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Colorado Matters
April 10, 2026: Snow-starved Breckenridge strategizes for summer; Colorado Springs bagelry in the national spotlight
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From CPR News, this is Colorado Matters. Business in Breckenridge is borderline. And planning for the future of a ski town is tricky business.
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It is a little bit difficult to try to anticipate what Mother Nature is going to give us or take away from us on any given year.
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Breck's town manager talks tax revenue and diversification, whether it's wildflowers or the arts. Then plans for a train to Boulder lurch forward and a Colorado Springs bagel shop will represent our state at a big bagel competition this weekend. A chat amidst the morning bagel bustle at Bella's.
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What people love about a good New York, New Jersey bagel is the dichotomy between the crunchy outside and the soft and chewy inside.
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What you've described is a New Yorker crunchy, but a big softy on the inside. This is Colorado Matters from CPR News and krcc. I'm Ryan Warner. I just checked the closing date for Breckenridge Ski Resort. Their site says as late as possible, conditions permitting, a post brimming with hope, maybe a little desperation. Winter was pretty much a bust for skiers and for ski towns. I popped up to 9,600ft in elevation and met Breckenridge town manager Shannon Haynes. Hi, Shannon.
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Hi. How are you?
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I'm okay. I'm grateful that you could meet in Breckenridge. Tourism in Colorado was already trending downward. The boom after COVID lockdowns was fading. I gather you were seeing that even before we talk about snow.
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We were seeing that. I think we were really Busy prior to COVID 19. We had a little dip when everything closed and then it was gangbusters right after. So we are seeing maybe a level setting reset. We're not sure yet.
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You were already budgeting for a tourism hit, I understand, in 2026 based on those factors. Now we have one of the warmest, driest winters on record. And what are you hearing from businesses around town?
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It's been a tough winter. It's been a really tough winter. And we see that with our town revenue, our sales tax revenue gets divided up into buckets. So we know generally speaking how restaurants are doing, how retail is doing and lodging based on their tax remittance. It can vary based on individual businesses. Like we may have some restaurants that are doing really well and some that are doing worse. But I think, you know, across the board so far this year, we're down about 5%. And then anecdotally I've talked to some business owners who are Saying it's been tough, March has been tough, February was tough. So it's a struggle for folks.
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Let's break this apart. So you talked about differentiating among restaurants, lodging stores, retail, that is. Who among those three has been hardest hit, do you think?
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Probably a split between lodging and retail. Those have both been hit pretty hard.
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Why do you think restaurants have been impacted less?
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You know, it may be that people are, they're still coming, but they're thoughtful about how they're spending their money. And maybe we're getting more drive up, which would impact lodging and folks. Maybe we'll come up for the day and we'll go for a meal, but they're not necessarily spending their money in the retail shops.
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Okay. How in terms of lodging are bookings looking toward the summer? I don't know if there's some page you refresh to tell yourself maybe this will improve.
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So we're really lucky because we have the Breckenridge tourism office here and so they provide us fairly regular updates on lodging. You can get a little whiplash from it. It can change pretty quickly. But essentially winter is down considerably. I think they predicted March to be down somewhere between 12 and 14%. The rest of April, May and into June is not looking great right now. July, August, September looks better, a little bit higher. So we've been looking at flat. It actually looks like it's improving a little bit. But we'll see as we get closer whether that trend continues.
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The idea there is that there is some promise in summer tourism. It just makes me wonder as climate change means that the warm season extends. If you're rethinking to some extent your identity, I think that there's been this traditional thought of ski season, shoulder season, summer. It feels like that's almost shifting now.
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It may be. I don't think we're quite there yet. We have for several years had a general goal of having a year round economy with also understanding that, you know, when we're really busy in the winter, the employees and businesses, those folks get really tired, they need a little bit of a break. So not looking to make May look like March, but generally trying to think about our economy here across the whole 12 months. So I don't think we're necessarily shifting how we're thinking about that, but we are certainly looking at say June through November. How can we fill in gaps in weekends, drive more tourism to the area, help support our businesses? We would say you can't make back March. If you have a bad March, it's going to Be tough to make that up. If you have a bad July, it's going to be tough to make that up. But how can we boost the other months a little bit to give our businesses a little bit of a nudge to help them through this difficult year?
