Two hours before Melissa Strong took a seat onstage Tuesday night at the Historic Park Theatre, a press release landed in local inboxes announcing a major change in Estes Park’s restaurant community.
Strong had sold Bird & Jim, The Bird’s Nest Café, and The Nest Above event venue to longtime business partner John Witmer.
But when KUNC radio host Erin O’Toole began interviewing Strong before an audience of more than 100 people, she didn’t begin with news of the sale or the life-changing accident. She began with a rock.
“What do you remember most about your first time rock climbing?” O’Toole asked.
“Terror,” Strong answered.
From there, O’Toole spent the next 40 minutes guiding Strong through the experiences that shaped her life: discovering climbing, becoming a sponsored boulderer, dreaming of opening a restaurant, suffering a catastrophic electrical accident in 2017, enduring repeated surgeries, and learning to use her severely injured hands again.
Only later did the conversation arrive at the news that Strong had announced Tuesday afternoon: She was ready to let go of the restaurants she had fought so hard to build.
“I did what I came to do,” Strong told the audience. “I built it, and I love what we built.”
An interview that gave the story room to breathe
The evening was a live taping of KUNC’s In the NoCo, the public radio station’s news program and podcast.
O’Toole, a veteran Colorado broadcast journalist whose work has been recognized by the Associated Press, Colorado Broadcasters Association, Public Radio News Directors Inc., Radio Television Digital News Association, and Society of Professional Journalists, demonstrated the craft of interviewing by doing something deceptively difficult.
Her questions were short, conversational, and carefully sequenced. Rather than rushing toward the dramatic centerpiece of Strong’s story — the 2017 accident that nearly killed her — O’Toole first established why climbing mattered so deeply to her.
Strong recalled that she was hardly destined to become an athlete. She described herself as a C student in gym class who preferred books and walks and ducked when balls came flying toward her. Climbing changed that.
“It definitely lit that spark in me that I needed,” Strong said. She eventually became an elite sponsored climber.
O’Toole also helped translate the unfamiliar world of climbing for listeners who may never have touched a climbing hold. She asked Strong to explain the differences among climbing disciplines and what it feels like to hang above the ground on a rock face.
The questions established an important foundation for what followed. When Strong later described looking at her catastrophically injured hands and thinking, “I’ll never climb again,” the audience understood she was contemplating the loss of far more than a recreational activity.
Climbing was part of her identity, her marriage, her friendships, and the structure of her life.
A restaurant dream and a terrible accident
By early 2017, Strong had spent decades working in restaurants — hosting, waiting tables, bartending, and managing. She wanted a restaurant of her own, one built around changing seasonal menus and fresh ingredients rather than the sameness she remembered from Estes Park restaurants years earlier.
Opening a restaurant carried some of the same attraction as climbing.
“It’s definitely a big roll of the dice,” Strong told O’Toole. “There are no guarantees that you’re going to succeed. It was honestly terrifying.”
Strong was doing some of the renovation work herself to save money. She discovered a technique known as Lichtenberg, or fractal burning, which uses high-voltage electricity to burn branching patterns into wood.
One April evening in 2017, while working on furniture outside her garage, Strong mistakenly believed the device was not energized. She picked up the leads. It was energized.
Electricity coursed through her body. She could not let go. She could not fall. She could not scream. Then Strong understood what was happening.
“I realized I was dying.”
At that point in the interview, O’Toole slowed the pace and gave Strong room to tell the story in her own words.
Strong described accepting that she was dying and experiencing what she remembered as a forest with dappled sunlight, a bed of ferns, and a dark tunnel. She recalled thinking that if she could somehow get back to her husband, Adam, and get help, she might be OK. Then she regained consciousness face down in her driveway.
“The fact that I remember every second of the accident made me grateful that I got the chance to live,” Strong said.
Her hands were catastrophically burned. Strong recalled seeing exposed burned bone and skin that looked like melted wax. Doctors initially told her she would be left with four fingers.
Another physician offered a possibility: bilateral flap surgery. Her damaged thumbs were surgically attached to her opposing forearms for three weeks so healthy tissue and blood flow could help preserve them.
Strong initially joked that the position resembled the pose from “I Dream of Jeannie.”
After three weeks, she had another name for it: the “straitjacket pose.”
A restaurant becomes part of recovery
Six months after the accident, Strong opened Bird & Jim, named for Isabella Bird, the intrepid Englishwoman who climbed Longs Peak in 1873, and her guide, Rocky Mountain Jim Nugent.
“I put everything I had into the restaurants, including my hands.”
Melissa Strong
During Tuesday’s interview, Strong explained that the restaurant project gave her somewhere to direct her attention when the future of her hands — and her ability to climb — remained uncertain.
“Looking back on it, it was overwhelming,” Strong told O’Toole. “During the time, it was kind of a saving grace.”
She could think about paint colors, light fixtures, and wallpaper rather than what she had lost. Because she physically could not do everything herself, she also had to learn to rely on other people.
“I knew that they would have to be my hands because we had no other choice,” she said.
