After 20 years of ownership, Ryan and Kristal Phelps have sold Hood Mortuary to funeral provider Park Lawn Corp.
Though Park Lawn Corp. now owns the building, assets and business, the Phelpses will continue to facilitate funeral services. Transferring the assets to Park Lawn Corp., Ryan Phelps said, allows him to focus more on providing Durango and Pagosa Springs with high-quality post-life care without also worrying about running a business.
“The direction I wanted to go with the business was to care for the community more than anything else, because Durango is very important to us,” Phelps said.
Hood is one of two mortuaries in Durango. The other is Williams Funeral Home & JWN Crematory, which opened in 2022 in the Grandview area.
Phelps said he chose to sell to Park Lawn Corp. because the company is actively reaching out to the Western Slope. After more than two decades of managing every aspect of Hood Mortuary, he said, stepping back from the business side allows him to spend more time with his family and the Durango community.
“Knowing what I knew about the funeral business, I wanted to partner with an organization that I thought would really take care of this town and would do right by my employees,” Phelps said. “We've given our lives to this place, and I wanted to be able to continue to serve the community while letting somebody else worry about the overhead.”
Phelps, who moved to Durango as a junior in high school, began working at Hood Mortuary in 1994 as an attendant while studying at Fort Lewis College. After graduating, he attended mortuary college in Houston, Texas, then returned to Durango in the late 1990s. Shortly afterward, he and his wife moved into the mortuary and then became the sole owners in 2005, operating the business for the next 20 years.
Though Hood Mortuary is now owned by a large funeral service corporation, Phelps assured communities in Southwest Colorado there will be no noticeable change. He said service prices will not increase and the level of care will remain the same.
“A lot of people ask when a corporation or a large organization takes over a funeral home if prices are going up,” Phelps said. “The answer is no. I run this place, and they've told me nothing’s going to change – nothing at all.”
sedmondson@durangoherald.com
An earlier verion of this story erred in saying Park Lawn Corp. is a Canadian company.