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And so what are some of the answers to? Is that just mountain biking? Is that just, you know, maintaining hiking trails? Even as the city might look at
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constriction again, Breck is really lucky. We have some sales tax that's dedicated to open space. So we do a really good job of maintaining our trails. We have a crew that does that. It's things like the tourism office is looking at, how do we bring people in to enjoy. There are wildflowers and other parts of our natural resources. Our arts and culture community is looking at ways to animate our community. Not necessarily driving business, but really making Breckenridge a fun place for people to be. If they're already coming, there's a lot of things to enjoy. They're going to tell their friends. There's all these things to do in Breck. And so leaning into that part of our identity, what does it mean?
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Obviously, it's an outdoors place. What does it mean culturally to boost Breck?
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So we do have a robust arts and culture environment here. We have Breckenridge Creative Arts. We have a theater. We have a film location. We have a history entity. There's a lot of culture in Breckenridge. And so those groups are getting together. They're doing flashback to 1876. They're, you know, they're just doing a lot of things to provide other opportunities for folks besides the recreation. Not everybody wants to get out on a mountain bike, so they might want to go to the pottery studio, they might want to paint. They might want to see our museums. There's just. There's a lot of other things to do here. And those folks are, I think, becoming a really important part of what makes Breckenridge Breckenridge.
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Let's talk about what it means that you. Your tax revenues are down about 5%. As you say, it's more acute in lodging and retail. Are you braced for cuts to town services?
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So what we're looking at right now is our capital expenses. We just had a conversation with council around what could we cut if we need to cut? And because there's limited contractors here, we have limited staff to do capital projects, we're already looking at just over $2 million saving. And so that's going to help us cushion that hit on the town a little bit more.
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Now, when you say capital, I just want to be clear. You're talking about either building new things, expanding them, or upgrading them.
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That is correct. So, you know, we're going to still maintain our roads. We have water projects we have to do, but we have a few things that we have a little bit of flexibility in whether we do them this year, next year, the year after. And so we're going to lean on that to adjust in order to make sure that we can cover our losses.
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What doesn't get built as a result or what gets built later.
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Right now we're cutting back a little bit. We have a fiber. Our own fiber network, so we're going to do a little bit less work on that. We have a project we're going to do in conjunction with the county and Cedar that we don't necessarily need to put that money up in 2026, so we'll do that in 2027. So it's not anything that I think the community or our community guests will even notice is a. Is a change from normal.
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That must be a. I mean, relative, I suppose, to how bad it could get. That has to be somewhat calming.
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It is. It is. And I think we are. We're conservative in how we budget and thoughtful in how we spend our money. We are luckily in a good place to weather this. We're also going to be talking to council about how we should be making budget assumptions for 2027 in the five years beyond that, so we can build out a budget for the next year that takes into consideration some of those continuing restrictions.
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When a ski town, certainly that has other things to offer. But when, you know, fundamentally a ski town tries to budget for a year or five years, it's not exactly like you can consult the Farmer's Almanac and make some edu. Maybe you could, and make some educated guess. That has to be some of the most gnarly forecasting you can do.
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Yes, it is a little bit difficult to try to anticipate what Mother Nature is going to give us or take away from us on any given year. So we're just sort of conservative across the board. And if we get fabulous snow, wonderful. Right. It's icing on the cake. But if we have another, let's hope not for another drought year, but something that's less than spectacular, we'll be in a good place. You know, climate change, you brought it up earlier, is. It's certainly concerning, but we're one year. And so we're going to be conservative and responsible, but we're not going to think the sky is falling quite yet.
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Funny, I was about to say Chicken Little. Okay. You've been in Breckenridge government, I think, for almost two decades.
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That's true. 18 years.
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Can you think back to a year that looked like this, or does it feel unprecedented to you?
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It's definitely unprecedented to me. I've talked to some folks who have been here 30, 35 years and they kind of remember back to a more significant drought year, something similar to what we've seen this year. But I haven't seen it in my 10 year. So I think because I don't have that perspective and a lot of us don't, we are thinking back to Covid 2016, 2008, and sort of approaching it the same way we approach those downturns.
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Okay. When your reference point for a drought is a pandemic, you're managing in interesting times, I'd say, Shannon, I agree with
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you and we aren't going to be that bad. We're not going to shut down. But it gives you good perspective.
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Hey, thank you so much for chatting with me.
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Of course. Thank you for having me.
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Shannon Haynes is town manager of Breckenridge. Meantime, researchers have measured the lowest snow levels on record in the Colorado high country. CPR climate and environment reporter Sam Brash joined them in the mountains.
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Ryan Damoncos is headed out to measure Snow at about 11,000ft of elevation in the Colorado Rock, Rockies. His big question, whether the snow levels have ever been this bad?
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That's what we're here to find out
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today and compare to some of the worst areas that we've seen, such as 1981 and 1977.
