It didn’t take but a spark and a stiff breeze to turn Justin Mitchell’s summer upside down.
During the first few hours of the Gold Mountain Fire, Mitchell — who runs a horseback guiding outfit in the Cutler Creek area off County Road 14A — spent the afternoon of June 27 evacuating their 21 horses as the hills went up in flames.
For his family’s company, Action Adventures, this rough stretch seems to just be getting started.
The immediate threat from the fire has evaporated, as evacuated residents settle back into their homes and routines and cooler, wetter weather helps firefighters make big containment gains. But a combination of highway closures that carried into the Fourth of July and thick smoke that diminished air quality and obscured views of Mount Abram, Mount Sneffels and Ouray County’s other picturesque peaks for several weeks hampered attempts to get visitors to keep their plans to vacation in Ouray County. The poor air quality and fears about the fire chased away visitors at a time when local businesses depend on summertime crowds to sustain them through the lean winter months.
A month into the fire, Mitchell reckoned that about 80% of his pre-booked trips this season — which take riders up Cutler Creek and atop Baldy Peak — have been canceled. The company foots the 3% transaction fee on credit card reservations, and took another 3% hit on the refunds. Employees who were laid off as business evaporated have now found other work, leaving the outfitter shorthanded as it tries to salvage the summer.
In typical peak season, Action Adventures will send several dozen riders out on a given weekend. On Sunday, they only had two.
“It ends up costing a lot of money to not do business,” he told the Plaindealer this week.
With the company’s usual guiding grounds torched, Mitchell said they’re searching for alternative areas to run tours in the interim. But there aren’t many areas to go around where groups can ride freely, not interfere with other recreation, and fill a day.
“We’re trying our best to work with what we have,” he said, “but the long term of it is going to be hard.”
And when it rains, it pours – on Monday morning when he spoke to the Plaindealer, Mitchell said his parking lot was buried underneath a rockslide from heavy rains Sunday evening.
“There’s just nothing left up there on that steep rugged country, but it’s all going to be susceptible to erosion and washing away, which is going to keep our area dangerous for a lot of years,” he said.
Survive the next 30 to 60 days
Jason Perkins remembers the economic strain at the genesis of the COVID-19 pandemic: empty shops and restaurants, lodging owners unplugging TVs and mini fridges to pinch pennies, Ouray’s Main Street turning into a ghost town.
The co-owner of Ouray Riverside Resort worries the fire may wreak even worse financial havoc on him and his fellow business owners. Hundreds of cancellations have poured into local campgrounds, motels and vacation rentals. Restaurants and retailers are cutting employee shifts.
“If you don’t make money in July and August, what’s going to carry you through the winter?” Perkins said.
The revenue dive is a double-whammy for businesses coming off one of the driest winters on record that offered little draw for ice climbers, backcountry skiers and other outdoor enthusiasts.
For Perkins, the difference between the impacts of the pandemic and the fire lies in the timing of each emergency.
Six years ago, the pandemic triggered shutdowns of lodging establishments and limitations on in-person gatherings in shops and restaurants in the spring — a traditionally slow time of year. Those restrictions vanished by June, when visitors started pouring into the county seeking an escape.
The fire, by comparison, ignited a week before July 4 — smack dab in the middle of what’s normally the busiest time for visitation.
Data gathered by Placer Labs, a company that uses cellphone data to track people’s movements, shows about 6,400 people visited Ouray on the Fourth of July. That figure reflects the number of visitors who traveled more than 25 miles and stayed for more than an hour.
That’s less than half the roughly 14,000 visitors who came to Ouray for the holiday each of the last three years.
A little more than 28,000 people visited Ouray between June 27 and July 10. Between 51,000 and 59,000 people visited the city during that same period from 2023 to 2025, according to Placer Labs.
Perkins said some visitors who booked a six- or seven-day stay at his RV park left and sought refunds after just two days, citing the smoke that frequently settled in the valley. Others canceled their reservations altogether. He said he normally offers gift cards for early departures. This year, he and his wife, Amber, gave full refunds, believing it’s the right thing to do and hoping customers will rebook after the fire is contained or burns itself out.
As of Wednesday morning, the fire was 59% contained and the estimated date of total containment for the 39,506-acre fire is in October, according to InciWeb.
Doing the right thing, he said, cost Ouray Riverside Resort nearly $350,000 in credit card refunds between June 28 and Tuesday.
To try to recoup their losses and pull others into town, Perkins said they slashed nightly rates for motel rooms and riverside cabins by half. They laid off roughly 15% of their summertime staff of 48 employees.
He said their strategy is to trim costs to make sure they can survive the next 30 to 60 days, while hoping things rebound in August. RVs are starting to fill up the campground, but he’s noticed the license plates are from Colorado and New Mexico with reservations for two or three nights, not from far-flung places like Florida or Georgia with plans to stay a week or longer.
Retail businesses hurting, too
Shops selling souvenirs and other items to visitors also felt the impacts of the fire.
Ouray T-shirts and Momentos owner Marc Hitchcox said he compared his mid-week revenue from a week before the Fourth of July last year to the same time period this year and found he was down 40% in gross sales.
He did it again last week and saw he was down 18%, indicating the situation is improving somewhat.
Anecdotally, he’s noticed more customers, more foot traffic, and better sales in the past week.
