The Outsider | Trade war reaches rural Colorado’s outdoor businesses

Layoffs, tariff-spiked costs reach rural Colorado outdoor companies as trade war rages

Lane Willson founded Oveja Negra in 2012 and makes all of her company’s bike bags with U.S. made materials in Salida. (Handout)

Since 2012 Lane Willson’s bikepacking business in Salida has handcrafted some of the best bike bags in cycling. Last week she had 16 workers — she calls ’em “stitch witches” working 20 machines — in downtown Salida, churning out all sorts of Oveja Negra frame bags and backpacks for long-haul cyclists.

This week Willson and her partners — husband, Monte, and co-owner Stephanie Perko — had to lay off seven trained sewists and move two workers into part-time contracting. She spent years teaching those workers how to design and sew Oveja Negra bags.

“The American dream is being destroyed by this administration,” Willson says.

Down the street in Salida, Mike Harvey just shipped a container of his Badfish river boards from China. He’s been working on the new board designs for a year with trusted manufacturing partners.

So he’s importing them under a 155% tariff imposed by the Trump administration.

“It’s a margin-killer,” said Harvey, who co-founded Badfish with Salida surfboard designer Zach Hughes in 2010, pioneering the then-nascent sport of river stand-up paddling. “We’re now facing only bad choices — either eat the cost and make little to no profit, raise prices on our customers, or some painful combination of both.”

Bike shops in Mexico, Canada, Australia, the U.K. and South Africa have canceled orders for Oveja Negra bags.

“They are saying ‘Nope, we don’t buy anything from the U.S. anymore,’” Willson says.

Dozens of bike shops in more than 35 states are not placing new orders for the coming season as owners brace for trade-war tariffs that will spike bicycle prices by several hundred dollars.

In 2023, Oveja Negra got a $99,350 grant from the Colorado outdoor recreation office’s federally funded Outdoor Recreation Industry Impact Fund, which helps outdoor businesses hire and retain workers. That helped Willson keep her workers on board through the post-pandemic slowdown. For 13 years, business has climbed more than 10% a year, often surpassing the owners’ projections.

Now Oveja Negra, which sources 98% of its materials from the U.S. and manufactures everything but metal buckles in Salida, is in a freefall.

“I’m the U.S. manufacturer using U.S.-made materials and Trump is putting me out of business,” she says. “We figured out U.S. manufacturing and we figured out how to take care of our people and it came crashing down. I’m doing everything Trump wants but we are being punished by this tariff bullshit.”

Fabric costs for Oveeja Negra have soared 30% in the past three years. Wages have climbed 25%. To return to profitability, Willson says she will need to sell $50 bags for $200.

“But no one will buy that,” she says. “So that’s not happening.”

Harvey wonders about the seemingly arbitrary nature of Trump’s tariffs.

“If the Trump administration wants to see more goods made in the U.S., where’s the roadmap? Why not phase tariffs in over time with a clear schedule, giving small businesses a chance to adapt? We can’t just uproot our supply chain overnight,” Harvey said. “I understand the logic of targeting sensitive sectors like semiconductors for strategic reasons. But what exactly is the strategic value of making inflatable stand-up paddleboards domestically? China has the infrastructure, components and expertise in place. Rebuilding that here would take years, maybe decades. And without a real plan to stimulate that kind of capital investment, we’re just being punished.”

Willson is equally frustrated by the lack of clarity in Trump’s trade war. But she hopes consumers can step up and offset the blows to small businesses. She would shoulder part of that cost if bike-bag buyers share the burden.

“Every time you buy something off Amazon — even from a small business that has been bullied onto the Amazon machine — you are supporting a system that does not care about your community,” she says. “Think before you spend. Know that if you give Lane your money, you’ll get the best bike bag made and her employees will be paid and she’s giving local kids free bags. People need to stop buying cheap stuff that is strangling local companies who are trying to do it right.”

Oveja Negra and Badfish are among hundreds of outdoor businesses in Colorado that are preparing for the chaotic storm ahead as the new president reorganizes the federal government and U.S. economy. If you, dear reader, have suggestions for outdoor companies who are limping through this trade war, ping me at jason@coloradosun.com. And stay tuned for more stories on how Colorado’s outdoor businesses are preparing for the uncertainty ahead.

The Outsider has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

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Ranchers and rural commissioners have issues with wolf introduction. But they oppose an effort to end it.

A map of northwestern Colorado with areas shaded in purple indicating watersheds where at least one collared gray wolf was detected from Feb. 25 to March 25, 2025. (Colorado Parks and Wildlife)

If more than 125,000 Colorado residents don’t like wolves roaming the state, the predator will end up on the state’s November 2026 ballot for a second time.

Organizers behind Initiative 13 — which would end the voter-mandated reintroduction of wolves by the end of 2026 — say they will start collecting signatures next week to make the 2026 ballot.

“Let’s end the wolf experiment,” said Patrick Davis, a political strategist from Colorado Springs working with the Colorado Advocates for Smart Wolf Policy.

If the measure lands on the 2026 statewide ballot and voters approve it, there will be at least one more planned release of wolves by Colorado Parks and Wildlife, which would add potentially another 15 wolves to the state.