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DeManco supervises the Colorado Snow Survey for the U.S. department of Agriculture. Its mission is simple. Track snow across the state to get an idea of how much runoff we
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will perhaps have here in the remainder of the year.
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To reach the Horseshoe Mountain site outside Fairplay, he would usually need backcountry skis. This year, however, he doesn't strap them on right away.
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Wait a little bit because we're going
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to be on bare ground for most of the walk. He carries his skis up a dirt road. Along the way, we see patches of snow in the forest melting in 40 degree heat. Colorado snowpack usually peaks around now, but there's not much left of after a bout of record warm weather. That's clear when we reach the snow course, an official trail marked by signs hanging in the forest. When we arrive, Mike Artisan, a USDA technician, takes A green trundle off his back. He unrolls it to reveal pieces of an antique aluminum tube about 8ft long. Once he fits it all together.
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So what we have here is a federal sampler. These were designed in probably the early 30s.
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Mountain snow acts like a massive water tower for the western US Snow melt through the spring and summer is a lifeline for ecosystems, farms and cities. That's why the federal government has tracked snowpack for nearly a century. By dropping these tubes into the snow, Artisan extracts the tube with a column of snow inside and reads out its height.
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8.5, 8.2, 0.5.
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To find out how much water it holds, the team hangs the tube from an old fashioned milk scale. Kind of like the produce scales at the grocery store. We haven't been able to find an
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equivalent that works as well as these
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do because the digitals once it's super
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cold out, usually the batteries don't last.
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Some snow courses date back to the Great Depression. This one started around 60 years ago. Crouched with a notebook, Demoncos calculates the amount of water here today. 2.2 inches. That's half the previous record set in 1977. It's even hard to speak about it.
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You know, haven't done this for 23
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years and to be talking about the worst year that I've ever seen, we've ever seen in my lifetime.
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You know, we don't exactly know what's
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on the horizon and that's concerning.
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The picture isn't much different across Colorado. At almost every snow course across the state, levels are either at a record low or tied for the lowest on record, says Rush Schumacher, the Colorado State climber climatologist, or maybe in like a bit of one of these liminal spaces where you can see what's coming, but it's not here yet. And that's a challenging situation I think to be in. Schumacher says there's no escaping reality. Large parts of the west are in uncharted territory without anything like normal snowpack. It's time to brace for low reservoirs and maybe fire prone conditions later in the year. I'm Sam Brash, CPR News and you
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can see photos of snowpack measuring@cpr.org Cloud seeding is one option to boost moisture in the West. The technology has been around for decades and is evolving. It means introducing particles into clouds so they produce precipitation, whether it's snow in the mountains or rain on the plains.
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What you're trying to do is create
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these small ice crystals inside of a cloud that's full of sub freezing liquid water drops.
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Frank McDonough leads the cloud seeding division at the Desert Research Institute, a nonprofit in Nevada.
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It's really the only method there is to increase the amount of water in a watershed. And it's done for less than $10 per acre foot.
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That is acre foot of water generated. The US Bureau of Reclamation has granted nearly two and a half million million for cloud seeding in our region. Patrick Malarkey is a cloud seeding field tech.
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We make a flame with a propane burner.
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We atomize the solution of silver iodide
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and acetone and spray it into the flame and it makes a dust like a smoke.
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There are questions, though. Is widespread use of silver iodide safe? Air pollution, meanwhile, makes it harder for clouds to be seeded. McDonough says taken as a whole, it could be worth it.
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So if you add in conservation, cloud seeding and land use, you could potentially,
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you know, help people manage a limited supply of water. Our thanks to Yvette Fernandez of Nevada Public Radio and the Mountain West News bureau. For those voices, read her coverage of weather modification@cpr.org we'll be right back with a ride on the rails that's long overdue. This is Colorado Matters from CPR News. A train between Denver and Boulder and onto Fort Collins is closer to reality. That's big news because it's felt like a pipe dream to the people who agreed to tax themselves for service costs. And other challenges derailed the expansion of what's known as fast tracks. CPR's Benta Berkeland is covering the apparent progress now. Hi, Benta.
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Hi, Ryan.
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The state's been negotiating with railway giant BNSF to use its existing tracks for passenger trains. What have they agreed?
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To the state and RTD, the Regional Transportation District, they would pay roughly $300 million. This is for all the infrastructure, one time funds and then about $30 million annually to BNSF to run three daily round trip trains on its track.
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Three daily round trip trains. That sounds like a lot of money. 300 million and then 30 million a year.
