Jason Blevins
Outdoors/Business Reporter
Sneak Peek of the Week
Colorado’s largest shipping container community debuts in Buena Vista as model for affordable housing
Jerry Champlin planned a dozen rentable tiny homes built around a courtyard on a residential lot in downtown Buena Vista. After nearly four years of approvals and working with the town, the first-time developer has built what is considered the largest community of shipping containers in the state. (Brian Malone, Special to The Colorado Sun)“This can be one way to solve our housing issues if we open our eyes a bit wider.”
— Wyatt Reed, whose shipping container hotel in Florence inspired the new BV Basecamp community in Buena Vista
Jerry Champlin had a plan to help ease the housing crunch in Buena Vista. Why not build a dozen tiny homes and corral them around a central courtyard on a residential lot a block from downtown and rent them out for $1,000 a month?
He bought a lot with a modest home in 2019 and floated his plan. Six years later, he’s about to start renting. But the plan, pushed and shoved by local rules and soaring costs, has changed.
He’s now stacked 21 steel shipping containers around the courtyard in a community he’s called BV Basecamp. He built 16 units in 17 of those steel boxes and the rest are community spaces for office work, storage and studios.
And his rents have climbed a bit. He’s got 160-square-foot furnished units available for $1,150. The larger 640-square-foot containers are renting for $2,650.
“I ended up with more of an art project that you get to live inside versus an affordable village of tiny homes,” says the first-time developer whose background includes a civil engineering degree and building a technology company.
It is one of the largest residential communities built entirely of shipping containers in the country. And it’s one of several new housing projects — some traditional and some innovative like Champlin’s — in Buena Vista.
“To do a creative project like this. You have to be willing to take on a lot of risk and, in hindsight, I had to be kind of clueless. I did not know exactly what I was getting myself into, but I needed to have the wherewithal to get through it,” says Champlin, who has lived in a 750-square-foot home for the past four years with his three kids and wife. “If I had known what I know now, in 2021, I would have stuck with my original plan and figured out how to get it through. I would have found a way to force it through, and it would have cost a lot less to build, and we would be up and operational and done a few years ago.”
The designs inside the shipping container homes are ingenious, with toilets inside showers, a la cozy apartments in Europe. Artistic tiling and custom shelving — made by a North Dakota woodworker who used trees killed by the ash borer — are in every apartment. Custom closets and cabinets are built with13-layer plywood. Walls have sliding pocket doors to eliminate the space for a hinged door.
There are not many multiunit residential complexes built out of shipping containers in the U.S., so Champlin had to spend countless hours working with local planners. He had to adapt his plan to existing code, even when it did not necessarily make a lot of sense for homes built with steel. Every unit has sprinklers, even though it’s next to impossible to ignite steel. He had to overly insulate the nearly airtight steel boxes that can be heated with a candle.
“It’s been a fun adventure,” he says, touring the white, cantilevered box community.
Champlin hopes he can inspire smaller designs and maybe help persuade local planning officials to adjust codes to allow out-of-the-box concepts that can help ease housing prices.
Wyatt Reed, who built a small hotel out of shipping containers in Florence, has spent nearly four years working with Champlin to design and build the BV Basecamp project. He knew it would take a long time to work with local planners.
Reed said the barrage of codes that raise the cost of construction “make it impossible to create cost-competitive housing.”
Containers are a new frontier for high-density housing, Reed says. He knows he’s at the very forefront of what he hopes grows into a shipping container housing movement. It requires massaging. A lot of home builders don’t really like working with steel. And people who cut and weld steel are not necessarily into woodwork. Reed has designed coursework to help the divergent trades overlap, which can reduce labor costs for shipping container projects.
Containers can be the answer for first-time buyers struggling to find footing in towns where homes sell for millions, Reed says. They cost very little to maintain, with no siding or roofs. Start in a single container and as you make more money and your family grows, add more. It’s inexpensive and scalable, he says. And the construction process with shipping containers produces a lot less waste.
“This can be one way to solve our housing issues if we open our eyes a bit wider,” Reed says.
> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story
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In Their Words
Could the tariff circus fuel the outdoor industry’s long simmering secondhand market?
Jimmy Funkhouser opened Feral Mountain Co. outdoor gear store on Tennyson Street in Denver in March 2016. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)“This is the future of consumption.”
