a forum for questions. “What’s causing a lot of people to be alarmed is the number of accidents related to people who seem to be getting off-route,” says CFI executive director , “It’s shocking to me that people might be getting in serious trouble when there is such a fabulous resource out there.”

But that democratization of route data could actually lead to more problems: anyone with a laptop can now research a route and think they have enough information to attempt to climb these peaks. “At the risk of sounding like a cranky old guy with gray in his beard,” says Athearn, “it appears there’s been a change over time in how people approach the mountains. In the old days, you’d connect with a mountaineering club or other climbers, and people would teach you in a progression of more serious mountains how to do this. Now, there’s very little experience learning the mountain craft.” 

So what to do to mitigate risk in these inherently dangerous places? DiSalvo wants to see Aspen implement some sort of route marking on the Elk Range’s hardest summits. “My argument is, no route marking at all is an invitation for people to be killed,” he says. “Why not just make it known which is the safest way to ascend?”  

Florida resident Roger Marcil, whose son died on Capitol, agrees. “There’s no reason for Carlin and Ryan [the couple who fell this August] to have perished,” he says. “There’s no reason anyone should be up on Capitol and take that way down. It wouldn’t be that hard to have a sign.”

Critics claim that approach could lead to even less personal responsibility. “I don’t think it’s a solution,” says Karen Schroyer, district ranger for the Aspen-Sopris Ranger District of the . “My concern is that we’d be inviting more inexperienced climbers to the mountains. And it’s not our role as public land managers to dictate which way people should go on our peaks.” 

What she’d like to see is “standalone, in-your-face signage that makes it very clear what the risks are of climbing these peaks,” she says. In other words, education and an it’s-on-you-to-make-the-right-choice mentality.  

DiSalvo and Marcil also advocate for a rating system based on difficulty, similar to ski runs, which are ranked from green to black. Stephen Szoradi, managing partner of , proposes using the three categories standardized in the Alps: an easy path, a hiking trail, and an alpine route that requires true mountaineering skills. “Then you can determine yourself if it’s appropriate to go on that trail. It doesn’t need a big sign that says, ‘Risk of death,’” he says.

Whether any of these proposals move forward will likely be determined after September 14, when the Pitkin County Sheriff’s department, Forest Service representatives, Mountain Rescue Aspen volunteers, local guides, and other stakeholders will meet. There, they will address address both what their specific message will be and how best to spread the word—whether through social media, website links, or basic mountaineering clinics.  

The results will likely be visible next spring. “There’s no more skirting around this,” says DiSalvo. “Some would say you’re discouraging tourism. I really don’t care. My job is public safety.”

One thing everyone seems to agree on is the need for a public-awareness campaign that clearly communicates the preparation, skill level, and risk assessment required for all the 14ers—and particularly the ones in the Elks. Marcil hopes to share the message by speaking out about the fate of his son and his son’s girlfriend. “They spend thousands of dollars looking for people,” he says, referring to law enforcement and search and rescue groups. “Why not spend the money on making sure those people have good gear and education instead?”

No matter what measures are taken, of course, risk will never be 100 percent mitigated. “The mountains can never be made entirely safe,” says CFI’s Ahearn. “Overcoming challenge and adversity is one of the reasons people climb them. There need to be places in our world where people can go out and just experience raw nature, regardless of what gets dished out.”

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