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Yes, it definitely does. But it's about half as much as this train was originally predicted to cost. And the people working on this deal think it's now doable.
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Okay, in a world where everything feels like it's getting more expensive, why would this be less expensive?
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Well, I talked to one of the key negotiators, Lisa Kaufman, and she's a top advisor to Governor Jared Polis, and she's his former chief of staff. And she set the price tags a lot lower because of how the train schedule is designed and the fact that state and regional entities are coordinating rather than planning to run separate services. It cost a lot less because of that schedule where we don't have any
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passenger trains passing one another. So that means less sidings.
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We're also, we're very strategic in the
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way we designed the stops.
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So where there is existing sunk cost,
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where taxpayers have already paid for large parking structures, we placed the platforms within walking distance.
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Okay, a little train language there. Sidings of trains, sidings. Where exactly would the train run? How soon could it start?
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The planned route would start at Denver's Union station and uses RTD's B line. The stop in Westminster then would go through Broomfield, Louisville, Boulder, also Longmont, Loveland and Fort Collins. And Kauffman told me that if all the transportation commissions, RTD and Front Range Passenger Rail, agree and the funding works out, they could break ground as soon as next year and carry passengers by 2029. And eventually the state hopes this northern leg is just the first phase of passenger rail between Pueblo and Fort Collins. But I'll note that the Pueblo section, you know, the southern portion, is more up in the air because that would require voters to approve a tax increase.
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And how would that initial northern stretch be funded?
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Benta so it's all state funding, no federal funds. It's new fees on rental cars and oil and gas production. And then also FAST Tracks has a savings account. So Kaufman said the money is there for this.
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Now, this Boulder train has been a priority for Governor Jared Polis, who is from. Drumroll, please.
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Yes, Boulder. He is from Boulder. Yes. So he's among the folks who agreed to tax themselves.
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And it's about how what the path
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forward is for rebuilding trust because there's
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a lot of angry taxpayers who've been paying for service since 2004, and the
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service is not on the Horizon.
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Now, that's Governor Polis in 2020 expressing dismay with the delay over this line. And this latest development will be a huge win for the governor if he's able to make it a reality before he leaves office next year or at least get construction started again. Denver metro area voters approved that Boulder line back in 2004, and it still hasn't materialized.
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What are the next steps?
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Binda the governing boards of RTD and some state transportation commissions must sign off on this service agreement by the end of the month and then set aside money to start the design phase.
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And there's that local community buy in.
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Absolutely. And communities will be involved with these station designs and stops and then development that would happen along this train.
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Right, the housing, the businesses that might pop up. Before we go this week, Governor Polis announced the name for broader Front Range Rail. This was at Union Station in downtown Denver.
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Would you all like to see what
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Colorado has chosen as the new passenger rail train name? Ladies and gentlemen, the name is Colorado Connector or Coco. Say hello to your new passenger rail train, Coco.
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Roughly 26,000 votes came in and that is a relative drop in the bucket. But Cocoa did win out over three others, Red or Front Range Express destinations, Colorado Ranger and Rangelink. And Polis says the name Colorado Connector highlights the train's central purpose to connect communities by making travel along the Front Range easier and a lot less stressful.
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Thanks, Benta.
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Thanks so much, Ryan.
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CPR public affairs reporter Benta Berklund. Still to come, how to build a Better Bagel this is Colorado Matters from CPR News. Bagel Fest is a celebration of bagels as you might have guessed. It began in New York, but this year expands to Los Angeles. This weekend a Colorado Springs bagellery will be the only one from our state featured. I visited Bella's not far from the Air Force Academy. They specialize in New York New Jersey style bagels. Jason Steele co owns the place and he's the kind of guy who'll ask you the first question, so what's your
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favorite go to bagel when you go to a good bagel shop.
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I am an everything guy.
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Okay, we have a pretty darn good everything bagel for you.
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I tend to like minimal cream cheese. I know that that is verboten in some circles. I'm not someone who sees a bagel primarily as a cream cheese vehicle.
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That's actually the beauty of our bagels is in many bagel shops where the bagel is not the it really does act like a utensil where you just toast the heck out of it and then you're just putting all the ingredients on to shuttle it into your mouth. The reality is people will come here and just eat our bagels. What people love about a good New York, New Jersey bagel is the dichotomy between the crunchy outside and the soft and chewy inside.
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What you've described is a New Yorker crunchy, maybe a little brittle on the outside, but a big softy on the inside. Is there some poetry to that?
