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The James Beard Foundation (JBF) Awards swept Chicago into a frenzy on Monday, June 16, at the Lyric Opera. Of all the Colorado contestants, upscale Italian restaurant Frasca Food and Wine in Boulder was named Outstanding Restaurant. This makes the restaurant’s collective fourth James Beard Award. Though there were six finalists headed into the final night of the ceremony, most of the Colorado contestants lost out.

Harold Tanner ’52, chairman emeritus of the Cornell Board of Trustees – who helped usher in an era of financial stability as a co-chair of Cornell’s first billion-dollar endowment campaign and served as board chair during the transformative shift of all first-year students to North Campus residences – died June 14 in New York. He was 93.

The AMGA mission drives a robust set of core competencies—education, standard setting, and advocacy—that serve to advance the AMGA community and the guiding industry. The mission positions the organization to tackle big industry challenges while also serving individual guides with career development and community.

In 2024, the AMGA executed high-impact initiatives that touched on all three areas of the mission. On the advocacy front, the passage of the EXPLORE Act in December 2024 was a landmark achievement for guides that will give rise to a new era of increased access and streamlined permitting. In the realm of education, the AMGA redesigned the entrance to the Alpine Guide Program to provide terrain-specific training in snow and glacier guiding, and alpine rock guiding. The new programs will enable guides to quickly gain qualification to work in the classic alpine ranges and will better meet the needs of AMGA Accredited Businesses. As a standard-setting organization, the AMGA made important refinements to the AMGA Scope of Practice including the introduction of a terrain complexity scale.