Steamboat Springs, CO - For years, the uniquely circular building on Yampa Street housed bicycles – most recently from Orange Peel Bicycle Service – but now, it’s embracing a new purpose: yoga. Mary Bailes opened the repurposed doors as Love, Yoga in May. 

For Mary, it was a long time coming. A Steamboat Springs visitor since childhood and a local since 2009, discovering the practice of yoga was a turning point in her life, found through the guidance of a mentor. Now, she hopes to lead others through that self-exploration.

After embarking on her yoga journey and getting her teacher’s certification in 2016, Mary started to dream bigger – about owning her own studio. It was only in the past year that those aspirations solidified, and she started looking seriously at open real estate in town. Though several places seemed promising, and after a few letdowns, (one space turned out to be selling only the door to the garage-style space, not the building itself) finally, one location called to her when she realized that it would be perfect for an environment of community that she sees as central to the pursuit of yoga. “The space seemed to want us in it,” Mary says.

The building comes with plenty of tidbits and pieces of history known by locals. The central beam made of metal and now covered with wooden slats, in town legend, is known to be a fallen-down ski chairlift tower repurposed from Stagecoach. However, Kent Erikson, who led the team who constructed – or reconstructed – the building in the first place, knows the truth. When a friend tipped him off in 1979 about a building on Twentymile Road, across from Builders FirstSource, that would make a great bike shop, he went to check it out. 

The first problem: it was the sawdust incinerator of a saw mill, abandoned in 1963. The second problem: the location, somewhat out of town. 

After looking for some land in town, Kent made a deal to buy the incinerator off the city property for the whopping sum of $1 – though after failing to move it within a year, still looking for land, he had to pay another dollar or two. 

Eventually he settled on the lot the building currently stands on, at 1136 Yampa Street, taking on 18% interest and a $135,000 loan to get ahold of the property. 

The incinerator was taken apart in eight sections to transport it to the lot, then reassembled in all its 16-sided glory. The legendary, though in truth utterly ordinary, central pole (not part of an old chairlift at all) was added to support the second floor. 

Kent planned to convert the structure of the building into a generator for passive solar energy. Below the first floor, 10 truckloads of gravel were added with vents, in order to suck the hot air back down and store the thermal mass. High-tech insulation was never added, as once the shop – Sore Saddle Cyclery, as it was originally called – opened, it gained customers fast. But Love, Yoga is now trying to reverse-engineer that system to keep the hot air in the studio for hot yoga classes, rather than being vented out. 

Though today, the re-construction process of this building likely wouldn’t be approved by any committee, at the time, an engineer was hired and sacrifices were made. One of which being the bottom 12 feet of the incinerator, which were warped and unstable from consistent heat and use, and besides, may have put the building height above code. 

“We got an engineer, and he's got, like, a missile silo base underneath here,” Kent says. “It's like a bomb shelter down there. It's built pretty strong. I mean, like a wrecking ball would just dent it. Honestly, if there was a tornado coming through, it would be about the strongest structure in town. I'm convinced of that.” 

Once the foundation was laid and the structure was set up, they put two layers of insulation on the outside, pushed onto welding rods, and then wrapped chicken wire over the top to keep the layers together. Then, to top it all off, ferro-cement, or gunite, was sprayed on to give the building its unique textured finish. 

In the end, a few determined guys with a dream came together to haphazardly construct what is now a town landmark that has laid deep roots in the culture and hearts of residents. For over 40 years, it has been a core piece of the bike scene in Steamboat, acting as a bike shop and site of production for Moots bikes. However, all its history has not been lost in the seemingly 180-degree shift of this business from biking to yoga: Bruce Alston, former co-owner of Sore Saddle, is now a part-time instructor at Love, Yoga. 

Though some elements of the building – like familiar faces – have stuck around, there is a stark difference in the interior from its former grimy-but-charming ambience. Grove Mountain Properties carried out the facelift and renovation of the building. “It was like a dirty old garage that hadn't been cleaned in 40 years,” Mary says. “There was a lot of creative morphing of this space from multiple generations of use. Somebody probably had a welder or knew a friend and they were like, 'We're just going to attach things to everywhere.' We had to spend a couple of days just kind of getting it back to a place where we can actually work with stuff – there were thousands of bike hooks and stickers all over the building.”

“We tried to maintain anything that we felt like could have sentimental value to someone, and tried not to cover up stuff because it's such a raw structure,” Mary continues. “You can see it's still the same building. There's a little bit of fresh drywall, a lot of paint, a lot of love, and a lot of cleaning  and some elbow grease.”

Elements such as the hand-carved wooden wheel decoration over the doors were re-incorporated into the space. But newer additions to the space make it seem like a whole new interior instead of a repurposed bike shop, such as the eclectic collection of lamps hanging in the studio. 

“Have you ever seen trees that have lanterns and lights hanging from them?” Mary asks. “That was my inspiration for this. When I first looked at it and started thinking, I realized that it kind of looks like a treehouse.”

Mary sourced lights everywhere from IKEA to Marrakesh. With the help of the construction crew, the staircase to the second floor was taken out and the ceiling sealed off. “Originally, I thought that we would build a smaller staircase or ladder to go up there, but we just wanted to keep the container of this studio space. Who knows, maybe that'll become something. It does have an exterior second-floor entrance, but possibly in the future, maybe some complimentary business could go in there, a massage or coach or something.”

Despite the fresh and brightly painted white interior, the exterior – with the exception of the chairlift swing now sporting a cheerful pink color – looks largely the same. No matter what business is inside, even the sight of the building holds memories for locals and visitors alike. 

“This place means a lot to a lot of people, so people come by and tell their story about it – people who bought their first bike here or worked here,” Mary says. “Some guy came in the other day, he's like, ‘Can I just take a picture? I just rode my mom's bike here.’ They came in from out of town for one of the races, so I think that no matter what business it is, it still has that call back to the part of your life when you came across it.”

After the renovation, Love, Yoga opened for business with offerings that focus around Bhakti, or love yoga, which is one of four major types of yoga in Hinduism. Bhakti is a practice that focuses on loving devotion, whether religious or personal. The classes offered at Mary’s new studio include all levels of intensity, ranging from slow and meditative to a “Tough Love” class focused on cardio and strength building. Afterall, Mary doesn’t believe in restricting oneself to just one type of yoga: “It’s like the branches of a tree, and you have to climb all of them,” she says. 

Sign up for a class online at LoveYogaSb.com or through the Walla app.

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