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Oh my gosh. So yeah, our New York transplants that we get, we get New York, New Jersey transplants all the time and they are the first to get the salty bagels because again, it's. The saltiness is in the DNA and we welcome it and we respect it.
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Now, what is your go to bagel? My hope is that we'll break bread together.
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Oh, yeah, we definitely will. I am all about being naked and afraid, so I will go with a plain bagel. Our plain bagel is the best plain bagel you're gonna find around, just based on the depth of flavor. Because we have a multi day unique fermentation process for all of our bagels. So they take several days to create a single bagel. I just like bagel and butter. That's my go to. I love some tuna salad with it. I can go on and on.
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Does this make you boring?
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Absolutely not. Again, there's such an experience when biting into our bagel, all the blisters from the boil bake that we do. So biting into that and the popping of the blisters in your mouth, the depth of flavor itself, you don't need any more. Any New Yorker or New Jersey folk that want to get the best pizza will always start with a plain cheese pie. That's what we expect here at Bella's too. Just get a plain bagel with plain cream cheese and then you know what you're working with and then you can go and add more and more. You don't need to use our ingredients to cover up what's actually not such a great bagel from other places.
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I love that I'm picking up vocabulary here. I never knew those little bumps were called blisters. And there's something really satisfying about them in the way that I think kids like to pop. Bubble wrap.
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C
Yeah, bubble wrap. Boba tea is another one. Now with boba, you know, you're getting that kind of soft pop. This is more of the crunchy kind of a pop. But yeah, you'll have to try it yourself. And we could talk about what you think of that experience.
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And are you a flavored cream cheese kind of guy or a plain.
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More on the plain side? Again, I'm just all about simplistic, super high quality ingredients and just the experience itself. Okay, so you're now up to our bagel case. Right now it's 8:30 in the morning. We have been open for two and a half hours. The team has already delivered over 800 bagels. A big chunk of those bagels is going to a very large wholesale client. So our tagline at Bella's is baked for boosting happiness. My wife Michelle's food truly makes people happy. And we Have a large hospital in town that gets that large order every week. So what a place to be able to provide amazing bagels to the doctors, the patients. Like it goes into the big cafeteria,
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and then you've got online orders coming in. Certainly folks walking in wanting bagels. I am looking at the bagel case. Salt, poppy, onion, olive oil, and rosemary with the rosemary dust on top. Jalapeno cheddar. Generous servings of jalapeno, Asiago, everything. Sesame, plain, cinnamon raisin, pumpernickel, rye, Mediterranean, and chocolate chip. Chocolate chip, Jason?
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Okay, so as a bagel traditionalist, any sweet bagel, honestly, it's a violation, to be quite honest, to not be a savory bagel.
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Thank you for saying so.
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However, you know, we're in business and in Colorado, there's going to be a need. There's a market for a lot of the. The sweet bagels. There's an itch that we got to scratch, and we're going to offer the best chocolate chip, the best cinnamon raisin. On weekends, we do a cinnamon sugar crunch. Growing up in the 80s, if you remember eating coffee cake, the top of our cinnamon sugar crunch has that exact taste.
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How many bagels do you make a day?
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We average around 1000 or so. But with the wholesale that continues to rise on the weekends, we're now doing 1500 a day. So we're somewhere in the 8 to 9,000 bagels a week range at this point. And rising and rising. Yeah, that was a pun slightly intended.
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Are all of these bagels that the same fundamental dough?
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No. No, they're not. So we have the white dough bagels. So those are going to be all of the bagels, including plain, that we then top all the different seeds, the jalapeno cheddar, the olive oil, rosemary. But then we have several other types of dough, which really adds a lot of complexity to our bagel production process. Those are all getting hand rolled. So, for example, the pumpernickel rye or the cinnamon raisin, the cinnamon sugar crunch, the chocolate chip, the blueberry.
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Would you like your bagel toasted?
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Normally, I would say yes. Jason, do you have a recommendation?
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So any of our bagels that are still coming out in the oven in the morning, I would recommend against toasting it because you're going to get the best possible experience with a bagel that is still warm from the oven and not starting to take away some of that soft and chewy on the inside.
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I think I'm gonna pass on the toasting.
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This one's still warm. Out of the oven.
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I gotta tell you, these bagels are so well wrapped in parchment, they feel swaddled. Here comes the first bite. Oh, my gosh, you're right about that. Thin, crisp layer on the outside. And then the most pillowy cumulonimbic dough.
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Wow, that's a first of like a meteorologist type of a description analogy of our bagel. I really respect that and I appreciate that.
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I'm curious how important water is to the process, especially in a state where water is so precious.
