Why I started Summit Shred Swap

Every garage in this county has gear that sits. A second pair of skis. A sled that goes out six weekends a year. A bike that's too nice to sell and too nice to leave in the rain.

I started Summit Shred Swap to help my friends here earn a little extra from that gear, passively, without having to run a business. Summit County is an expensive place to live, and most of the people who make it run are piecing together rent, a pass and groceries on seasonal money. If a snowboard can cover a month of utilities while you're at work, it should.

It started with me not being able to afford the gear. I wanted to get into splitboarding and mountain biking and didn't have the money to buy it all outright. Renting from a shop every weekend gets expensive fast. What I wanted was to rent from the friends and neighbors who already had the gear, pay them something fair, and get good equipment while they made a little money on something that was sitting in the garage anyway.

I'm also a snowboard addict who has bought boards he was sure he'd love and ridden twice. Those tend to be the popular ones everyone wants to try, and somebody would happily pay to ride one for a weekend before buying their own. The board earns, the renter gets a real test instead of a guess, and I get closer to the next board. (Or, if I'm honest, to a day on a turbo sled. I have two snowmobiles and neither is a turbo.)

The other half is for everyone coming up to ride. A shop hands you whatever is on the wall for the price on the board. Here you rent the exact gear a local picked for these mountains, usually for less, from someone who can tell you where to take it.

I've watched a big-chain rental counter put a kid's snowboard bindings on backwards. Nobody who rides their own gear would do that. Renting from a person who cares about the thing you're borrowing is just a better deal, on both ends.

So that's the idea. List what you have, set a price, say where you'll meet. Rent what you don't own from a neighbor. Everything else — payment, deposits, ID checks, messages — stays in the app, so nobody is handing a stranger a credit card.

If you're local and your gear is collecting dust, the first 100 members to list five things get $50 and a year with no lender fee. That's the nudge.