Nearly three decades in the field — from British Columbia to Florida, Canada to New Mexico. He has built trails, directed races, run tours by lantern light, and advised governments on what it actually takes to make outdoor recreation the economic backbone of a community. He is also your neighbor.
Jared Chatterley graduated from Brigham Young University in 1997 with a degree in Recreation Management and has not stopped moving since. Nearly three decades in the outdoor recreation industry — public sector and private, from British Columbia to Florida — have taken him from lodge operations in Canada to trail development in New Mexico to race directing in the Sangre de Cristos. He is not a consultant who theorizes about the outdoors from a conference room. He is someone who built a trail with his own hands and then built the economic argument for why it matters.
That is OREC Consulting's entire premise: outdoor recreation as a stabilizing economic force for communities that need it most — rural communities that have the terrain but lack the capacity to develop it. Jared's work is moving initiatives from vision to reality in places where an overburdened local department cannot do it alone. He evaluates assets, develops programs, energizes events, secures funding, and builds the long-term planning infrastructure that keeps outdoor economies alive after the consultant leaves.
His board service tells the rest of the story: Colorado's Office of Outdoor Recreation under OEDIT, EndeavOR (New Mexico's Outdoor Recreation Business Alliance), the Scenic Highway of Legends, the Spanish Peaks Outdoor Coalition, NM State University's Colfax County Extension, the NM Northeastern Regional Tourism Marketing Board, and the Friends of Sugarite Canyon State Park. That is not credential collecting. That is someone who has been asked, repeatedly and by different kinds of organizations, to help figure out how to make this work.
His work covers the full stack of outdoor economy development: evaluating a community's terrain assets, designing programs that give people a reason to stay longer and come back, building signature events that put places on the map, securing the funding that makes it all sustainable, and doing the day-to-day follow-through that most planning processes never survive. He founded and still directs the Master of the Mountains Adventure Relay in Raton and created the Climax Canyon National Recreation Trail — projects that are not consulting deliverables but living proof of concept.
His operating thesis maps directly onto Tymmber's: the other 8 hours — the discretionary hours after sleep and work — are where human character is either built or eroded, and where communities either invest in themselves or don't. Outdoor recreation is not a luxury sector. It is infrastructure for human development. That is the argument Jared has been making to governments and communities for nearly 30 years.
"There are 24 hours in a day. 8 are spent sleeping. 8 are spent at school or work. The other 8 are where the money is spent."
[Jared's statement on what drew him to this — what he sees in Tymmber's direction, why it's different, and what he intends to contribute as an advisor. His honest take.]
In Raton, New Mexico — Jared's home base — he operates Legend by Lantern Light Tours and continues as founder and race director of the Master of the Mountains Adventure Relay. He built the Climax Canyon National Recreation Trail, which now serves as a model for what terrain development can do for a small community's identity and economy. These are not past projects. They are living operations that Jared maintains alongside his consulting work.
Through OREC Consulting, he is currently working with rural communities across the region to develop outdoor recreation as a primary economic driver — doing the planning, funding, programming, and event work that turns a community's natural assets into a sustainable outdoor economy. He also continues his advisory role with Colorado's OEDIT, where state-level outdoor recreation policy is shaped.