- [31:38]
C
So that is a really great point. We get a whole lot of the New York transplants that come in here banging their chest saying, but it's all about the New York water. But the reality is it is all about the water. It's about the PH level itself. I won't get into the technicalities or we'll have to have your entire audience sign an NDA. Once we nailed the appropriate level of ph, the rest is up to the Colorado Springs. You know, municipality, like utilities, they have amazing water here. And we know what to do with it because it's all about submerging our bagels in that water first, followed by very high temp baking.
- [32:16]
A
What does it mean to be a part of Bagelfest? And I believe it's the first Bagel Fest west in Los Angeles. Interesting. You had to send samples in.
- [32:29]
C
Yeah. So it was a real honor for samples, Sam, the bagel Ambassador, to reach out to us. And essentially we are representing the state of Colorado for the inaugural Bagel Fest West. So we're going to be competing against some of the best bagel shops from the Rockies to la. We are not going to be making our bagels and our product in Colorado Springs and then flying it to la. We're doing everything in LA so it can be super fresh. Like we do it in a restaurant
- [32:58]
A
with the same ph.
- [33:00]
C
Yeah, well, we're going to have to look at that.
- [33:02]
A
What do you get if you win Bagel Fest West?
- [33:06]
C
We're not going there to win. We're going there as a growth opportunity to get out of our comfort zone. Anytime we get out of our comfort zone, there's an opportunity to just get better and better and to also see we've never been in any sort of competition other than kind of indirectly. We have won the best of the Springs best bagel.
- [33:28]
A
You would come back, what with like the golden bagel.
- [33:31]
C
I imagine it is something like a golden bagel on a statue and a very firm handshake from Sam, the bagel Ambassador.
- [33:39]
A
Are you afraid people are going to scoff at Colorado Springs in Los Angeles.
- [33:44]
C
Again, traditionally, we're known for our beautiful scenery and the hiking and the scene skiing and all of that. We are not known for baking, but we're bringing the best. The number of New York, New Jersey folks that are our regular clientele. You know, a very typical scenario is for them to go home in New York and New Jersey and then fly back with, like, smuggled three, four dozen bagels that they then can freeze and keep over time. There's several of our customers who now bring our bagels back to their family in New York and New Jersey. I'm certain we can compete with some of the absolute best.
- [34:22]
A
So you and your wife Michelle started Bella's. Indeed. It's a pandemic era origin story.
- [34:29]
C
Yeah. So Michelle and I are married almost 30 years. We got.
- [34:34]
A
Mazel.
- [34:34]
C
Thank you. We had gotten one of the very stereotypical bread machines for our engagement back in, like, the late 90s, and Michelle started making loaves of bread. And then eventually she's like, I'm gonna go try to make you a bagel. And she really succeeded on the taste. Now, granted, in the late 90s, there was no YouTube. There was the beginnings of Google. So she just had to do research. Kind of super old school, and cobbled together the right types of flavors. It was the ugliest bagel ever, and it was very difficult to chew. But I was like, wow, you really nailed it on the taste. And then over the past 20 plus years, she's just continued to evolve her recipe and her process. And once the COVID lockdown released, we live about a minute from here in this large 2000 family community. They sent around a Facebook notification that the farmer's market was was going to start up again. And we were standing in the kitchen at the time, and I remember saying to Michelle, I'm going to sell your bagels at this farmer's market. And with a lot of things that she does, she looked at me sideways like, yeah, right. I was like, please. There's like, no barrier to entry. It's 20 bucks to apply to be a vendor. And, you know, we built a tent and a table, and I designed a New York, New Jersey style bagel banner. We brought 100 bagels that she baked in our kitchen at home. Colorado cottage law supports being able to bake bread because it doesn't spoil or at least it can't hurt you. And so within two hours, we sold out. And we're like, what's that about? We finished out the farmer's market season, selling out literally every single weekend. And at that point, I was not done. So, being A technologist of 30 years, I then built getbellasbagels.com and allowed people only within the 80924 zip code to order at least a half a dozen bagels or more by every Thursday. And that Michelle would bake them Friday to Saturday. And I would drive around knocking on doors, ringing doorbells, dropping off a steaming bag of bagels. I even got serious enough to where I had an app that did route optimization. So if we were selling to say, 40 different families on a particular Saturday, I would be able to use my phone to say, go here first, go here second, third, and again, being a techie, I really appreciated all of that. And within a year and a half, we built up this whole book of business.
- [37:11]
A
Who's Bella?
