NEDERLAND, Colo. — Small businesses in Nederland are asking people to visit to make up for revenue lost during the Cold Springs Fire.
The fire shut down the small town in Boulder County for about a week. More than 500 acres burned, including eight homes. Boulder Canyon was closed because of the fire line, which cut off about 70 percent of Nederland’s customers from the businesses.
“Most of them had no choice but to go elsewhere and that was for almost a week,” said Doug Armitage, owner of Brightwood Music.
Brightwood Music sells instruments, fixes broken equipment and provides lessons to music students. During the fire, students and teachers couldn’t get to Nederland for lessons so they had to cancel. Tourists also couldn’t get into town, so Brightwood saw a steep decline in guitar sales.
“Anytime there’s a sort of panic in a small town, everybody just sort of hold off doing anything,” Ermitage said.
Now, shops like Brightwood Music are struggling to catch up.
“It was a ghost town,” said Jill Dreves of Wild Bear Mountain Ecology Center.
The nonprofit hosts summer camps for kids and serves as a nature discovery center for people of all ages. It saw a huge drop in the number of visitors, plus it had to alter its summer camp plans for children who couldn’t get into Nederland.
“We do, as a nonprofit, depend on sales in our gift shop and our program tuition,” Dreves said.
Wild Bear received two donations in the past week to make up for lost revenue. Another nonprofit business next door hasn’t been so lucky.
“I figure we lost $5,000 in income,” said Katrina Harms, who runs Carousel of Happiness, a nonprofit that invites riders to try its antique carousel for only $1. “To lose one-quarter of our July income is a huge, huge hit and it’s just hard to make that up.”
Local businesses in Nederland are now asking Coloradans to come visit for the day, sample the local restaurants and shop their local boutiques.
They say the three best things to enjoy are: the wildlife, the local shops and the fact Nederland is usually about 20 degrees cooler in the summer than Denver.