That lesson changed her management style.
Before the accident, Strong said, she probably would have tried to do everything herself and might have been a tougher boss, focused on getting things done and hitting numbers. Her injuries forced her to ask for help and empower employees.
“I think it completely changed my approach to managing my staff,” she said. “I think it made me a better person overall. I hate to say it, because I don’t think I was a bad person beforehand.”
Returning to the rock
About a year after the accident, Strong began climbing again. Her first outdoor attempt came at Boxcar Boulder in Wild Basin, a place deeply connected to her early years of bouldering. She deliberately chose a route she knew well, so she could rely on muscle memory as she figured out what her altered hands could do.
Even packing her climbing shoes, chalk, and tape brought her to tears, she told O’Toole.
“It was such a familiar thing that I did all the time without even thinking,” Strong said. “It was just so impactful that I was going to go climbing again.”
Nine years later, Strong still climbs, although differently. Some fingers have diminished sensation while others are painfully sensitive. Skin grafts can tear. Her thumbs do not function as they once did. She improvises movements and develops her own ways of holding the rock. That adaptability, Strong told O’Toole, comes from climbing itself.
“Climbing gave me the try-hard bit of life,” she said. “You give it all you have.”
From survival to succession
The connection between Strong’s accident and Tuesday’s restaurant announcement became clearest near the end of the evening.
Asked about the sale, Strong summed up what the business had required of her.
“I put everything I had into the restaurants, including my hands,” she said.
Writing her memoir, “Climbing Through,” forced Strong to reconsider what she once regarded as the happy ending to her story. While she survived, opened Bird & Jim, and climbed again, she realized that ending had actually been another beginning — the daily pressures of the restaurant business, personnel changes, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Strong told the audience that during the past nine years, she never truly allowed herself to step away and heal from what happened in 2017. Her health began to suffer. She developed migraines and eventually stepped away from the restaurant floor. But leaving the floor did not remove the responsibility that came with owning restaurants and being accountable for roughly 90 employees.
She also began to understand the other side of stepping away: A restaurant needs an owner who is present.
“I just felt like to have Bird & Jim continue to grow, we needed an owner that was going to be present, and I wasn’t able to physically do that anymore,” Strong said.
Passing the business to Witmer became a way to protect what she had built while giving herself permission to continue healing.
“I also wanted to honor myself and honor my journey healing and kind of pass that torch,” Strong said.
Witmer takes ownership
Under the transition announced Tuesday, Witmer becomes full owner of Bird & Jim, The Bird’s Nest Café, and The Nest Above, which will operate as the Estes Park Bird Family Restaurants.
Witmer has been part of Bird & Jim since its inception and helped Strong build the restaurant’s culinary and wine programs. An award-winning sommelier, he developed a wine list emphasizing small, sustainable, and biodynamic producers. The program has received multiple Wine Spectator Awards of Excellence.
“Bird & Jim has always been a labor of love, and stepping into ownership doesn’t change the mission — it sharpens it,” Witmer said in the press release. “I’ve spent years building the restaurant I would want to eat at and a guest experience I’m proud of.”
Witmer is already putting his stamp on the Bird Family. Brunch Above, a new restaurant concept on the second floor of The Bird’s Nest Café at 1221 High Drive, is scheduled to open at 8 a.m. Sept. 3 in the space previously known as The Nest Above event venue.
The Bird Family has been teasing the opening on social media with hints that an “elevated” nest is hatching, along with the announcement that veteran chef Rob Corey is joining the team.
Corey, who owned Seasoned — An American Bistro, brings more than five decades of experience developing menus, opening restaurants, leading culinary teams, and teaching. His résumé includes work in the kitchens of six Michelin-starred restaurants, including The French Laundry, Le Bernardin, Daniel, D.O.M., WD-50, and Pujol.
His return to an Estes Park kitchen brings local familiarity with decades of international culinary experience to the table as Witmer takes ownership and charts the Bird Family restaurants’ next chapter.
Learning when to hold on — and when to let go
O’Toole ended the interview not with the restaurant sale, but with a question about ordinary life. What little things does Strong appreciate now?
“Everything,” Strong answered.
Nine years after the accident, Strong said she still drops things. Tasks take longer. Something as simple as fastening a necklace can be difficult.
But those frustrations exist alongside something larger.
“Just the fact that I get to participate in life still,” Strong said, “whether it’s in the restaurant or whether it’s in my house or whether it’s climbing or just sitting here, it’s all just a gift.”
It was the kind of answer O’Toole’s interview had been quietly building toward all evening.
She began with climbing, establishing what Strong loved. She explored the restaurant and what Strong hoped to build. She moved carefully through the accident and what Strong nearly lost. Then she asked about recovery, marriage, work, self-forgiveness, and the small acts of daily life that acquired new meaning afterward.
The result was not simply a story about surviving electrocution or building a successful restaurant. It was an intimate story about identity — how people build it, lose pieces of it, reconstruct it, and sometimes discover that the next act of resilience is not hanging on harder.
Sometimes it is knowing when to let go.
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