Outside Inc. expands as part of a $150 million effort to create the Amazon Prime of the outdoors

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Sneak Peek of the Week

Outside Inc. empire heads into a make-or-break year

In the past five years, Boulder investor Robin Thurston has amassed 25 iconic outdoor brands as he forges a vision of a publicly held outdoors company where millions of subscribers use Outside Inc. to read, buy, register for events and book their outdoor holidays.

Thurston’s “Amazon Prime for the Outdoors” grew last week when he acquired Inntopia, a software company that handles booking reservations for more than 200 resorts and analyzes lodging trends in dozens of resort communities across the West.

Inntopia fits with Outside Inc. CEO Thurston’s overarching vision to “inspire, activate and celebrate” outdoor adventurers by creating a “one-stop shop for outdoor adventure travel” that marries Outside’s content, registration and mapping apps with Inntopia’s booking systems.

“It really fits into a space that will be helpful for a lot of our partners,” said Thurston, whose consolidation of outdoor media and online tracking apps is part of a plan to build “the world’s leading creator of outdoor content, mapping, events and experiences.”

The acquisition of Inntopia grows Outside to about 450 employees, up from 370. It also led to 20 layoffs, most of them editors and employees of Outside magazine. It was the third round of layoffs for Outside in five years. Thurston has now shed every employee at the magazine who was there before he bought the storied publication in 2021.

Outside Inc. says it reaches as many as 300 million unique visitors a year through its magazines, Outside TV, podcasts, movies and social media. The company also claims 100 million registered users and is nearing 1 million members of its $89-a-year Outside Plus subscription program that delivers access to 25 media and service brands offering articles, gear reviews, mapping apps, online education and discounted travel and events.

Outside has raised more than $150 million over three rounds of venture capital funding from nearly a dozen investors since 2019.

This year, Thurston said, the company’s highest goal is to not only grow revenue, but have positive earnings and cash flow.

“I cannot emphasize how much we need to put this profitability in our position,” he said.

There are three outcomes when you borrow a bunch of money from outside investors, Thurston said. You go bust, you sell to a competitor or you go public and sell shares on the open market. There are few media companies that are capable of spending more than $150 million for Outside Inc.’s assets. So Thurston is in a do-or-die scenario, with 25 legacy brands and 450 livelihoods on the line.

Thurston said he hopes to bring Outside public in the next three to four years.

“But we have a lot of work to do,” he said.

The workers who were laid off last week as part of the Inntopia acquisition are irked. The outdoors world is a fiery lot. It’s painful to watch raw capitalism permeate a world filled with writers and editors who focus more on outdoor experiences than financial gains. Success for a publicly traded Outside will be defined by quarterly financial statements, not quality dispatches from sunburned scribes.

“He pirated all of these legacy brands — some of which were admittedly at the end of their business cycles in the demise of the era of print media — and killed or consolidated them, pulling them away from the core communities, for the sole purpose of a huge financial play. Nothing more, nothing less,” said one editor, who asked not to be named, citing the guidelines of the company’s termination agreement.

>> Click over to The Sun on Tuesday to read this story

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The Outsider 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.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Breaking Trail

Arguments against logging fire-threatened forests heat up wildfire mitigation plans

Wildfire mitigation in Colorado is about thinning forests and reducing fuel loads by logging and clearing underbrush. What if that’s wrong? What if the best way to stop a wildfire is to keep forests dense, where drying winds and sunlight cannot penetrate?

That’s the argument of the Eco-Integrity Alliance, which argues decades of fire mitigation focused on removing trees in Colorado’s forests is endangering lives and homes.

The activist group is fomenting opposition to Jefferson County’s plans to clear forest on 25,000 county-owned acres in the next decade as well as the federal Fix Our Forests Act that calls for a national fire center and fast-tracking wildfire mitigation projects that would remove timber from fire-threatened forests.

The alliance argues that less logging keeps forests healthier and better for the climate by protecting carbon-capturing trees while limiting impacts to soil and watersheds. The group suggests limited wildfire funding would be better directed at protecting homes with fire-retardant materials and by removing vegetation around structures.

One national forest supervisor in Colorado told The Sun that the group is “wrong and full of crap.”

Many Jefferson County residents who spend time in JeffCo open space parks — including Alderfer/Three Sisters, Elk Meadow, Flying J Ranch and Meyer Ranch — agree with the Eco-Integrity Alliance.

Wildfire mitigation experts with the Colorado Natural Resources Department, The Nature Conservancy, the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control and the Society of American Foresters constantly review evolving fire mitigation science, assess the potential impacts and “see if there’s a place for it in our projects,” Jefferson County’s natural resources supervisor Steve Murdock told The Sun’s Tracy Ross.

“There are numerous studies that demonstrate both the effect and lack of effectiveness of these forest thinning projects on altering fire behavior, but as land managers we have to go with the consensus of the community,” Murdock said. “We can’t sit around and wait for the perfect solution that everyone agrees on. That’s never going to happen.”

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

The Playground

New owner for Powderhorn on the Grand Mesa plans new lift, expanded snowmaking and more tiny homes

Colorado’s Gart family and resort industry pioneer Andy Daly have sold a majority interest in their Powderhorn ski area to Utah-based Pacific Group Resorts.

