On a Friday in shoulder season, lunch hour was quiet at Angie Stanford’s basement Italian restaurant, just off the busy thoroughfare in downtown Glenwood Springs.
A handful of groups scattered throughout the restaurant dined on pasta, salad and homemade cheesecake. In the kitchen, staff bustled around, preparing salads, chopping ingredients and plating whole fish.
“This winter really kicked our butts a little bit,” Stanford said, sitting on a stool in the corner of the kitchen near her office. “I would say 35% easy sales dropped.”
Stanford bought her restaurant two years ago, and renamed it the Euro Italian Underground. Owning a restaurant is her lifelong dream. She practically lives at the restaurant and thinks of her team as family.
“I really go to bed every night, and my heart is full,” Stanford said. “I am absolutely very happy. I am happy for my family. I am happy for each one of my employees. I love my team.”
Stanford’s savings got the restaurant through the slow winter without needing to make drastic cuts.
She said it was tough to strike the right balance of ordering food and keeping it fresh when guest numbers were so different from what she expected.
“The bills are not lower, because you are still open,” she said. “You are waiting for that guest to come in. You are hoping and praying that today is going to be the day to kind of cover some of the expenses that we already lost.”
It’s not just new businesses that struggled after a warm winter. Most of the local economy took a hit.
“It's not a straight shot across the board,” said Eliza Voss, the senior vice president of destination marketing for the Aspen Chamber Resort Association.
Aspen’s sales tax numbers show that luxury retail — like jewelry and gallery sales — was one of the few areas that didn’t decline compared to last year.
But for others, Voss said the lack of snow hit hard. Hotel occupancy in March was down about 15% in Aspen and Snowmass compared to 2025.
“That's a pretty significant number, and one we haven't seen in a while, especially in a month that is known for actually being a very high snow month, typically, and spring break,” Voss said.
Compared to other Colorado ski towns, Voss said Aspen’s not a one-trick pony: beyond skiing, it’s also an arts destination.
“Aspen sort of has this inherent diversification,” Voss said. “When skiing was born in Aspen, so too was arts and culture. So we have a really nice product that even if it's not snowing, people can enjoy arts and culture offerings throughout the winter season.”
And big groups and corporate events at the resorts help keep the bottom from falling out, even when there’s little snow.
“Snow helps, though,” Voss said with a laugh.
Aspen's diversification may help the city weather dips in visitation. But Colorado ski resorts as a whole still saw a drop of 3.5 million visitors this winter — a 24% decline. That’s the worst showing since the early 90s and worse than during the pandemic.
Aspen fared slightly better than the statewide average: ski visits to the Roaring Fork Valley dropped 21.5% last winter, according to Aspen One, parent company of the Aspen Skiing Company.
“When we're talking about a couple of inches here and there, Aspen still kind of can maintain,” Voss said. “But when the word of mouth [is] that the entire West is not getting snow, that was a very big deal. It's hard to change the narrative once it's been set.”
Tourists typically start booking their winter mountain getaways during the summer, but Voss said that may not be the case this year.
“We are going to see a snow hangover into next winter,” Voss said. “So that means people are probably going to wait to book to see what the weather does.”
Aspen Public Radio spoke to businesses from Aspen to Rifle about the record-low year.
Even businesses that have weathered many bad seasons over decades felt how stark this winter was.
Jim Lindsay and his wife have operated a small, by-appointment boot fitting shop since the turn of the century at the base of Aspen Highlands.
“That's by design, so it doesn't take a lot of people to fill our schedule,” Lindsay said on a warm summer day at the shop.
Last winter, for the first time, when BOOTech opened its appointments in early November, they didn’t fill up.
“It was 70 degrees,” he said. “People were mountain biking and fishing and golfing, and they weren't thinking about ski boots yet.”
He figured the business would be ok.
“Bookings for Christmas were looking good, and it was going to snow eventually, until it didn’t.”
Most years, business has been cyclical: professionals arrive first, then retail guests, the professionals returning, and international customers later in the season. But this year broke the pattern.
BOOTech also gets most of its product from Europe, and tariffs in the past year added stress to the slow season.
“Almost everything that we sell went up 15- to 20% in price, so not only was revenue off, but our bills were quite a bit higher,” Lindsay said.
By the spring, Lindsay said the shop had made up for the sluggish start, but he still calls it the shop’s most challenging year.
“The hope is that it was just an anomaly, and next year will be a more normal year.”
He said he’s not sure he would want to be in the ski business 50 years from now, though.
Restaurant owner Stanford is more concerned about her business in the immediate future.
This was only her second winter owning her restaurant, and she said she couldn’t weather another one like it without making changes.
“It'll be a lot of sleepless nights,” she said. “The last thing I want to compromise is hours for my employees to keep going,” she said. “Like, OK, which light are we going to turn off?”
The thought ties her stomach in knots, but she’s determined.
“No matter how sometimes I do struggle, and how bad the winters are, I am happy for my team,” Stanford said. “I am happy for every guest that walks through the door. They are everything to us.”