- [37:12]
C
So I love that you asked that. So Bella is one of many dogs that we've had over the past 20 plus years. Our theme at Bella's Bagels is the 20 years worth of amazing rescue dogs that we have had. All of our sandwiches are named after our dogs. So Bella is our bacon, egg and cheese, our most popular bagel. Our other dog right now, Charlie, is our Denver egg frittata, which is going to be like a traditional Denver omelette that we've changed to work with a jalapeno cheddar bagel typically. And then we have a little miniature pinscher who thinks, you know, he's 500 pound dog. He's the grilled cheese. His name is Finley. We have this huge wall that I can show you over here that has all these big beautiful headshots of all of our dogs.
- [37:56]
A
Bagels named for dogs is the most Colorado thing I've ever heard. Well, duh. Let's wrap up in a canine way the fact that you've begun, given the largesse of the community to give back to some extent.
- [38:13]
C
Let's talk about Bella's buddies. So about four or five months ago, we created this initiative for pets that can't afford vets. We give our customers the ability to upload a photo or multiple photos of their pets for a minimum of a $5 donation. That money goes directly to a local veterinary clinic in town that may have some clients that can't afford to pay for emergency services. So every now and then I will get a phone call saying, hey, there's an emergency. We have a client who's lacking the funds. Do you have anything? And I typically do, and if so, I just give it to them. In these past four or five months, we've already saved at least seven dogs, no questions asked. There's zero money that goes to us. It's complete pass through. And people have been really excited by what we're doing. And then also, I mean, from the kids perspective, to come in on a weekend and see their dogs sitting on the wall, that makes this whole experience at Bella's even more special. How much better does it get than that?
- [39:16]
A
What's been nice is you've done most of the talking and I got to finish my Everything bagel and it lived up to its name. It was everything. Jason, thank you so much. You, by the way, have not even touched your plain bagel because you've been too busy talking.
- [39:29]
C
If I did this interview with my mouth full, yes, I have a wife that is very, very sensitive to that. And so if I want to continue to have her bake for boosting happiness, I wasn't going to do an interview with my mouth full.
- [39:45]
A
Jason Steele co owns Bella's Bagels in Colorado Springs. He'll take part in Bagel Festival West Sunday in Los Angeles. And mom, I promise I was covering my mouth as I spoke with food in it. This is Colorado Matters from CPR News. We heard from Breckenridge's town manager earlier in the show about the dry, hot winter. My visit there made me think of the prolific writer Sandra Dallas, who used to live in Breckenridge. She now splits her time between Georgetown and Denver. She spoke with Andrea Dukakis in 2016 about her novel the Last Midwife. Like much of Dallas's work, it's set in Colorado, this one in the mining town of Swan Dyke in the late 1800s. The protagonist is Gracie, who's ultimately accused of murder.
- [40:52]
F
Let's talk about Gracie Brookins and her life as a midwife in this small mining town.
- [40:58]
G
She's very much like the people I knew in Breckenridge when I lived there in 1963. She has a love hate relationship with the land. Land is very important and the setting is very important to me. She loves the mountains. She hates the winters. Like most of the people up there. She loves the women and children. She feels she has a calling as a midwife, that it's a God given gift. But she's tired. She's been a midwife for more than
- [41:26]
F
50 years and she worries about mistakes that she might make too.
- [41:30]
G
She worries that she feels guilty that she doesn't have the knowledge to save women who've died in childbirth and babies who've Never taken a breath.
- [41:39]
F
In the book, the local doctor, who's a man, is very competitive with Gracie. He doesn't like that the woman would rather have her delivering their babies than him. And Gracie is really a critical source of information for these women. Women that she's caring for talk about
- [41:57]
G
that she knows not only more about childbirth than the doctor does, but the women trust her. They know she understands them. She understands why a woman who has six or seven little children clinging to her skirts wants to terminate a pregnancy or why she doesn't want to get pregnant in the first place.
- [42:17]
F
And she actually will help some of them terminate a pregnancy.
- [42:22]
G
That's a little unclear. She won't talk about that. But she will send them to an abortionist in Central City. But there are times when she knows that women shouldn't proceed with they've had too many children, they can't live through another pregnancy, and so there's a hint that she may help them.
- [42:39]
F
How similar is Gracie's work as a midwife to what midwives back then in the 1880s really experience?
- [42:48]
G
I did a lot of research on 19th century midwifery. Women were generally trained by apprenticing to practicing midwives. They certainly didn't have the medical knowledge that midwives have today, but they did have a great knowledge of women and a great sympathy for women. They knew a great deal about childbirth, more than doctors did.
- [43:13]
F
Without giving too much away in the story, tell us a little bit about the murder.