— Peter Whitcomb, whose Front Range Tersus cleans and repairs millions of pounds of used outdoor apparel and equipment for resale
$28 billion
Outdoor retail sales in 2024, up slightly from 2023
As a trade war and the cost of importing foreign-made goods threaten already thin margins in the outdoor industry, there’s a glimmer of a silver lining in the looming storm clouds.
Could the soon-to-be-soaring costs of new stuff fuel the long-simmering secondhand gear market? For years, outdoor gear makers and secondhand store owners have hailed re-commerce — they also call it the circular economy — as a model for sustainable business that reduces waste, minimizes environmental impacts and delivers less-pricey offerings to newcomers to the outdoors.
Now, with the price of new gear set to spike, could refurbished equipment become a viable economic pillar for the $28 billion outdoor retail industry?
As the on-off tariffs threaten global supply chains and the yearlong process of developing, selling and manufacturing outdoor apparel and gear, it’s too early to accurately assess the impacts of the looming trade war. And the retail industry is carefully watching consumers, wondering if they will rein in spending if prices climb and economic horizons darken. Uncertainty reigns right now and that, in and of itself, is threatening.
“The unfortunate reality is that it’s going to cost more to make a jacket and make a pair of skis and those costs will get pushed to consumers. There is a shock coming to a lot of consumers,” says Aaron Provine, the president of the secondhand online marketplace Geartrade.com, which has seen surging numbers of outdoor users both buying and selling in the past two years. “That means a lot of people are going to start shopping used markets. We have not started to see the potential winds or benefits — I think the market is still too dynamic right now — but if these tariffs do stick, it will push more people into the resale market.”
The outdoor retail market has been on a roller coaster since 2020, with a big spike during the pandemic as everyone stocked up for outdoor play, followed by a slump and now a modest rebound.
Outdoor retail sales hit $28 billion in 2024, up 1% from 2023. Equipment sales were down while footwear and casual categories — versus technical gear typically purchased by core outdoor enthusiasts — climbed.
Proponents of re-commerce and circularity, which involves brands making high-quality gear with the hopes that the initial buyer may hand it down to a second user, are hardly cheering yet another layer of taxes on Asia-made stuff. And again, this uncertainty about what is coming threatens anyone who is selling anything.
“We’re in a period of extreme uncertainty, and when that happens, people simply spend less money across the board,” said Jimmy Funkhouser, who opened his outdoor shop in a north Denver bungalow in 2016 and has grown his Feral Mountain Co. business into a national model for re-commerce. “On the aggregate, I expect the secondhand market to continue to grow for the next several years, and this could be an additional catalyst for that growth. But if the economy craters, that’s bad news for everyone. Including Feral.”
Over at the Tersus factories in Denver and Englewood, huge machines use liquid CO2 — not water — to clean millions of pounds of textiles for major brands like Patagonia, Nike and Adidas. In the past three months, the number of brands tapping the innovative Tersus technology to repair and clean gear and clothing for resale has doubled, Tersus boss Peter Whitcomb said.
“We are seeing brands that in the past have not even returned our phone calls, they are reaching out and saying, ‘we know we have to do this now,’” Whitcomb said. “The tariff environment is forcing that conversation.”
> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story
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Breaking Trail
Legislation could help State Land Board better consider recreation, conservation, community when managing trust lands
Pronghorn graze amid cholla cactus June 21, 2022, on the Chico Basin Ranch southeast of Colorado Springs. The nearly 90,000-acre ranch is owned by the State Land Board. (Mark Reis, Special to The Colorado Sun)“This is a really good opportunity to take a refreshed look at how to maximize state trust lands in a variety of ways.”
— Colorado Sen. Dylan Roberts
2.8 million
Number of acres owned and managed by the Colorado State Land Board
Next year the Colorado State Land Board will share a 150th birthday with the state of Colorado. New legislation approved last week could give the land board its first new direction in 30 years.
From 1876 to 1996, the land board used its 2.8 million acres of surface land and 4 million acres of minerals — valued at $4.1 billion — to maximize revenue for Colorado schools. In 1996, voters passed Amendment 16, which adjusted the land board’s maximum-dollar mandate to allow the land board to include land conservation, stewardship, resource protection and “community stability” alongside things like renting land to oil and gas drillers or commercial real estate developers.
