NEDERLAND — Doug Armitage lost the violin his great-great granduncle carried when he fled Nazi Germany escaping Hitler, and John Thompson lost the connections he could make with out-of-towners who thanked him for suggesting the perfect place to hike or snowshoe.
Jeffrey and Susan Green lost the wall of mugs they gave the first 50 people to drink 50 of the beers they brewed on site from their recipes, and Diana Underhill lost the candles and bowl full of aspirational sayings on the altar she’d been adding to for more than a decade.
And Michael Camarata, who as Nederland’s family physician had given countless tetanus shots and high school physicals to kids who are just a bit more wild than average, lost a portrait of famous jazz musician Joe Bonamassa a patient had given him, and a two-volume textbook he bought for $1,000 as a medical school student in 1988 called Andrews’ Diseases of the Skin.
But what these business owners and others gained after losing the sentimental items and hard goods of their livelihoods in the Caribou Village Shopping Center fire, which burned in the predawn hours of Oct. 9, were an understanding of their ability to rebound after disaster and an appreciation of the generosity of people who heard about the fire from near and far.
Those things have helped at least 10 of the 22 proprietors affected by the tragedy start to rebuild their small businesses — as well as critical tax revenue for Nederland. Every business or its employees has also benefited from a set of GoFundMe pages, which to date have raised just shy of $425,000. A GoFundMe spokesperson wouldn’t compare the response to the Nederland fire to other tragedies. But ask anyone who’s been watching the aftermath unfold, and you’ll hear stories of neighbors helping neighbors — and others — in record time.
Neighbors helping neighbors
Within hours of the fire starting, Sam Bass, marketing director at Eldora Mountain Resort, was emailing and calling Underhill, owner of Tadasana Mountain Yoga. Eldora wanted Tadasana to know they could continue classes in the Timbers Lodge if they wanted to. And they did. The following Sunday, in the lodge overlooking the grassy ski hills, more than 100 people did their down dog and corpse poses, which carried a little more meaning than usual.
“People were very emotional,” Underhill said. “It was tender.” One instructor sobbed into the arms of a participant.
Tadasana has held two more Sunday classes at Eldora and expanded to the community center, Hub Ned co-working space and Boulder Creek Lodge. And as of Monday, an email said they were back to operating on a full schedule.
“It was so heartwarming to know the love and care that people have for Tadasana and how much they really wanted to see it continue in the community,” Underhill added. She intentionally chose not to create an individual GoFundMe page for the center, because she wanted anything Tadasana did as part of its recovery to be something that brought people together.
Thompson, who owned the Mountain Man Outdoor Store that offered hats and gloves, snowshoe rentals and “Nederland”-emblazoned mugs, plus walls of Carhartts and a corner dedicated to gently-used items, awoke to a friend calling him about the blaze, and realized soon after the only thing he could do was figure out how to move forward.
He’d been jolted from bed at 3:45 and had thrown on his shoes, a pair of pants and a sweatshirt. He didn’t know what to do, so he drove to McDonald’s in Boulder. As he sat there, “that sad guy in the corner, sobbing into my McNuggets,” he thought, “You know what? I need to go back up there and deal with this.” The Kind Castle Organic Cannabis Store had gone out of business and the building with its store front along Colorado 119 sat empty. Thompson texted the landlord and within days he was submitting a lease and credit application.
But here’s what’s amazing about his story.
Within hours of the fire, Camarata’s wife, Cathy Valen, the town chiropractor, was also on the hunt for a new location for their medical clinic. It was a bit more fits and starts, because Camarata was getting calls “from people wondering how they were going to get their prescriptions,” he said. But Valen reached the Kind Castle landlord and set a time to go see it.
When she found out Thompson was looking at it too, she told Camarata, “John should have it. It’s perfect for him. There’s other options for us.”
But Thompson, thinking the same about them, said he’d withdraw his application if they wanted it because their work was more important.
Valen demurred, because, “we can do what we do anywhere, but for John, it was perfect,” she said.
Thompson on Monday was getting ready to open Mountain Man 2.0 by Friday. His shop is more stocked than one might imagine given all he lost in Mountain Man 1.0. But Carhartt extended their payback terms for new merchandise and another company “that does a bunch of Colorado touristy (mugs and hats) put an order together” for him “and they won’t let me pay for it,” he said.
For the first week after the fire, he’d walk around town and people would go up and hug him. One who did put a $100 bill in his hand, something he says has “happened a dozen different times now.” Someone else popped in on Monday, bought a mug and two hats, and gave him $300.
And a consistent stream of people have been dropping by with gently-used gear to fill his new secondhand corner.
“I’m not really a big person for charity, and I know the insurance will kick in eventually,” he said. “But I can use the help I’m getting right now,” he added, and all’s well that ends well, anyway.
Because over the 12 years he was open, he always gave locals a 10% discount, and some years gave away almost as much money as he made, he said. “But I do it because I love what I do, and I only need a certain amount. The rest of it is, just, whatever. And now that they’re all giving back to me, I’m like, this is the money I gave you last year.”
