It’s official: The outdoors beats beer.
The outdoor industry counted 183.2 million Americans getting outside in 2025, or about 59% of everyone in the country older than age 5.
“That’s more participation than booze,” says Kelly Davis, the data-crunching boss at the Outdoor Industry Association, pointing to surveys showing about 54% of Americans say they drink alcohol. “We are in a good place.”
The annual Outdoor Industry Association participation report for decades triggered hand-wringing by outdoor boosters lamenting a lack of engagement. For years, they could not move the needle past 50% of the country playing outside.
Now, for the fourth year in a row, record numbers of people are going outside. The outdoor recreation movement has added more than 30 million Americans since the pandemic. Americans age 65 and older are among the fastest growing demographic in outdoor recreation, up more than 12 million in the last decade. And kids are fueling the boom too, with 22.6 million youngsters between 6 and 12 heading outside, up 5% from 2024.
But the pace of growth is slowing and there are troubling storm clouds ahead.
The association counted Americans going outside 11.9 billion times, or an average of 65.2 times a year for those outdoor participants. That’s down from more than 87 outdoor excursions a year in 2012.
Young adults are not heading outdoors like they did coming out of the pandemic. The 18-to-24 and 25-to-36 cohorts are the only age groups to report declining outdoor participation in 2025.
The outdoor recreation industry is working to better engage young adults as well as embrace the new arrivals.
“Now the question is what do we do with these 30 million newcomers,” says Davis. “A lot of us are still a little bit in shock and we are trying to figure out the new kids who came onto the playground.”
There’s a balance in the outdoor industry that involves celebrating the newcomers while taking care of the 150 million participants who are the foundation of the $1.3 trillion outdoor economy. (Not to be too obvious, but the most frequent outdoor explorers spend the most, so keeping that tally of outdoor days high is critical for outdoor brands, manufacturers and retailers.)
And those frequent and fervent fans are fading. Those are the folks – defined by the association as “core” – who keep the outdoor recreation economy humming. The association counted 89.8 million core outdoor Americans, down 4% from last year and down 12% from the 2013 peak of 101 million.
This marks a significant shift in usage patterns as the most critical engine in the outdoor recreation economy loses steam and a surging demographic of newcomers – people who get outside 1 to 11 times a year – takes the reins.
For several years in a row, the most popular activities have remained hiking, running, fishing, camping and biking. Camping is what outdoor-recreation boosters call a gateway pursuit.
A person spending the night outdoors tends to be participating in a lot of other activities, and there’s a growing recognition that getting more people outside for a night can be the key to even more surging participation.
“Camping is the secret sauce,” Davis says. “We have to get more people to spend the night outside with equipment good enough to keep them comfortable.”
That’s the goal of Hest, a 7-year-old maker of sleeping gear with a mission to make a night outdoors as comfortable as your home bed. The company, with its memory foam mattresses that do not turn rigid in cold temperatures, is aiming to change the fear that a night camping involves a poor night of sleep.
“The first thing you say when you wake up after camping is ‘How did you sleep?’” says MJ Carroll, the Durango-based head of brand marketing for Hest. “We want you to wake up refreshed and go out and enjoy your day and connect with nature and hopefully join us in advocating for public lands.”
