Hotels Fill Fast As Blizzard Shuts Down SE Colorado Region

As blizzard conditions began to shut down wide areas of southeastern Colorado Tuesday night, many travelers decided to get somewhere warm and safe.

The extra traffic was a boon to hotel operators in towns like La Junta and Walsenburg, where business can typically be much slower.

Sheila Ayala, a clerk at the Holiday Inn Express in La Junta, said the extra visitors provided for a nice windfall, ?It’s doing good for us, we didn’t expect [the storm to be so big] and now we are almost sold out, so that’s good for us!”

Ayala says for many people sliding into her business on highway 50, there really wasn?t much of a choice, “We?ve got highways that are closed in both directions so we have a lot of out-of-town people that are basically stuck here”

Tom Pape and his daughter were stuck in La Junta Tuesday night. Tom is a Minnesota native, but he says this storm still stacked up pretty good against others he’s seen, ?You know, I was here in 1997 in October, and there was this incredible blizzard, but this is pretty epic.

Road closures had much of the region shut down Tuesday night, with most of Hwy 50 closed in both directions east of Pueblo, and I-25 shut down to the south.