Scenic mountain village to share Sundance spotlight
ESTES PARK — Already acclaimed for its scenic location and access to Rocky Mountain National Park, Estes Park will share a new spotlight. The high-country village played a key role in luring the Sundance Film Festival from Utah to Colorado and is likely to play a bigger part when the festival arrives in Boulder in 2027.
A public-private entity closed on the sale of the iconic Stanley Hotel and its 41-acre Estes Park campus in a complex deal that will jumpstart development of the Stanley Film Center. The 117-year-old hotel, which inspired Stephen King’s novel “The Shining” and the movie version by Stanley Kubrick, helped make the case for Colorado by hosting the Sundance Directors Lab program in 2024.
John Cullen, whose Grand Heritage Hotel Group sold the hotel to the state-backed entity, also gave the town a boost by purchasing Nederland’s annual March “Frozen Dead Guy Days” festival, moving it to Estes, and opening a Cryonics Museum in the hotel’s historic ice house to house the frozen corpse of the festival’s namesake, “Grandpa” Bredo Morstoel.
Cullen’s next project is developing an ornate F.O. Stanley Chocolate Factory in a structure that formerly held the Old Church Shops in downtown Estes Park. The upper levels of that building will be part of a multi-phased improvement project for Cleave Street, the east-west corridor north of downtown’s busy Elkhorn Avenue.
A public-private entity closed on the sale of the iconic Stanley Hotel and its 41-acre Estes Park campus in a complex deal that will jumpstart development of the Stanley Film Center.”
Estes Park has a year-round population of slightly more than 6,000. But in summer, when throngs of visitors escape the lowland heat for a dose of cool mountain adventure, the town grows by the tens of thousands, prompting adoption of paid parking in the downtown core, a color-coded free transit system, an accompanying all-day parking pass, and a timed-entry system for the national park designed to ease crowding.
The challenge for the town and its economic-development infrastructure has been to build a more viable year-round economy while also addressing how best to improve the experience for the hordes of tourists that crowd the village in summer. Toward that end, the town turned downtown streets into a one-way loop with the aim of easing summer traffic jams.
Estes Park’s alpine surroundings attract visitors and new residents alike. The Big Thompson and Fall rivers rush downhill from the park to converge in the center of town. The Rooftop Rodeo, Independence Day fireworks over the lake and the massive Longs Peak Scottish-Irish Festival on the weekend after Labor Day have roared back after weathering pandemic-related restrictions.
Expanded health-care options are available in the Estes Valley now that an agreement for Estes Park Health to affiliate with UCHealth has been completed.
Estes voters addressed the need for affordable workforce housing by approving an increase in the lodging tax from 2% to 5.5%, allocating the additional 3.5% – revenue estimated to be around $5.25 million – to fund workforce housing and child-care initiatives.
A pair of successful citizen petitions will send voters back to the polls in November. One of the initiatives would require written approval from a two-thirds majority of property owners within a 500-foot radius of a property undergoing rezoning or a Planned Unit Development before the change can be approved. The other initiative would repeal a section of the Estes Park Development Code that provides density bonuses in multifamily residential zones as incentives for the construction of affordable, attainable and workforce housing in multifamily residential zones.
