knows the outdoor industry better than almost anyone. He’s held leadership positions with Vail Resorts, Outward Bound, and VF Corporation, taught outdoor recreation economy at the University of Colorado’s business school, and even guided clients to the summit of Mount Everest and other 8,000-meter peaks. But Benitez, who is currently the Vice President of Government Affairs for Lululemon, is best known as the, a position he took on in 2015.
In 2024 Benitez co-authored a book alongside ԹϺ contributor Frederick Reimers about his experiences in outdoor recreation titled .In this excerpt, Benitez discusses his time in Colorado state government.
My gratitude for all that outdoor recreation has given me was behind the most unexpected turn of my life—government service. As the son of an immigrant and an indifferent student in my youth, I was shocked to find myself working directly with the governor of Colorado.
In 2015, then-governor (now senator) John Hickenlooper asked me to lead the state’s first Office of the Outdoor Recreation Industry. The idea was to be a government liaison and advocate for Colorado’s outdoor-recreation businesses. I’d be working on behalf of Summit County’s ski resorts and for hunting guides in the town of Rangely, as well as with growing gear manufacturers like Big Agnes and established retail giants like REI, who has a flagship store in Denver.
Helping those businesses thrive meant improving access to outdoor recreation across the state by working with state parks and the national forests to build more trails, more bike paths, and even more whitewater rapids. In the same way the airline industry relies on the FAA and air-traffic controllers, and the transportation industry on highway departments, the outdoor industry needs government oversight of the places where we play.
Yet as honored as I was to be asked, the opportunity required sacrifice, a step back in pay, and a move from the mountain community of Eagle, where my wife and I had, beginning in 2014, made a home while we were still dating. We wrestled with the decision, but the chance to be of service to the industry and community won the day. I got to work.
Growing a Vital Part of the Colorado Economy
In my four years—from 2015 to 2019—as the director of Colorado’s Office of the Outdoor Recreation Industry, we grew that sector of the economy from $23 billion to $63 billion, recruiting businesses and individuals who saw the state as a great place to work, and more importantly, live. Promoting Colorado’s recreational amenities to visitors and prospective businesses wasn’t enough, though. I realized that ours was an industry that needed more support from academia, in the same way that the medical profession, the engineering professions and tech rely on universities to train and cultivate new talent.
We needed to educate workers who could make the outdoor-recreation economy more resilient, and more importantly, sustainable. I urged Western Colorado University, in Gunnison, to create the nation’s first MBA focused on outdoor rec in 2018, and had a hand in the creation of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Masters in Economics of the Outdoor Recreation Economy, and Denver University’s Leadership in Outdoor Recreation Industry program. My industry was growing up.
I wasn’t the only one realizing it. There was a national movement for the outdoor industry to be more involved in protecting our playgrounds and nurturing the essential conditions for our businesses. One tool was to establish the importance of our industry to the national economy. The numbers are huge.
In 2021 visits to national parks alone generate $20.5 billion in direct spending at hotels, restaurants, outfitters, and other amenities in nearby gateway communities, supporting over 322,600 jobs and generating over $42.5 billion in total economic output. The outdoor-recreation economy generates an $862 billion impact every year.
Between the likes of gear manufacturers such as Columbia, whitewater-rafting outfitters in West Virginia, and bike shops in Moab, Utah, we account for 4.5 million jobs, the majority of them in small businesses. We represent 1.9 percent of the GDP, which is bigger than the automotive and the pharmaceutical industries combined.
In fact, the outdoor industry is larger than the mineral-extraction industry, which illustrates the stakes perfectly: Isn’t a hiking trail just as important to our economy as an oil well? Why should our industry have to rely on a constellation of nonprofits like the Access Fund and the Sierra Club and the Appalachian Mountain Club to ensure that our businesses can continue to thrive by building and maintaining our recreation sites and our trails? We need to treat recreational infrastructure the same way we treat transportation infrastructure.