Surprisingly, a band of rural county commissioners, ranchers and hunters who have vehemently opposed wolf reintroduction are not lining up behind the effort to nix the state’s wolf plan. That coalition wants CPW to pause wolf reintroduction — not necessarily end it.

That coalition says it was “blindsided” by the Smart Wolf group’s plan and they were never consulted in the decision to return wolf reintroduction to voters.

Smart Wolf “should have started by engaging with the stakeholders that truly have the best interest of their livestock in mind, being the ones that are in danger and needing protection,” said Tom Harrington, board president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and a coalition member. Instead, they “came at this thing with pretty limited knowledge” about ranchers’ involvement in reintroduction from the beginning and what’s at stake for them, he said.

Lauren Dobson, the former director of information and education at CPW who represents the group of commissioners and ranchers urging CPW to delay reintroduction, said “the coalition doesn’t feel like this is the right group to represent their needs.

“They don’t have any true understanding of what they are dealing with or how their citizens’ effort would impact the agricultural, rural and hunting communities.”

>> Click here to read this story by Tracy Ross

Hickenlooper fields frustration from communities surrounded by public lands

Colorado U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper toured the Western Slope this week, including a stop in Eagle to talk about cuts to public land agencies. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)

Sen. John Hickenlooper toured the Western Slope this week and he got an earful.

For communities surrounded by public lands, the recent slashing of workers at the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Park Service is stressing residents as wildfire season and summer crowds approach.

At a gusty gathering on the banks of the Eagle River on Tuesday, Hickenlooper heard from local officials eager for direction under a constant bombardment of bad news for the public lands that surround them.

Gary Tennenbaum, the director of Pitkin County’s open space and trails program, wondered if “something drastic” — like the county closing its road and shuttles into the wildly popular federal Maroon Bells Scenic Area — could “get all the people who come to our community to know the impacts.”

Hickenlooper, lamenting what he called “this new march of horribles” and the “reckless” cuts at land management agencies, said even senators are struggling to respond.

“It’s going to be a battle. It’s going to be a war. And the only real leverage that we have … in a constitutional democracy is to have people rise up,” he said, urging the small group to take to social media to combat the Trump administration’s campaign to reorganize the U.S. government and economy.

“So much of this is contradictory in nature,” he said. “What they say they want to do and then they act in a way that’s opposite and makes their goal unobtainable.

“I hope this is not true, but it seems like they’re trying to set up government to fail so they can say ‘Hey, look at how the Forest Service has not done this or the Forest Service has not done that.’ And they are gonna say it’s a failure of government and government is the enemy. I believe most Americans feel we should be making federal government smaller but this isn’t the way to do it.”

Trump proposes ending BLM public lands rule that championed conservation alongside energy, grazing and recreation

BLM lands in the the Upper Colorado River District outside Gypsum in September 2022. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

Public lands — those American splendors that are “economically significant,” according to the Trump administration — took another hit Monday when the White House Office of Management and Budget posted the administration’s intent to roll back a Biden-era ruling that put conservation on equal footing with energy development, livestock grazing and recreation. The rule would apply to 81 million acres of BLM land, 8.3 million of which are in Colorado.

The notice posting is part of the formal process for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, so a rule hasn’t been proposed yet, said Kathleen Sgamma, an oil and gas industry advocate who was Trump’s appointee for BLM director until she withdrew her nomination last week after a letter that she wrote in 2021 criticising Trump was exposed. She recently resigned from her position as president at the Western Energy Alliance.

The notice aligned with a meeting called by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last week when he let Interior Department employees know the job of Interior is to “manage and protect,” public lands. “We’re in the business of ‘and,’ not ‘or,’” he said.

Management and protection of BLM lands was what the Biden administration’s Public Lands Rule espoused as it moved through the Republican-controlled U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources in 2023 and was finalized in April 2024 after review of more than 200,000 public comments.

The BLM is the nation’s largest land management agency. The Public Lands Rule sought to put conservation and ecosystem restoration on equal footing with drilling and other extractive uses, including by offering new leases for improving and recovering federal lands and offsetting development impacts.

Not everyone loved it: During the 2023 House committee hearing it was called a seismic shift in public land management that would upend the agency’s multiple use mandate and a Biden administration tactic to lock up more lands and advance the administration’s goal of conserving 30% of U.S. lands and oceans by 2030.

The Trump administration seems to be dismantling that goal, executive order by executive order.

But Sgamma said rescinding the Public Lands Rule would be essentially inconsequential as it was “based on a very novel interpretation of the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act,” which established the BLM’s sustained yield and multiple use mandate, and “there’s no legal basis for it,” she said.

The rule has “barely been implemented, so it really hasn’t had much effect on BLM lands in the West,” she said.

And it’s pretty much a given that it will be rescinded, because “Congress overturned a substantially similar rule using the Congressional Review Act when they overturned BLM Planning 2.0” during Trump’s first presidency, she added.

That rule was considered a long-overdue attempt by the BLM to improve the way the agency had developed land use plans over the previous 40 years and to modernize and improve its land use planning process in ways that made its efforts with multiple stakeholders more collaborative, transparent and efficient.

Environmental groups have thoughts about the notice.

>> Click over to The Sun soon to read this story by Tracy Ross

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