The West Side Corner That Keeps Filling Up With Businesses That Already Existed

The corner of Lincoln Avenue and Elk River Road used to print the news. Today it pours coffee, tunes derailleurs, and racks kettlebells, and by spring 2027 it will also cure its own steaks. The building that once housed the Steamboat Pilot & Today's operation has become Steamboat Basecamp, a 52,000-square-foot adaptive reuse project on the west side, and if you've driven past it in the last two years you've watched it fill in one tenant at a time.

What's easy to miss, if you're just passing through, is that almost nobody who moved into that corner was new to Steamboat. This isn't a corner that lured outside chains with cheap rent. It's become the address where established local businesses go when they've outgrown where they started.

A coffee shop that had already moved once

Big Iron Coffee didn't arrive at Basecamp as a startup. Bowen and Nina Rodkey launched the company in November 2017 out of a small retail space on Downhill Drive, roasting single-origin coffee in a former marijuana dispensary. They added a downtown location in Old Town Square in November 2018, then a west-side shop in May 2020. In August 2024, that west-side location closed on a Monday and reopened seven days later at 1901 Curve Plaza, inside Basecamp, on the building's northwest corner. Rodkey told the Steamboat Pilot & Today it was "actually kind of miraculous" that the turnaround was so fast, crediting a week of round-the-clock work between locations.

The move wasn't about chasing foot traffic from a new development. It was a business seven years into its life, already known around town, relocating because the old space had run its course.

The bike shop that gave up 25 years in the cone

Orange Peel Bicycle Service's story runs even longer, and its move says more about what this corner actually offers. Brock Webster's shop started in 1999 in a 500-square-foot space behind the "Little Red House" downtown, sharing an alley with outdoor brands like BAP and a young Honey Stinger. In 2005, Orange Peel moved into one of Steamboat's most recognizable buildings: a cone-shaped structure built by Moots founder Kent Eriksen around a repurposed 30-foot sawdust incinerator and an old ski lift tower, at the corner of Yampa and 12th. Webster ran the shop there for 19 years, in a space with a shared lineage to Moots Cycles, Sore Saddle Cyclery, and Eriksen and Bingham Bikes.

Orange Peel left the cone building for good in the fall of 2023, moved into its new space at 1901 Curve Plaza, Suite 3 inside Basecamp that December, and opened for business there in January 2024. Webster was candid about the trade-off. "It's melancholy for me because I had good memories there," he told the Pilot, but added the new spot works better for a shop that wanted "to be somewhere where it is more like a destination." Nineteen years in an iconic downtown building gave the shop history. Basecamp gave it room.

Steamboat Fit and M3 Golf Lab filled in around the same stretch of storefronts, and together with Big Iron and Orange Peel they turned a repurposed newspaper building into a working strip of daily-use businesses: coffee before a ride, a bike tune-up, a workout, a lesson on your swing.

What's actually there right now

For anyone on the west side planning an errand run, here's the current lineup at Basecamp, at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Elk River Road:

• Big Iron Coffee, 1901 Curve Plaza, serving coffee and a food menu that includes breakfast burritos, bagel sandwiches, and a turkey Italian club
• Orange Peel Bicycle Service, 1901 Curve Plaza Suite 3, offering bike builds, tune-ups, fittings, and rentals
• Steamboat Fit, a fitness studio operating in the same retail block
• M3 Golf Lab, a golf studio rounding out the strip

The corner also sits on the free local bus line and within a few tenths of a mile of Yampa River Core Trail access, which is part of why a bike shop and a fitness studio make sense as neighbors here rather than downtown.

The market that needed room downtown couldn't give it

The next tenant is the one that's been generating the most conversation, and it follows the same pattern as its neighbors. Collin Kelley isn't new to Steamboat dining. He owns Primrose and Cypress, two restaurants already established in town, and in December 2025 he introduced plans for a chef-driven market and dining concept at Basecamp to the local real estate community at a broker preview event.

The scale is the tell. The planned market spans roughly 4,500 square feet, with a ground-floor European-style market hall, a mezzanine, and a patio built for year-round use. Kelley described the concept to the Pilot as filling a specific gap: "We're going to be more like a Trader Joe's size than a City Market or Safeway," he said, adding that the market will include a pizza kitchen, a deli counter, fresh-cut steaks from the same cases that supply Primrose and Cypress, and a seafood case with fresh oysters. None of that is a format that fits into a typical downtown storefront. Kevin Riegler of MR Homes, the developer behind Basecamp, called it an addition that "fills a long-standing gap on the west side."

As of April 2026, Kelley told the Pilot he aims to break ground by the end of summer 2026, with completion targeted for spring 2027. That puts groundbreaking at essentially right now, if the timeline holds.

Why this keeps happening at this specific corner

Line up the tenants and the pattern becomes hard to miss. A coffee roaster that had already outgrown its first west-side storefront by 2024. A bike shop that traded 19 years of downtown history for a bigger footprint. A restaurateur who needs 4,500 square feet and a full commercial kitchen buildout, something no vacant storefront on Lincoln Avenue downtown currently offers. Basecamp isn't pulling businesses in from outside Steamboat. It's catching the ones that already built a following here and then ran out of space to grow into.

That matters for how you think about the west side generally. This isn't a corner betting on unproven concepts. It's a corner absorbing Steamboat's own success stories as they scale, which is a different kind of momentum than a development banking on outside interest.

There's a real estate footnote worth knowing too. In March 2026, a transaction recorded with the county showed the Lofts at Steamboat Basecamp, the 73-unit rental building that anchors the retail space these businesses occupy, sold for $41.6 million to an entity called 970 Basecamp LLC. Riegler told the Pilot the sale wouldn't change his plans for the property, including a second apartment building already in planning. Whatever the ownership structure looks like on paper, the businesses on the ground floor aren't going anywhere, and neither is the market Kelley is building next door to them.

What to actually watch for

If you live on the west side or drive through it regularly, the thing worth tracking isn't a grand opening date so much as the groundbreaking itself. Kelley's timeline points to construction starting by the end of this summer. Given how quickly Big Iron turned around its own move, a matter of one week between closing an old location and opening a new one, it wouldn't be surprising if Basecamp's next chapter moves just as fast once the permits clear.

For now, the corner still works the way it has for two years: a place to grab a coffee, get a bike tuned, and watch a bakery and market take shape one framed wall at a time.

If you're curious how a corner like this shapes property values and daily life on Steamboat's west side, or you're weighing a home nearby and want someone who's tracked developments like this one for years, Kelly Conway is happy to talk it through. Let's Connect.