This type of investment works. According to the State of Virginia, in 2019, for every $1 of general tax revenue provided to state parks in Virginia, the parks brought in $17.68. That same year, the National Park System generated more than 30 times as much as the federal government invested. Look at Columbus, Ohio, which in 2023 converted an abandoned limestone quarry into a 180-acre park featuring mountain-bike trails, lakes for paddling, and a via ferrata rock-climbing course along the quarry’s 150-foot-tall cliff face. That new park follows the city’s 2009 investment in a climbing wall open to the public that is amongst the nation’s largest. “Our goal with that park was to keep urban young professionals in Columbus,” the city’s park operations manager told ԹϺ magazine.
Columbus is putting into play a trend that Salt Lake City has been benefiting from for years. In 2021, a University of Utah study looked at Utah’s booming tech sector. The study found that 85 percent of tech workers working in the state chose to stay despite being offered a higher salary elsewhere, citing the outdoor-recreation opportunities as their motivation. For those workers who left and then returned, 62 percent said outdoor recreation was their primary reason, compared to 49 percent who said that family was the most important factor.
We aren’t just talking about rock climbers and bird watchers. The outdoor-recreation economy encompasses motorsports fans too, featuring big-ticket items like Jet Skis, powerboats, and quadrunners. Dirt bikers like me value long, challenging trails, where we can get away from suburbia and leave our problems behind, taking a mental-health break.
We are realizing that outdoor recreation has benefits beyond just fun. Studies are increasingly showing that time outside is a critical component of physical and mental health. Even just living near green space can provide a stunning array of advantages. In one Danish study, researchers used satellite data to assess children’s exposure to green space, correlating each child’s place of residence with nearby parks. Children who lived in neighborhoods with more green space had a reduced risk of depression, mood disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders, and substance abuse later in life.
Those with the lowest levels of green-space exposure during childhood had a 55 percent higher risk of developing mental illnesses than those who’d grown up with abundant green space. (Now imagine those same, city-bound kids with access to safe, green-lined pathways and a bicycle.) That was just one of the studies referenced in the Colorado Outdoor Rx Report my office produced illustrate to government departments the importance of allocating resources for better access for outdoor recreation, whether in the wild or in urban planning.
To get the word out about outdoor recreation’s value for our health and our economy, I knew there needed to be more people like me working in state governments. With the governor’s blessing, I personally met with delegations from a half dozen states including Montana and Michigan, urging them to create their own positions. The number of offices rose from two to eight in just three years and included states from both sides of the political spectrum, from Wyoming to Vermont. That felt significant in such a partisan political climate.
A Plan to Create More State Outdoor Recreation Offices
Realizing we’d be more effective all pulling in the same direction, we drafted the Confluence Accords. The document is an operational charter for state outdoor-recreation (Orec) offices and stands on four distinct pillars: economic development (keep this economy strong); conservation and stewardship (without the wild places, there would be no reason to buy that new fleece jacket); education and workforce development (where will the next generation of leadership for this industry come from and what will their education look like?); and, above all, public health (this was validated, for instance, by the returning-veteran community, which showed a significant decrease in traumatic brain injury [TBI] and post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] impacts by spending time outside, and has been codified by the handful of nations like Japan that can now formally—by a doctor—prescribe time outside instead of medication). The Accords are an agreement that each state agency signing on will work on behalf of each of those pillars.
Eleven states have signed the Confluence Accords, with more on the way. How many other industries have made a formal agreement to work for the greater good of society? None that I can think of.
That alignment across the industry and the states has led to some remarkable bipartisan political wins in recent years, at a time when such wins are nearly extinct. Armed with the GDP numbers and scientific studies, outdoor-recreation-industry leaders were major players in advocating for the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act in 2019, which created 1.3 million acres of Wilderness and 10 new Wild and Scenic River segments, and increased the size of three national parks, amongst dozens of other conservation acts in dozens of states. The Senate passed it by a 92-8 vote, and it was signed into law by President Trump.
