High and dry: tourism looks to regain lost ground.

• Author: Peterson, Eric

First there was the tech bubble bursting, then the economy slackening, and the unthinkable events of 9/11/01. Then the drought. The economy kept staggering, the markets kept sliding, fear overshadowed optimism. Forest fires exploded across Colorado, and Gov. Bill Owens enraged thousands by proclaiming, "The whole state is on fire." It couldn't get any worse for the state's tourism industry.

Or maybe it could.

In mid-July, "biblical proportions of grasshoppers" invaded Steamboat Springs, said Sandy Evans Hall, executive vice president of the Steamboat Springs Chamber Resort Association. The story was picked up by The Rocky Mountain News, and subsequently ran in USA Today and newspapers in Europe. The unfortunate infestation hit right in the midst of a highly publicized fire, and less than a month after a stretch of the Yampa River in the Steamboat area closed for recreation due to the drought.

Yet, all things considered, Steamboat weathered the fires, the economy and the grasshoppers quite well: lodging tax receipts were off less than 1 percent through August, 2002. "It hasn't been great but it wasn't as bad as it could have been," said Hall. "I'm cautiously optimistic about winter."

But Steamboat was something of an anomaly.

Beyond a nice summer in Grand Junction and a flat one in Winter Park, Colorado's tourism landscape for 2002 has been more a sea of red ink than a mountain sunset.

While the domestic lodging industry was off 4.6 percent through August, Colorado's losses will likely outpace that national figure. Many observers predict a 10 percent drop from 2001 in tourism spending -- a thrashing on the order of $700 million.

Lodging tax receipts in Denver were off 10 percent through August, after a 6- to 8-percent drop in 2001. Durango was down 9 percent. Colorado Springs was off 6 percent. The list goes on and on.

"It was probably the worst summer the Vail area has experienced in 15 years," said Frank Johnson, president of the Vail Valley Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Bureau. "Every segment of the market was off."

"In some ways, Colorado suffered the perfect storm for its tourism industry this year," said Richard Berdue, a professor at the University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business and co-editor of the national Journal of Travel Research. "If it could go wrong, it went wrong."

To many observers, this "perfect storm" did not begin when the dot-com industry flat-lined, but rather in November 1993, when voters killed the state's...