Pacific Group Resorts – or PRGI – has run Powderhorn since 2018, alongside four resorts it owns in Maryland, Vancouver, Virginia and Vermont and one it operates in New Hampshire. Since taking the reins of the three-lift, 1,600-acre ski area on the world’s largest flat-top mountain, the operators have tripled season pass sales and doubled visitation.

Powderhorn’s latest marketing push claims Palisade, a 30-minute drive away, as “Colorado’s last undiscovered ski town.”

“Palisade really is a ski town. It’s such a beautiful drive up the mesa and it has that character and authenticity that people like,” said Pacific Group Resort CEO Mark Fischer.

The pitch lands squarely inside the Grand Valley’s transformation into an outdoor recreation hub, with a growing population of younger residents flocking for outdoor amenities and cheaper homes. (And there’s a robust hive of outdoor businesses setting up shop in the region as Colorado Mesa University pioneers an outdoor recreation industry studies program.)

The new owners also have a majority interest in almost 800 acres around the ski area and the Gart family and Daly are helping plan for development on the land. A few years ago Powderhorn opened a village of tiny homes offering slopeside lodging in cozy cabins. Initial plans call for more tiny homes, with skiers able to buy a ski-area starter cabin for about $150,000 and put it in a rental pool for vacationers.

>> Click over to The Sun on Monday to read this story

The Guide

Legislation would allow Colorado counties to triple lodging tax

On Thursday morning, Colorado lawmakers dropped legislation that would allow communities to raise the county lodging tax from 2% to 6%. The tripling of local lodging taxes — which mountain town voters have recently embraced to fund housing and squeeze additional benefit from visitors — also expands the types of projects that can be funded with lodging tax revenue.

House Bill 1247 would allow increased lodging tax revenue to fund infrastructure, preserve historical sites, land and wildlife habitat, promote sustainable tourism practices and employ more police and emergency workers.

The new tax was expected by now well-organized groups of short-term rental property owners and advocates who galvanized last year to fight a proposal that would have quadrupled property taxes on short-term rental homes. Short-term rental industry advocates have been predicting increased taxes and regulation on homes rented to vacationers as communities grapple with a lack of affordable housing.

The proposal to increase county lodging taxes to 6% was first floated last year by Colorado Counties Inc. alongside a proposal to possibly tax homes that are left vacant for most of the year. The legislation is for unincorporated portions of counties and cannot add taxes to areas where there are existing municipal or district lodging taxes.

>> Stay tuned to The Sun for more on the lodging tax proposal

In Their Words

Crested Butte Mountain lift mechanics reach contract deal with Vail Resorts

Crested Butte lift mechanics on Thursday announced a settlement with Vail Resorts that delivered the 12-member union an average raise of $6 an hour.

The lift mechanic union — one of only two in the country — voted to authorize a strike last month, just as Vail Resorts ended a first-in-decades strike with its ski patrollers at Park City Mountain Resort in Utah. That patroller strike hobbled the country’s largest ski area during the holidays, riling skiers who had to wait in long lines at lifts reaching limited terrain.

Lift mechanics began negotiating a labor contract with Vail Resorts in January 2024 and met about six hours a month for all of that year. Once the Park City strike ended, negotiations started happening weekly. The union was seeking a $2 starting wage increase to $23 an hour with a stipend to pay for gear and equipment.

When Crested Butte’s lift mechanics approved a strike and started raising money online last month — they raised nearly $12,000 — “there was like a flip that switched” in negotiations with Vail Resorts, said Thomas Pearman, a five-year mechanic at Crested Butte Mountain Resort and president of the union represented by the 1,100-member United Mountain Workers.

The new contract through August 2027 delivers $3.50 an hour pay increases to new mechanics and $9 an hour for veterans with an average for the group at $6 an hour. They also got an annual tool and equipment stipend to pay for things like skis and safety gear. When Vail Resorts settled with Park City patrollers the company quickly offered similar pay bumps to patrollers at ski areas that require dangerous avalanche mitigation work.

“We hope this makes an impact across all Vail Resorts lift maintenance departments and hopefully the stipend becomes universal and there are some kinds of raises rolled out to all lift mechanics in the company,” Pearman said.

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Cranor Hill in Gunnison celebrates nearly 60 years of affordable local skiing

It’s a tiny bump in the Colorado ski resort landscape but the city of Gunnison’s Cranor Hill has kept locals on snow since the 1960s.

Cranor Hill opened as a private ski area in 1962 and sold to the city a few years later. The Poma surface lift climbs a little more than 300 feet and serves about 45 acres divided into four runs. It’s one of several city-owned ski areas in Colorado that thrive amid the giants of the U.S. resort industry.

Cranor — it’s pronounced Cray-Ner — usually opens in January and closes by the end of February. Without any snowmaking, it can lie dormant for entire seasons or open late and close early, depending on snowfall. Day tickets are $35 for adults and season passes run $90 for members of the Gunnison Recreation Center and $25 for additional family members.

So that was $190 for season passes for the entire Butterfield family.

“I can see all three kids skiing at once,” said Tina Butterfield, a professor at nearby Western Colorado University as she skied Cranor with her children and husband. “We can get all of us and our stuff in the car and 10 minutes later we are skiing for the day. It’s family-friendly and reminiscent of my skiing growing up.”

>> Click over to The Sun on Saturday to see photographer Dean Krakel’s shots from Cranor Hill

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Corrections & Clarifications

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