Infinite opportunities for outdoor enthusiasts

When Sam Seeton ’16 and David Rhine ’19 enrolled at Mines, they both did so to earn a high-quality education, but also because of the entire package the university would provide. Seeton wanted to play football, and Rhine wanted to spend his weekends on the slopes.

They were able to do those things and, at the same time, create Infinite Outdoors, a website and mobile app that connects property owners with hunters, anglers and other outdoor enthusiasts seeking private outdoor experiences—a concept similar to AirBnB but for outdoor recreation.

Infinite Outdoors seeks to fix a problem of supply and demand. Many landowners will lease out the hunting or fishing rights on their land to a third party. When they do so, the lease doesn’t guarantee they’ll allow people to hunt or fish responsibly, which could lead to someone’s land being trashed. Because they could lose that control, some landowners don’t lease out those rights at all. 

Because of this hesitancy which pushes down supply, this system has also made hunting and fishing on private property prohibitively expensive for many people. It was something Seeton, who is now Infinite Outdoors’ chief executive officer, saw when he was a student at Mines and the football team wanted to go pheasant hunting on one of their off days. It wasn’t easy to find an open and affordable space for a single group for one day. 

Seeton started connecting landowners to people for these short kinds of outdoors experiences while he was a student at Mines “in a very manual way” he said, by seeking out landowners who wanted to allow people to fish and hunt and then working as a go-between with people who were looking for these kinds of outdoor experiences. It was time consuming but “laid the groundwork for this new DIY, short-term hunting and fishing market.” 

He knew it could be more though. “He had the idea but just needed engineers to build it,” said Rhine, who happened to be roommates with one of Seeton’s football teammates and jumped at the opportunity to be one of those engineers. 

They started laying the groundwork for Infinite Outdoors in early 2020 and launched the app and website in August of that year with a focus on Colorado. “We thought it would be something good enough to plug and play,” Seeton said, meaning that they’d get it up and running and leave it at that. But the business took off. “We truly pivoted, and we were suddenly a full-blown tech company.”

Since that 2020 launch, Infinite Outdoors has been a hit with both outdoor enthusiasts and landowners. Users can search for opportunities based on location or what they would like to hunt or fish. Through the app and website, they’re gaining access to land that was not previously leased out before. 

“From the technology side, it’s making things frictionless and making access as easy as possible,” Rhine said.

But Infinite Outdoors doesn’t just make that connection and facilitate payment between parties. It’s also built on an advanced digital mapping platform that automatically downloads maps and boundary lines. Plus, the app includes user reviews and even photos from trail cameras or user-uploaded images of game from previous trips to spots featured in the app. 

Seeton and Rhine also make sure to only work with the eco-minded. “One of the caveats is landowners have to work with our biologists to do conservation work,” Seeton said. “We won’t just let them open the flood gates and abuse nature.” 

Since its inception, the app has grown beyond just outdoor spots in the Mountain West and now includes locations in Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Mississippi and Oregon, with opportunities sometimes costing less than $100 per person, plus a reservation fee. To support this growth and increase their engineering budget, the company received an investment from the Mines Venture 1 Fund in 2024. 

Not only will the funding help Infinite Outdoors grow their business, but Seeton and Rhine also have been attending the Mines Venture Fund’s events and forums and found them to have “great information and also networking opportunities to meet and talk about other startups and solve problems together,” Rhine said. “It’s been a great resource.” 

Seeton and Rhine see their work as something that will lead to better land use in a way that is easy for everyone involved. “Conservation and access are our core focuses as a business,” Seeton said. “But the only way to accomplish those goals, at scale, is to double down on great tech and processes that are sustainable at a macro level.”