Tam Flickinger's Spreadsheet Knows Exactly When the Money Runs Out

Tam Flickinger is a hypothetical seasonal worker, assembled from the documented experiences of Colorado's mountain-corridor workforce in 2026. She is the kind of person who exists in large numbers but rarely appears in financial planning literature or climate journalism. Her spreadsheet, however, is based on real numbers. She'd want you to know that.

The math of a seasonal outdoor-recreation life in Colorado has always required a certain willful optimism. You work the ski season, November through April, give or take, then pivot to guiding rafts or slinging drinks through the summer, banking enough from two compressed peaks to float the shoulder months when nobody's hiring.

It works as long as both peaks show up.

In 2026, neither did.

Colorado's ski season collapsed by 24 percent, the steepest decline in more than four decades.¹ Lift operators at Winter Park who normally worked 32-hour weeks were cut to roughly 20, a 37 percent reduction, with managers delivering the four-word eulogy: There's no work today.² Then summer arrived, and the same historically low snowpack that wrecked the ski season produced rivers running at a fraction of their normal flow. Clear Creek, one of the state's most popular commercial runs, was likely past its peak by early June at barely 200 cubic feet per second, against a normal peak of 1,000 to 1,200 cfs.² The Arkansas River, the most rafted in the country, hovered just above its minimum raftable flow.²

One hydrological event. Record-low snowpack melting early. It arrives twice in a seasonal worker's annual income calendar. The ski season contracts from the back end. The rafting season contracts from the front. The same worker absorbs both.

Tam Flickinger, 29, has spent seven years in this cycle: lift operations at Winter Park from November through April, raft guiding on Clear Creek from late May through August, bartending shifts to fill gaps. She has an environmental science degree from CU Boulder and a spreadsheet she updates weekly that tracks her hours, income, insurance premiums, and what she calls her "runway": the number of weeks her savings will cover at current burn rate. We spoke in early August at a coffee shop in Idaho Springs, a few miles from Clear Creek, which was running too low for commercial trips.

You keep a spreadsheet tracking your income across both seasons. What does 2026 look like on it?

Tam: So I started the spreadsheet my second year because I kept running out of money in October and not understanding why. It's not complicated. Hours times rate, minus rent, minus insurance, minus food, and then what's left goes into a column I call "runway." Runway is how many weeks I can pay for before I need income again.

In a normal year, and I'm using air quotes because I genuinely don't know what that means anymore, I'd come out of ski season with maybe eight to ten weeks of runway. Enough to cover the May gap before guiding starts, plus a little cushion. This year I came out with three and a half weeks.

Three and a half.

Because I went from 32 hours a week to, some weeks, 16. There were days I'd drive up to the mountain and they'd send me home. You're burning gas to not get paid. Which is a business model, I guess, just not a survivable one.

And then the rafting season was supposed to rebuild the cushion.

Tam: Right. That's the whole architecture. Winter fills one tank, summer fills the other, and the shoulder seasons drain both. Except this summer the river basically didn't show up. We ran trips in June but at flows where you're dragging the boat over rocks half the time. Customers aren't having fun. Tips crater. And then we're probably done on Clear Creek by mid-July? Ron Raudelunas, who runs Rocky Mountain Whitewater, said publicly he was hoping to make it to late July.³ Hoping. I love Ron. But hope is not a revenue stream.

What does that do to the annual number?

Tam: I ran it last week. If the season ends when I think it ends, my total 2026 earnings will be about 58 percent of what I made in 2023, which was my best year. And my costs haven't gone down by 42 percent. They've gone up. Rent went up. Insurance went up. The price of a breakfast burrito in Idaho Springs went up. The spreadsheet doesn't care that I love my life.

Let's talk about the insurance piece specifically.

Tam: Oh, gladly. During ski season I get coverage through Winter Park. It's not great, but it's coverage. When the season ends, I lose it, and I go on the marketplace. I'm in Grand County. A Silver plan for a 29-year-old in a Colorado mountain town runs around $800 to $940 a month before subsidies. And the enhanced subsidies expired at the end of 2025, so my premium roughly doubled for 2026.⁴

I was paying $847 a month from May through whenever I get employer coverage again in November. That's over four grand just for the summer gap. Four thousand dollars to have the privilege of a $6,000 deductible.

But here's the part that actually makes me want to scream. My subsidy is based on my projected annual income, which I estimate when I enroll. My annual income depends on how long the seasons run. How long the seasons run depends on snowpack. Snowpack depends on precipitation patterns I cannot predict. So the IRS wants me, in January, to forecast a climate variable. If I guess too high, I'm overpaying premiums all summer. If I guess too low, I owe money back at tax time.

