Jill Brabec and her family were packed and ready for their unplugged, ski-in Thanksgiving trip to their favorite yurt in State Forest State Park. 

The little trailer at the edge of the park where they typically checked in with Never Summer Nordic Yurts was empty and dark. The sign on the door — “Be back soon!” — was not freshly hung. They poked around the campground across the way. Knocked on all the doors they could find. They went into nearby Walden, wondering if anyone knew where the operators of Never Summer Nordic might be. 

Brabec’s daughter checked the internet on her phone and saw a post by an angry visitor from a few days earlier saying the owners of Never Summer Nordic had disappeared. The Brabec family went home to Steamboat Springs to celebrate Thanksgiving, abandoning a yearslong holiday tradition of “playing cards and noodling around the backcountry” from a remote snowy cabin, Brabec said.  

Brabec is an attorney in Steamboat Springs and said she sent the owner of Never Summer Nordic Yurts plenty of “nasty grams.” She never heard back. Her credit card company eventually refunded the hundreds she lost to the suddenly darkened outfit. 

“It’s frustrating because this guy is clearly out there doing this to a ton of other people. What peeves me more than anything is that he doesn’t seem to have any remorse,” Brabec said. “He is a crook.”

Read more at ColoradoSun.com.