LOVELAND, Colo. (AP) - You’ve seen the “U.S. 34 closed” detour signs, and you know you can’t drive to Estes Park from Loveland. But if you wanted to buy a freshly baked pie at the Colorado Cherry Co., climb the tower at The Dam Store or shop for a vest at Beavers Den Leather, could you get there from here?
The owners of those stores and others in west Loveland want you to know that the answer, emphatically, is yes. And they wish the Colorado Department of Transportation would make that clearer, reported The Reporter-Herald (https://bit.ly/2f1pvxy).
The highway department closed a 3-mile stretch of U.S. 34 in the Big Thompson Canyon to make permanent repairs of damage from the 2013 flood.
That closure, from Oct. 17 to the Memorial Day weekend, affects the highway from Cedar Cove Road (mile marker 80) up to a point just east of Drake (mile marker 77). It cuts off travel between Loveland and Estes Park except at specific times for drivers with special permits.
A few weeks before the closure began, the Department of Transportation started posting signs on U.S. 34, U.S. 287 and Interstate 25 in northern Colorado telling Estes Park-bound motorists that they’d need to drive south to Longmont and then go west and north through Lyons.
“If you travel on I-25 anywhere near 34, you see these glaring notices that it’s closed,” said Kristi Lehnert, co-owner of Colorado Cherry Co., which has a store about a mile east of the closure.
“They’re under the assumption that anyone who gets on Highway 34 heading west is going to Estes,” Lehnert said of the CDOT officials in charge of the signs. “But they may be going to my store. They may be going to The Dam Store.
“Those signs are on I-25. They’re miles and miles and miles before the road is actually closed,” said Lehnert, who said she has gone round and round with highway department officials about the closure’s effect on her store.
“The impact already has been really significant, and I don’t really see it turning around,” she said just three days after the highway was closed.
Beavers Den Leather
LeAnn Beavers, owner of Beavers Den Leather, about 3 miles east of Colorado Cherry Co., said she wishes CDOT’s signs could be more specific.
“They need to say ’west of the cherry store’ or something like that,” she said. “That would help us a lot.”
Beavers said she is still trying to recover from the flood three years ago. It didn’t physically affect her property, but the highway closure was devastating to her biker-focused business.
“They kept me closed for eight and a half weeks, and I lost $65,000 in revenue, so you can imagine what this is going to do to me,” she said. “I’m having to refinance my home to get us through the winter.”
Colorado Department of Transportation spokesman Jared Fiel said his department has tried to lessen the impact on local businesses, scheduling the repair work during the slower tourist season.
CDOT: ’It’s a balancing act’
“We have tried to communicate as well as we can where exactly the closure is,” he said. The department has posted small signs at regular intervals in the canyon, counting down the number of miles before the closure. And it is adjusting the wording on its lighted message boards, he said.
“We’re continually tailoring those messages,” he said. “We’ve changed them two or three times since the closure. … We have a sign over here (in Greeley) telling people it’s closed at Cedar Cove.”
Fiel said CDOT doesn’t want people driving all the way up to the roadblock and then having to turn around and go back down the canyon.
“You’d be amazed at how many people we’ve turned around at the closure,” he said. “We understand this is going to have an impact on businesses. We’re trying to mitigate that the best we can,” he said. “It’s a balancing act.”
The state has made money available through a grant program to help companies hurt by the closure, he said. Businesses in the canyon on the other side of the roadblocks, accessible only from Estes Park, also will suffer from the loss of drive-by traffic.
The Dam Store
Roberta Olmstead, who has owned The Dam Store at the mouth of the canyon since 1969, said she doesn’t want to sound whiny, but she wishes that the signs and the news coverage of the closure would be clearer about the area affected.
“Put it in the paper that we are still here and not in the closed-up part,” she said.
Colorado Cherry Co. has another store in Lyons, the town through which the detoured traffic is being routed.
“I wish I could say, ’Wow, I have seen a decrease here but an increase there.’ But that has just not been the case,” Lehnert said.
Both stores, which sell locally produced pies, juice, jams and other products mainly to tourists, were closed in the aftermath of the flooding. Lehnert said they had to lay off most of their employees, and her husband now has a full-time job to make ends meet.
The business survived “by the grace of God, and I don’t say that lightly,” she said.
Then the permanent repairs of U.S. 36, which were completed last year, hit the Lyons store hard, she said, and it’s clear that things will be tough again.
“Looking at the numbers this week, it’s scary,” she said Oct. 20. “It could be a very scary nine months.”
After that, the permanent repairs on the rest of U.S. 34 could take at least another two years, with additional stress on business, she said.
Lehnert added that she knows that other people lost everything in the flooding - some even their lives - so she’s trying to keep her struggles in perspective.
“It stinks, but hopefully with some patience … it might not be as bad or as long as everybody thinks,” she said.
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Information from: Loveland Daily Reporter-Herald, https://www.reporterherald.com/
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