The housing question. You're in resort-provided housing?

Tam: Through the season, yeah. Winter Park has units in Grand County.⁵ When the season ends, I move. This year I'm sleeping on a friend's couch in Idaho Springs because I can't afford $4,000 a month for a Steamboat rental.⁶ The Breckenridge workforce housing program is interesting, but you need 30 hours a week of local work to qualify.⁷ In a short-season year, I might not hit that threshold. So the housing support is designed for a season length that doesn't exist anymore. It's like a life jacket sized for a river that's already gone.

Guide Oliver Carter told Rocky Mountain PBS that next year is going to be "a real big decider," that if it's another bad year, a lot of guides won't come back.³ Where are you on that?

Tam: I think about it every day. And I have a degree. I could go do something else. I stay because I love the river and I love the mountain and I love this weird, broke, beautiful life where I own almost nothing and know every rapid by name.

But love doesn't compound. My savings don't compound. My runway gets shorter every year the seasons get shorter, and at some point the spreadsheet just says no. It doesn't care about the sunset from the put-in at Dumont.

What would make you stay?

Tam: One good winter. Honestly. One 2018-style dump where the snowpack is 120 percent of normal and the lifts run through mid-April and the rivers peak in June the way they're supposed to. That would reset my runway and buy me another two years of believing this works.

And if it doesn't come?

Tam: Then I join the people Ryan Snodgrass was talking about. The qualified applicants who just don't show up because they checked the snowpack forecast and picked somewhere else.² You don't quit this life dramatically. You just stop arriving.

What would you want someone in your position to know? Someone trying to plan a life around two climate-sensitive seasons?

Tam: Track your hours. I mean it. Build the spreadsheet. Because the thing about this life is it feels like freedom. You're skiing, you're on the river, you're in the mountains. And the feeling obscures the math.

The math is that you have maybe 36 weeks of real income spread across two seasons, and everything else is savings drawdown. When those 36 weeks become 28 become 22, the drawdown period gets longer and the savings get smaller and at some point the lines cross.

Winter Park's April 2026 sales tax collections fell 37 percent year-over-year. Food bank requests in the area rose nearly 14 percent; housing assistance requests climbed 24 percent.²

Vail Resorts, which saw a 25 percent drop in visits, reported lift-ticket revenue fell only 5.6 percent. The company's season-pass strategy had successfully transferred snowfall uncertainty from the corporation to the consumer.¹ No comparable mechanism transfers income uncertainty from the employer to the seasonal worker.

Tam's spreadsheet is, in a sense, the only risk model she has.

Footnotes

1. Colorado Sun, Jason Blevins, "Visits to Colorado ski resorts collapsed in 2025-26 with the steepest annual decline in decades," June 4, 2026. https://coloradosun.com/2026/06/04/colorado-skier-visits-collapse-2025-26/ ↩ ↩²

2. Colorado Sun, Shannon Mullane, "After a grim Colorado ski season, drought is crippling rafting," June 3, 2026. https://coloradosun.com/2026/06/03/grim-colorado-ski-season-drought-rafting-season/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Rocky Mountain PBS, Ziyi Xu and Cormac McCrimmon, "Colorado outfitters adjust as rivers run low," June 17, 2026. https://www.rmpbs.org/news/outdoors/low-water-rafting-impact ↩ ↩²

4. HealthInsurance.org, "Colorado Health Insurance Marketplace: 2026 ACA Coverage Guide." https://www.healthinsurance.org/aca-marketplace/colorado/; Aspen Times, "Health insurance enrollment on Colorado's marketplace running even with last year, even with subsidies slated to expire," December 30, 2025. https://www.aspentimes.com/news/colorado-health-insurance-enrollment-connect-for-health-federal-subsidies/ ↩

5. Colorado Sun, Shannon Mullane, "After a grim Colorado ski season, drought is crippling rafting," June 3, 2026 (citing Winter Park Resort communications on employee housing). ↩

6. Colorado Sun, Jason Blevins, "What's Working: How an Estes Park workforce housing program is rewarding renters," February 28, 2026. https://coloradosun.com/2026/02/28/estes-park-workforce-housing-renters-property-equit/; Planetizen, "This Colorado Ski Town Saves 75% of its Full-time Housing for Local Workers," February 11, 2026. https://www.planetizen.com/news/2026/02/136928-colorado-ski-town-saves-75-its-full-time-housing-local-workers ↩

7. Summit Daily, "Breckenridge officials worry about some of the town's workforce housing units sitting unoccupied," May 28, 2025. https://www.summitdaily.com/news/breckenridge-officials-worry-about-some-of-the-towns-workforce-housing-units-sitting-unoccupied-suggesting-change/ ↩