The following year saw similar bipartisan support for the Great American Outdoors Act, which permanently allocated $900 million annually to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a source for recreational infrastructure created in 1965. The fund helped create some $18 billion in boat ramps, bike paths, and state parks over the years, but was allowed to lapse in 2018 amidst partisan bickering. The Great American Outdoors Act also allocated $9.5 billion to reduce the infamous National Park Service maintenance backlog. Some called it the most significant conservation legislation in a half century. The only thing both sides of the political aisle can agree on, seemingly, is funding and conservation for outdoor recreation.
The Need for a National Outdoor Recreation Office
Those successes have led us to start asking whether it is time to push Washington, D.C., to create a federal outdoor-recreation-industry office to continue the promotion and preservation of this unique and special economy. As we saw earlier, outdoor recreation comprises nearly 2 percent of our nation’s economy and provides priceless quality-of-life and health benefits to our people, but there’s no specific entity shepherding it in the federal government. Imagine how much more effective we could be with dedicated leadership?
What would such an agency do? Firstly, it would convene the state offices, which will hopefully eventually number 50, and help channel money their way. The Great American Outdoors Act shows there’s an appetite for such spending across the political spectrum. We’ve also been able to educate D.C. about the value of such investments. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, for example, earmarks $750 million for investments in outdoor-recreation travel and tourism. The problem is, many local governments don’t know how to access those funds. Furthermore, I believe the time has come for recreationists to ante up and pay into the system. Hunters and fishermen have, through special taxes on guns, ammunition, and fishing tackle approved decades ago, been helping pay for conservation and scientific management of wildlife habitat to the tune of $23 billion over the lifetime of the legislation that created the funding. Likewise, I think those of us using trails and boat ramps should help invest in their preservation. Similar taxes have been wildly successful in Minnesota, Missouri, and Georgia. It’s time for us, too, to pay to play.
A national director of outdoor recreation would also help coordinate federal agencies like the United States Forest Service (USFS), National Park Service (NPS), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and any other agency that managed land or resources of benefit to outdoor recreation. Right now, that’s the job of the Federal Interagency Council on Outdoor Recreation (FICOR). It was created in 2011, and before it was dissolved by the Trump Administration, FICOR made significant strides on behalf of outdoor recreation, including combining most federal permits and reservations into the Recreation.gov website and helping the Bureau of Economic Analysis measure the economic impact of the Orec industry. Under the Biden Administration, FICOR is back, but the problem is that its leadership rotates annually between the agencies, and so FICOR doesn’t have the full attention of any of them.
It’s an idea that already has a precedent. From 1962 until the late 1970s, there actually existed a federal Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, which worked on both the national and local levels to promote outdoor recreation. In addition to creating some of the foundational research on the health benefits of outdoor recreation, and on the importance of equity in getting Americans outside, the bureau was a prime driver behind some of the nation’s seminal recreation and conservation legislation, including the Wilderness Act in 1964 and the creation of the Land and Water Conservation Fund that same year. The bureau was also the originator of the idea of rails to trails, converting abandoned railway lines into recreational pathways, and helped fund some of the earliest rail-to-trail projects in nine states including California, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.
The Bureau of Outdoor Recreation also set the precedent of cooperation between federal agencies to foster recreation. Even more prescient was its approach of establishing cooperation between such federal agencies and the states to create parks and trail systems. Ultimately, the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation was subsumed into the National Park Service in 1981. Because it had no real funding of its own, and couldn’t make its own policy, it was easy prey for the anti-conservationists of the Reagan Administration.
Before you start thinking “Uh oh, this smells like Big Government,” I’d assure you that it doesn’t need to be. I did my job with the State of Colorado with just my salary, a gas card, and a laptop. The outdoor industry is great at getting by with minimal resources—give us a roll of duct tape and some bailing wire, and we’ll cobble something together. Furthermore, I would challenge you to ask yourself if you are comfortable with nonprofits and trade associations alone protecting and promoting our birthright, the public lands that Teddy Roosevelt called “America’s best idea”?