No more gift shop or restaurant at Buffalo Bill's Museum and Grave in 2025

It's a place jammed with knickknacks and oddities. Buffalo Bill memorabilia, key chains, knives, and a big stuffed buffalo. 

The gift shop at Buffalo Bill's Museum and Grave atop Lookout Mountain however will be no more in 2025 as Denver Mountain Parks owns the building and park and is working to figure out a future for the property.

"I got a letter addressed to my grandmother saying 'please be out of that building at the end of December. You've done a nice job, but we have other plans,"' said Bill Carle, the current owner of the family-run business that has held the lease on the shop and restaurant since 1956. 

Carle's grandmother died in 1979, so the city was a bit behind on updating its information. 

"We don't even have a chance to talk about it. Bid it. Anything. It's just, be out," said Carle.

It will be the last of the contracts the HW Stewart Company has held for concessions with the city of Denver.

"We have a very old septic system. We have a huge increase in visitation… where we have pretty significant structural issues within the building that need to be addressed," said Denver Mountain Parks director Shannon Dennison. 

The city has been looking at its mountain parks with an eye on restoration and maintenance in keeping with a master plan formulated in 2012. 

"People have been coming up there for generations and decades and love coming up there, it's a very special place," explained Dennison. "The goal isn't to take that away, it's to make sure that that experience still exists. That we don't overuse it to the point that it has to be shut down forever and entirely and we can't maintain the buildings anymore."

In the past, the company has had concessions at Red Rocks and Echo Lake Lodge as well as Buffalo Bill's Museum and Grave. 

In addition, the company once held concession operations atop Pikes Peak and at Garden of the Gods as well as the Summit House atop current Mount Blue Sky. 

HW Stewart was formed in the late 1800s when Carle's grandparents started to run concessions atop Pikes Peak. 

"I came here to work for my grandmother when I was 9, in 1963," he said about the gift shop at Buffalo Bill's Museum and Grave.  

Things have changed. "There were some scalps here in those days. They've been reunited with the tribes." 

Concessionaires have changed over time. Many public park concessions like Buffalo Bill's Museum and Grave were operated by family businesses. 

"All of the National Parks, were families like mine," said Carle. "Being a concessionaire is a tough business because it's either the government's going to come do something when they get new people and decide to do things differently. Or you have the three major parks concessionaires that want your business too." 

A year and a half ago, their contract to operate the gift shop and restaurant at Echo Lake Lodge ended. Denver Mountain Parks is working on a plan for revitalization there. The lodge was closed for the summer season in 2023 and will be closed again for 2024.

The shop is a place of many personal memories.  

"There's a lot of soul to a place like this," said visitor Rob Shea, who was buying fudge on Thursday. 

"You got such awesome views here and homemade fudge and just a cool gift shop. We're selling memories. Reminders, mementos. Souvenirs," said Carle. "It's a history of your trips that you took and the time of your life. You know get this when you were a little kid. 'Oh I remember this, I bought one of these.'"

He said the city will be losing out on lease revenue that is the equivalent of about $500 a day. But Denver Mountain Parks points out its mission is not to make money on parks property. 

"The amount of money that comes out of those concessions relative to the amount that the city needs to put back into them to keep them in good condition doesn't necessarily mean that the city is making money off of it, or generating a huge amount of revenue," said Dennison.

Visitors can expect the gift shop and restaurant to be closed for a time after December 31. How long it might be closed is unclear. The city says it will bring in a historic preservation architect to look at the property. 

"And then we'll consider what is the highest and best use and that will likely be a combination of food service, some retail but a much larger emphasis on education and exhibits as well," Dennison said.