- [43:18]
G
Gracie is accused of murdering. Not an abortion, but of murdering a newborn baby. She's dumbfounded when she's accused of this because she would never hurt a baby. But the baby is the child of the wealthiest man in the community, a major mine owner, and he insists that she be arrested.
- [43:41]
F
The murder charge really devastates Gracie, and there are a lot of parts of this book that keep you in suspense. And that's all I'm going to say about the murder. But a lot of your novels have this element of mystery to them, and I wonder what draws you to that storyline.
- [44:01]
G
I don't know. You have to have some sort of storyline. My books tend to be character driven rather than plot driven. In fact, finding plots is really hard for me. But I like secrets. And Gracie certainly has a great many secrets, some so deep that she can't share them with her husband. And I like the elements element of surprise. I like twists. And you get that with mysteries.
- [44:23]
F
And you've written 15 novels, 10 nonfiction books, two children's novels. And as you mentioned before, the land almost becomes One of your characters and explain a little bit more about that. What does that mean?
- [44:39]
G
The mountain people had a love hate relationship with the land. They were rooted into it. They were like the pines at timberline who are formed by the wind and the cold and the atmosphere. The people I knew up there had their own way of speaking. They would say, us, go home now. And they had their own mannerisms and they wouldn't leave. As much as they hated the winners, they hated the idea of leaving. And if they had to say, because of the altitude, they would go to Salida or Buena Vista where they could still see their mountains.
- [45:19]
F
I'd love you to read a paragraph about the women in this mountain town. Many are married to miners.
- [45:24]
G
Gracie loved them. But women mountain hard, strong, knowing, like her, that come fall they'd be no better off. But they let their husbands hope. Watched as the men packed their burros, sent them off with smiles and cries of save me the biggest lump of gold. But what a woman really thought was maybe he'd find a little gold this time. Enough to go back home. To go back where they'd come from, where rain was warm and the wind didn't howl its loneliness.
- [45:52]
F
It's sort of like these women. It's a little bit torturous for them to be married to miners and not know what's going to happen from one day to the next. Did you research that?
- [46:04]
G
Life was like that in the 19th century in a lot of jobs, but particularly in mining, which was so dangerous. And they never knew women would keep the beds turned down in case their husbands were brought home injured.
- [46:18]
F
Yeah. And there was this real fear of that injury. And the book is set in the 10 mile range, which encompasses what's now the Breckenridge ski resort. And I wonder, is Swan Dyke a real town?
- [46:29]
G
There is a Swan Dyke. I used the name, but I didn't use the setting. Swan Dyke was a very, very tiny town.
- [46:37]
F
Let's talk a little bit about your writing process. You're a business reporter in your past life and you write about a novel a and authors talk about how hard that is, how hard it is sometimes to get up and write every day. And I wonder how you keep on the schedule.
- [46:56]
G
Well, it's hard to get up and vacuum. It's not particularly hard to get up and write. I developed the discipline as a reporter where if you say you have a bad day and the writing doesn't come, you have to find another job. So it was not really hard. It's not hard for me to sit down and write every day. I consider it a job. What's hard for me is coming up with a plot, with coming up with the idea for a story. Once I have it, then the writing goes pretty fast.
- [47:24]
F
So do things come up from your past lives, experiences that you have? Is that another way that you find
- [47:31]
G
some of my experiences at Business Week? Have some of the stories that I wrote at Business Week actually turned into novels? One was a novel about the 1856 Mormon handcart expedition.
- [47:42]
F
And so as a business reporter, some of these storylines have translated to your work.
- [47:47]
G
I covered hard rock mining for Business Week and learned a great deal about the subject and about the people. And I covered copper mining in Butte, for instance, and talked to a lot of the old timers. So that's where a lot of that comes from.
- [48:00]
F
Sandra, thanks so much for being here.
- [48:02]
G
Thank you.
- [48:03]
A
Journalist and author Sandra Dallas speaking with my colleague Andrea Dukakis in 2016. Dallas latest novel is the Hired man, which is set in southeastern Colorado. And that is colorado matters for now, with thanks to our team, sandy batulga, tyler bender, carl bielek, anthony cotton, pete
- [48:35]
C
kramer, andrea dukakis, zan huckpechone, matt herz,
- [48:41]
G
tom hess, michael hughes, pedro lumbragno, shane
- [48:45]
A
rumsey, haley sanchez, chandra, thomas whitfield. And I'm ryan warner in denver. Although my mind is drifting to breckenridge this hour at cpr news and kr, Sam.