"You can come in the morning and get coffee and a croissant, or in midday after a workout and get a smoothie," chef Collin Kelley told the Steamboat Pilot & Today back in April, describing his vision for the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Elk River Road. It sounds like a pitch for a neighborhood gathering spot, and eventually it will be one. But that is not why the bakery opened first.
Kelley owns Primrose and Cypress, two of Steamboat's better-known restaurants, and for months his kitchens had a supply problem: the town's existing bakeries were too busy to keep up with his volume. So instead of waiting on someone else's oven schedule, he took over the space vacated by Big Iron Coffee inside Steamboat Basecamp and built his own. The public gets to buy croissants there too. That part is real. But the bakery exists because a restaurant group needed bread, not because the west side asked for one. Understanding that order tells you something about how this corner is actually developing, and why the timeline for what comes next keeps moving.
What's Already Standing At Lincoln And Elk River
Basecamp sits at the intersection of Lincoln Avenue, which is also U.S. 40, and Elk River Road, which is Colorado 129. The building anchoring the corner used to be the Steamboat Pilot & Today's printing operation. When the paper moved on, developers preserved part of the structure for commercial reuse and rebuilt the old printing floor as a five-story, 75-unit apartment building now known as The Lofts at Steamboat Basecamp.
The retail space that survived the renovation currently holds three businesses that have nothing to do with food:
- Steamboat Fit, a fitness studio
- M3 Golf Lab, an indoor golf training space
- Orange Peel Bikes, a bike shop
A few steps away sits Basecamp Row, a small collection of newly built townhomes. None of this reads as a food destination. It reads as a gym-and-hardware version of a mixed-use block, the kind of place you'd stop for a bike tune-up or a golf lesson and then leave. The bakery is the first thing on that corner designed to make people linger.
The Bakery Came First Because The Restaurants Needed It To
Kelley's team took over the former Big Iron Coffee space this spring and began installing two 6,000-pound commercial ovens, with a public opening targeted for July. The plan was always for it to double as a retail bakery and a production kitchen. Kelley has said plainly that the operation is not designed to be self-sustaining as a standalone café. Its job is to supply Primrose, Cypress, and the market that's still under construction with bread, pastries, and prepared dough. Walk-in customers are a secondary use of ovens that were purchased for a different reason.
The person running that kitchen is Sarah Helzer, executive pastry chef for both Primrose and the Nomadic Table since 2022. Helzer has competed nationally, including a spot on the U.S. team vying for the Coupe du Monde de la Pâtisserie, the sport's world championship. A commercial bakery on the west side of Steamboat now has a pastry chef with that kind of résumé running daily production, which is a different proposition than a corner coffee shop hiring a barista and calling it a bakery.
The Groundbreaking That Moved
The bigger project attached to that bakery is called Forty West Mercantile, a 4,500-square-foot, one-and-a-half-story market hall that Kelley plans to build next door. The plans have shifted since they were first announced. In December 2025, the timeline called for construction to start in June 2026, with the building finished by December and doors opening in March 2027. By April 2026, Kelley told the Steamboat Pilot & Today he was now aiming to break ground by the end of summer instead, with completion pushed to spring 2027 in more general terms.
That's not a dramatic delay. It's a few months. But it matters if you're the kind of person who was planning to walk over next winter expecting a finished building. The bakery opening on its own timeline, ahead of the market, is partly a hedge against exactly this kind of slippage: it gives Kelley's restaurants a working supply chain regardless of when the larger construction wraps.
When it does open, Forty West Mercantile is designed to function like a small European market rather than a grocery store. Kelley has been explicit that he's not trying to compete with City Market or Safeway on commodity groceries. Instead, the plan includes a butcher case cutting the same steaks served at Primrose and Cypress, a seafood case with fresh oysters, a pizza kitchen, extruded fresh pastas, a dairy case with local eggs and cheese, and an ice cream counter with hand-dipped scoops. Upstairs, a mezzanine will hold seating for people who want to eat what they just bought instead of taking it home. Garage doors on the west side will open onto a patio.
Why This Corner, Not Downtown
Kevin Riegler of MR Homes, the developer behind Basecamp, has framed the project as filling a gap that's specific to that part of town. West side residents, and those living north of town along Elk River Road, currently drive into downtown or to a grocery chain for the kind of daily food shopping that Forty West Mercantile is designed to handle. Riegler has said the market and bakery bring a level of quality and consistency that part of town has been missing.
That's a different problem than downtown Steamboat has. Yampa Street and the blocks around it already have a dense cluster of restaurants, a farmers market, and a food hall. The west side has apartments, townhomes, a fitness studio, and a bike shop, with nothing built specifically around food until this year. Basecamp's own retail mix has been growing since the Lofts opened, but growing toward gyms and services first, food second. Kelley's project is the first attempt to give that specific intersection a reason to stop instead of pass through.
What To Actually Expect This Fall And Winter
If you live on the west side, the practical version of this story is simple. The bakery inside the former Big Iron Coffee space is either already open or close to it, selling coffee, pastries, and bread to the public while it works primarily as a production kitchen for Primrose and Cypress. The full Forty West Mercantile, with the butcher case, oyster bar, and pizza kitchen, is not opening this year. Based on the most recent update, spring 2027 is the target, and that target has already moved once.
For now, the corner of Lincoln and Elk River is in an in-between state: a working bakery next to a construction timeline, surrounded by a gym, a golf lab, and a bike shop. The smaller thing you can walk into today exists because of a supply problem at two restaurants across town, not because the neighborhood lobbied for it. The bigger thing still coming was designed for the neighborhood from the start. Both are true at once, and knowing which is which tells you what to actually expect walking up to that door this winter.
If you're curious about what else is changing across Steamboat's neighborhoods, from the west side to downtown to the ranch land outside town, The Labor Long Team tracks these shifts as part of daily life here, not just as a real estate story. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually happening in a particular corner of town.
