SAM Magazine—Denver, June 30, 2025—Outside’s second-annual Festival and Summit, May 29–June 1, drew roughly 35,000 visitors to Denver’s Civic Center Park. Attendance was nearly double that of the inaugural event in 2024, a sign the concept has room to grow and could yet become a meaningful way to promote participation in a wide range of outdoor recreation, including activities at mountain resorts.

The four-day event mixed live music, film, and activities with an industry trade event of sorts, and is positioning itself as a potential “SXSW for the outdoors,” according to Outside CEO Robin Thurston. (South by Southwest in Austin, founded in 1987, is an annual conference and festival that brings together professionals and enthusiasts in marketing, music, and film.)

“We want to create a sort of centering point that people feel every year that they need to be there, to potentially activate their own brand or interact with their consumer or their partners,” Thurston told SAM.

And that's beginning to happen. "This year we saw a number of other things going on in and around the festival," he said. "There was the extreme climbing competition, there was a fly-fishing experience in town. The Adventure Travel Association did their conference around this."

The festival is also good for Outside, of course. "We still have the print magazine, but on a daily basis, the millions of consumers that are touching the Outside platform are largely digital ones,” said Thurston. “The physical event provides an incredibly unique opportunity to engage with them in a totally different way."

The two-day summit, May 29–30, kicked things off with speakers and networking opportunities. The summit "brings leaders in the industry together to discuss new ideas, successes, and challenges that top outdoor businesses are facing today," he said. It drew 900 mostly young attendees, many in their first year or so of working in the industry or looking for an entry point. 

The two-day festival, May 31–June 1, drew more than 33,000. It featured 12 bands, more than 30 speakers, and 13 films. There were also activities zones like the REI Wild Ideas Worth Living stage and Outside’s Ultimate Basecamp with Colorado Wildlife Council. Twenty partners from the Adventure Travel Trade Association, 26 Camp Colorado partners and businesses, and 15 nonprofit vendors were represented. 

The popularity of immersive events continues rise. That includes the Outside Festival and Summit, Racoon Media Group’s Snowbound Expo and Run and Outdoor Expo, both in Boston, and Snowvana, which will debut a third location in the Midwest in November 2025, among others.

Getting folks outdoors. Outside itself is in the midst of a major pivot from print magazine to digital adventure hub as it seeks new ways to get more people, well, outside. "Never in human history have we spent as much time indoors," said Thurston. "A child born today will spend 30 years on a screen. And there's definitely a loneliness crisis going on across the world."

At the same time, he said, "Families and individuals are going to spend far more on experiences than they are on goods." Events like the festival, he added, "are opportunities for people to experience outdoor culture in kind of a unique way, in the middle of a big city." 

Those opportunities draw people away from their screens, he said. "Music is a part of that." So were the festival's climbing wall, bike park pump track, and other activities. "It's such a rich environment for them to interact with."

Incorporating Inntopia, and more. The Outside platform currently encompasses several magazines (many of them now available online only; Outside magazine itself has become a quarterly), mapping and event registration services, and with the acquisition of Inntopia last February, a software platform that includes a booking engine, CRM and CDP—and several mountain resort clients. Its aim is to reduce the "friction" in the process of pursuing outdoor activities, said Thurston.

What does that mean for mountain resorts? 

"We'd like to bring more of what I call the Outside suite of products to the Inntopia [resort] so that they can service their customer better through that platform and technology," Thurston said. "For the average customer in the outdoors, there's still too much friction. As people start their discovery process, they drop out because it's just easier to do XYZ or not go on a trip at all. Our goal with Inntopia is to make it easier and easier for people to make these decisions."

While the decline of Outside magazine has dismayed many of the brand's longtime fans, there's reason for optimism that the company will nonetheless help grow interest and participation in the outdoors. 

Report by Rick Kahl