Taylor Popovich began her baking journey terrified that she would ruin her husband’s sourdough starter when he asked her to feed it. Three years later, she now enjoys baking daily for their business, The HummingBird Bakery.

In 2023, realizing she hadn’t harmed Michael’s starter after feeding it a few times, she attempted to bake a loaf of sourdough bread.

“I kept seeing videos about making sourdough and how it’s better for your gut. And I didn’t like to eat bread because it kind of made me feel sick,” she said.

After being so proud of her first loaf – which, looking back, she said was very ugly – she continued baking for fun and experimenting with recipes.

She eventually found that baking sourdough wasn’t just delicious, it helped her process her emotions. After her cousin, Baily, died in 2025, Taylor started baking a lot more.

“It was a way for me to process my grief,” she said.

Micheal, a professionally trained chef who is currently the breakfast chef at Twin Peaks Lodge & Hot Springs, helped Taylor improve her baking technique and develop her own recipes.

“It was so fun. We loved it. We realized how much joy it brought us to give people baked goods that made them happy,” she said. “It was so much love for us to get to do it together and then to see it bring people joy. And so we just really fell in love with it.”

The couple moved to Ouray in November 2024 from Gypsum. Taylor wanted to live in the mountains but also wanted to stay close to her family in Delta, where she was born and raised. Taylor produced her homemade goods under a cottage foods license and sold her baked goods at the Ridgway farmers market the following summer. At the Ouray Ice Festival this year, their breakfast burritos and scones drew the attention of the Ouray KOA managers, who suggested they rent out a space in the KOA for their bakery. The HummingBird Bakery opened in its new location on May 15. Locals might remember it as the longtime location of a barbecue restaurant, tucked back near the creek running through the property.

From November through April, when the KOA is closed to campers, HummingBird Bakery will stay open and provide baked goods to the Ouray community.

The couple named their business The HummingBird Bakery in honor of their late cousins. The H and B are capitalized to honor Taylor’s cousin, Baily, and Micheal’s cousin, Hailey.

The Popoviches each have a hummingbird tattoo, and Taylor said that she resonates with the resilience and strength of hummingbirds.

Along with classic sourdough bread loaves, The Humming-Bird Bakery’s popular products include their cinnamon rolls, biscuits and gravy, bagels with cream cheese, muffins and scones. The menu also features breakfast burritos stuffed with sausage, egg, potato, cheese and green chile from Zia Taquería in Durango. Customers can also find donuts at the shop weekly on Saturdays.

“Everything we do is sourdough: the cinnamon rolls, the breads, the bagels,” Taylor said. “And I think that makes us different because it’s a specific market. It’s a unique area. It’s not your typical bakery.”

The Popoviches worked with Telluride Coffee Roasters to create a custom drip coffee blend, which is very high in caffeine with fruity notes. “I describe it as high caffeine without tasting like diesel fuel. Like, you can actually drink it,” Taylor said. The bakery also has a full espresso bar.

Since she has a long history of feeling sick after eating bread, Taylor uses her own experience testing ingredients to choose the highest-quality products to use in their baked goods.

“A running rule that Micheal and I have is if it makes me sick, we don’t sell it.” she said. “And so we try to have really fresh and good things.”

She said that she enjoys providing a space where people can slow down, socialize, enjoy good food and the games and puzzles she has laid out on the tables.

“We get to bake in memory of the people we’ve loved, in love with each other. And everything we do just has love and grief and joy mixed into it. And so I think that’s part of why it tastes so good,” Taylor said.

The HummingBird Bakery is open Friday-Tuesday, 7:30 a.m. to noon, or until inventory is sold out. It is located in the Ouray Holiday KOA behind the camp store at 225 County Road 23.