“If I looked again, I bet I’d be within 5%,” he said this week. “It feels like it’s a normal summer again.”
He said he’s not sure if he’ll be able to make up the lost summer revenue, given the limited remainder of the busy season.
“A week in the summer is equivalent to a month in the winter,” he said.
Longtime business owners like Hitchcox know they’re probably not going to get enough revenue to compensate for a fire driving away visitors during the July 4 holiday, which is typically their biggest moneymaker.
Hitchcox compared the slump to the pandemic, and said while he accepted a Paycheck Protection Program grant to keep employees paid during COVID, he also took out a loan for his inventory and cash flow. But recovering from this fire is different, he said.
“But when you’ve lost 40% of your business for three weeks or a month, you’re not making that back. You’re just in the hole,” he said. “I don’t need another loan. And I don’t know that any entity can give us a grant, so I don’t know what it would take.”
After glut of cancellations, rebookings trickle in
Ridgway businesses are feeling the economic pain as well.
True Grit Cafe owner Tammee Tuttle said the restaurant’s gross revenue between July 3 and 10 plummeted from more than $51,000 last year to just shy of $13,500 this year. As a result, she’s reduced her staff’s work schedule, which typically offers 22 daily shifts during peak summer business, by six to eight shifts per day.
She emailed Ridgway town councilors on July 11 asking them to eliminate food trucks from the remaining Thursday night concerts at Hartwell Park and redirect concert-goers to Ridgway restaurants, noting most of the food vendors aren’t based in Ouray County. She said local eateries could offer picnic-style, to-go meals that customers could take with them to the park.
Town leaders declined her request.
“I am beyond not impressed with their lack of urgency to not support the brick and mortar businesses that can’t roll their wheels somewhere else,” she said.
Town Manager Preston Neill said he appreciated Tuttle’s outside-the-box thinking but that it was too late to modify food service at the concerts.
“It would be really bad form for us to pull the rug out from food vendors who have purchased the supplies (for the month),” he said.
Orvis Hot Springs, according to manager Will Russell, was hit with a shotgun blast of cancellations just after the fire began — over 100 within the first 48 hours. By July 9, the figure climbed to 263.
“And I called every one of them. I only was able to rebook 18,” Russell told the Plaindealer.
Throughout the month, he said, Orvis’ revenues were down about $150,000 – about 60% of their usual till. Typically averaging about 45 overnight guests per day, the resort only saw five to 10 guests for the fire’s first few weeks. And the usual 250 or so day visitors who come to soak in the springs dwindled to around 25.
Through promotions, advertising and working the phones, Russell said he’s been able to rebook Orvis’ rooms through the rest of the year. But a rebound of the “soaking” crowd, he added, is more dependent on whether general travel through Ridgway and Ouray picks back up.
“If we get people rolling back through that corridor,” he said, referring to U.S. Highway 550, “we’ll be good.”
Russell said he and Orvis owner Jessie Hatter were determined not to repeat their pandemic experience and have thus far avoided laying off staff despite the wave of cancellations.
“We kind of learned from that incident that it’s much harder to rehire people, because they go out and get other jobs. They move on, because they can’t just sit around and wait,” Russell said, adding that the resort has put off renovation projects and other expenses to make payroll.
“Because the hardest thing is to try to come back, and we get busy, and then we need to rehire, and it’s really hard to hire people in this area,” he added. “…We need our customers, but also, if we don’t have the staff, customer service and everything else suffers, and we end up not being able to support it anyway.”
A switch in marketing
After initially focusing their public communication on relaying information about the fire, municipal leaders shifted their message a couple of weeks ago.
While tourism marketing efforts are usually concentrated on attracting off-peak season visitors, during mud season, they have shifted to bring in tourists during what is usually the busiest time. Business owners want potential visitors to know that Ouray County is open for business and the immediate danger from the Gold Mountain Fire has moved away from the populated areas.
Ridgway town leaders started posting photos on social media showing clear skies over the Cimarrons and reminding people of the impact of supporting local businesses.
During the Ouray County commissioners’ meeting this week, Region 10 Executive Director Michelle Haynes said her agency was providing free business consulting and could assist local business owners with loans to help with cash flow. Region 10 has an emergency loan fund offering 7% loans, but it’s possible that they may be able to assist with Small Business Administration Economic Injury Disaster Loans with 4% fixed interest rates for up to $2 million if the SBA makes a disaster declaration. These low-cost loans for working capital can cover operating expenses after a disaster, and offer no interest for the first 12 months, according to the SBA.
The city of Ouray also took steps to counter the downturn, launching summer marketing and shop local campaigns, asking Colorado Welcome Centers across the state to tell visitors that Ouray is open for business and partnering with lodging establishments and shops to offer discounts. They bought advertising in markets to target day-trippers and weekend visitors, offering deals on radio stations in Grand Junction for visitors to come down and spend time in Ouray, hoping they would also open their pocketbooks and boost revenue.
Perkins, though, fears it’s too late to make up for lost sales.
“Summer is kind of lost. We’re just trying to make the best of it at this point,” he said.
Chart Riggall is a journalist with Report for America, a nonprofit program that helps boost reporting resources in underserved areas. He’s also part of the Western Environmental Reporting Collaborative, a partnership between Report for America, High Country News and local news organizations across the West.
