Mountain
communities
are interconnected.
Labor sheds, commuter flows, housing markets, and visitor traffic cross municipal lines every day. But the data that describes those flows lives in a dozen federal and state portals, each with its own geography, vintage, and access pattern — and most of it has to be rebuilt by hand every time a board, a partner, or a business asks a question.
High Country Analytics consolidates that working knowledge into shared, durable references. We work with chambers, tourism boards, downtown development authorities, transit agencies, counties, and municipal staff. Our deliverables are designed as civic infrastructure: comprehensive, easy to host, accessible to non-technical readers, and built to outlive any static report.
The defining choice in our work is regional framing. Rather than analyzing a single jurisdiction in isolation, we normalize every dataset to a comparable system of anchor communities and corridors. That framing reflects how mountain economies actually function — and it lets any single metric be read three ways at once: the community alone, the community among peers, and the corridor as a system.
Drag to orbit
Jake Zook
The practice that grew out of the spreadsheet.
Jake came for the mountains — for snowboarding, mountain biking, and the kind of life you can only build in a mountain town. He started out at REI and wound up where he is now: the Economic Development Specialist for the City of Glenwood Springs, helping a Colorado mountain town make sense of its economy and its trajectory.
Working inside that role gave Jake a close-up view of the problem High Country Analytics exists to solve. He kept finding himself rebuilding ad-hoc spreadsheets every time a board, coworker, or developer asked a question. The data was always somewhere — a federal portal, a state filing, a private dataset, a back-of-the-cabinet PDF — but rarely in a form that could meet a decision in real time.
High Country Analytics is the practice that grew out of that experience. Jake holds a Bachelor's in Urban Studies and Economic Data Analysis from the University of Pittsburgh and spends his career at the intersection of economic development, data, and the mountain communities that depend on both. When he's not in front of a dataset, you'll find him conducting gravity research on his snowboard or dirt bike somewhere in the Colorado backcountry.
- Education
- BA · Urban Studies & Economic Data Analysis
University of Pittsburgh - Off-clock
- Snowboard · MTB · Dirt bike
Colorado backcountry
That's the whole climb — the practice, the person, and the line between them. If your community has a data question, let's talk.
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