House Bill 1332 could give the land board even more leeway when balancing revenue with resources and values. The bill heading to Gov. Jared Polis’ desk creates a 21-person committee that will focus on how to better infuse conservation, community needs and recreation into the land board mission. The group will make recommendations to the land board by September 2026 and new policies could be adopted by early 2027.
The goal is to better balance how the land board generates revenue with protecting and conserving lands for recreation, open space and wildlife.
It is not about changing the board’s overarching mission to generate funds for schools. That would require a statewide vote since the land board is part of the state constitution.
But the working group’s recommendations could offer “a way to grow investment and have other benefits to the people of Colorado, whether that’s something like promoting outdoor recreation or using state trust lands for housing for teachers,” says Colorado Sen. Dylan Roberts, a sponsor of House Bill 1332.
“The working group can take a holistic view of the potential benefits of state trust land whether its extractive industries or agriculture or some of the new demands of the state like outdoor recreation and affordable housing,” Roberts says. “This is a really good opportunity to take a refreshed look at how to maximize state trust lands in a variety of ways.”
Mother of snowboarder who died from a chairlift calls on resort industry to require lowering the safety bar
Donovan Romero, a 32-year-old father of two girls, died May 2 from injuries he sustained falling from a Keystone chairlift on Dec. 11, 2024. A state report suggested he was leaning over to adjust his snowboard bindings but a friend on the chairlift with him said he was not leaning over. (Courtesy photo)“It’s mind blowing to me that resorts do not require riders to lower the safety restraint system. I mean it’s right there.”
— Tonette Romero, whose son Donovan died last week from injuries sustained in a chairlift fall in December
35
Number of chairlift fatalities at U.S. ski areas since 1956
The initial report from Keystone ski area and the Colorado Tramway Safety Board was that 32-year-old Donovan Romero was leaning over and fiddling with his snowboard bindings when he tumbled from the Ruby Express chairlift in December.
“The investigation by Keystone is not accurate,” says Romero’s mother, Tonette Romero.
Donovan died last week from his injuries, making him the 14th person to die from injuries on Colorado’s slopes in the 2024-25 ski season and one of only three chairlift-related deaths in Colorado since 2016.
“Donovan was very safety-conscious and he would not have been leaning over and adjusting his bindings,” Romero said. “He had a friend on the chair with him and that is not what the friend witnessed.”
Romero has asked Keystone for a copy of the accident investigation by ski patrollers that cited a witness saying it appeared the snowboarder was doing something with his board when he fell. The restraining bar was not lowered. She has been unable to get that report.
And she’s getting angry. No one from Keystone has reached out in the months that Romero was immobilized from a brain injury, she says. The only information she can find about the accident is from Flight for Life nurses who flew her son from Keystone to St. Anthony’s Hospital on Dec. 11.
“Obviously they have to protect themselves and they got into a defensive position, which is why we saw in those initial reports that they immediately pointed to my son as this being his fault,” she says.
Yes, he should have lowered the safety bar, she says. But go visit a ski area and you will see hundreds if not thousands of lift riders every day not lowering the bar, she says.
“It’s mind blowing to me that resorts do not require riders to lower the safety restraint system. I mean it’s right there,” she says. “They tell us that safety is our responsibility and I understand that. But what would it take for an attendant to lower that safety bar? I mean we have rules for amusement parks and the construction industry for protecting people at heights. We have rules around seatbelts. Why do we not have better protections for skiers on chairlifts?”
Very few states, including Connecticut and Vermont, require skiers on chairlift to lower the safety bar. The most recent requirements by the American National Standards Institute mandate safety systems for all new chairlifts. But for most of the ski resort industry, lowering the safety bar is recommended but not required. It’s all part of the industry’s reliance on personal responsibility when it comes to safety.
But there were a lot of chairlift falls this ski season. The last three chairlift deaths in the state — in 2023 at Breckenridge, in 2020 at Vail and in 2016 at Ski Granby Ranch — have led to wrongful death lawsuits alleging the resort operator was negligent.
Donovan Romero was a single father of two girls, ages 8 and 10. He loved his dog, Penelope. The Littleton resident was an avid snowboarder and outdoorsman. Recently his friends used a specially designed wheelchair to take him outside for a final goodbye. They filmed a heartbreaking video as they shared their favorite memories.
“What can we do to make sure this does not happen to another family?” Romero said. “How can we help skiers take that safety bar more seriously and recognize the risk when ski resorts do not?”
— j
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