Camarata and Valen ended up in a quiet location by a burbling creek not far from Calvary Chapel and the Nederland fire station. Their challenges increased immediately, because, well, they’re a chiropractor and a doctor.
The place they moved into was “one big room,” Valen said. Now it’s several rooms. That took serious construction and they had to install a hydraulic lift because Valen’s office is on the second floor. Their equipment was another matter — they lost several exam and chiropractic adjustment tables, not to mention Camarata’s X-ray machine, printers, scales and gurneys. Valen lost machines for helping people with things like lymphatic drainage and scar tissue breakup, but they’ve replaced nearly everything through a combination of hard work, sleuthing, deal making and the generosity of others.
Someone gave Valen a table worth $6,000 for $1,800 and someone else let her put a $1,000 deposit on a laser that costs $16,500, for instance.
Camarata’s insurance company gave him a $20,000 advance that’s gone straight to construction and he has a new examination chair that’s foot-operated.
But what Valen might miss the most are her pens and clipboards, she said.
“Since the fire, I wake up in the middle of the night needing to make lists,” so she ordered new ones from Sam’s Club.
Camarata is tired, but grateful. For Mark Longfellow, who jumped in on the construction. For Calvary Chapel, who let them redesign their rental space’s interior. And for Clinica, the other medical center in town, “because they’re my competitor but they’ve been very gracious. They saw some of my patients. They let me use their clinic.”
He and Valen are working as quickly as possible to reopen.
Into The Vault
On Halloween, if the fire hadn’t started, Armitage and his wife, Barbara Hardt, the editor of Nederland’s Mountain-Ear Newspaper, would have been moving Brightwood Music across Colorado 119 from Caribou Village into the old Citywide Bank building. Now called The Vault, local developer Christian Vanek has been remodeling it into a new space, “intentionally to increase the sales tax of the town of Nederland, increasing the ability of the town to be sustainable,” Hardt said.
She and Armitage spent 16 years building Brightwood into a hub of creativity and connection for all ages and abilities of musicians. They lost $7,000 in instrument strings alone in flames that reached 20 feet skyward.
“They’re probably all lying coiled on the floor right now, but they’re covered in so many chemicals and so burned they have to be unusable,” Armitage said.
The two don’t know for sure how much they lost in instruments and Armitage doesn’t want to estimate. The expert luthier just knows that when they do reopen, he’s going to prioritize fixing instruments over selling them.
When the local schools are in session, Hardt says they’ll “be taking stuff in and we will work on it and fix it. Then we will rent it out again after storing it for the season. Rentals normally start in August and then there are a few in January when the new semester begins.”
And not to be rude, but without any storage space, Armitage says he doesn’t want your donated instruments. Or as Hardt puts it, “we appreciate the outpouring of love and support we have received from the community, but wait until we get a little more on our feet before bringing things in to us.”
One of the hardest things for them to accept is that the original space for Brightwood was about 220 square feet, then they added about 500 square feet and now they’re going back to about 200 square feet.
But a good thing is that they’ll be neighbors again with another business that burned and is also moving into The Vault, Very Nice Brewing Company, owned by Jeff and Susan Green, who many people say created another anchor for the community.
They opened in 2012, converting what was an old gym into their English-style pub and brewery. They’d partner with other businesses in the village — offering a dollar off on a beer to anyone who bought something at Mountain Man, letting people bring in their slices from Backcountry Pizza and doing fundraisers for the Carousel of Happiness, for instance.
“We were up to, I think, almost $30,000 in charitable giving,” Jeff Green said. They’d become so integral to the community, “nobody left us in the dark about anything,” he added. In June 2024, they opened a second location in Gilpin County.
But all kinds of musicians played in the lower-level business in Nederland that opened onto the parking lot of Caribou Village. They always seemed to include Armitage or some other maestro with ties to Brightwood Music.
“Doug was part of it all, playing in numerous bands and impromptu sessions with people like Eric Stone and Tom Hall and too many probably to count,” Green said. “I think maybe we were a little bit of a proving ground. Once you would go over things in Doug’s music store, you’d come over and try them out on us.”
“And Very Nice was a proving ground for us,” Armitage added. “And I never once said, ‘This beer sucks.’”
The plan now is for Very Nice to take the upper floor of The Vault and for Hardt and Armitage to rent a space on the bottom floor. They’ll be joined by a food truck-turned-sit-down restaurant, The Kitchen, and three other nonfire-affected businesses: 8z Real Estate, 8236 Gear and Inkhaus Tattoo.
Green isn’t sure how it will work, but he hopes the town of Nederland will license the building such that people will be able to take Very Nice beers downstairs to The Kitchen, an inverse of how it went at Caribou Village.
And he hopes the town sees the fire and its aftermath as an opportunity to grow small businesses in Nederland.
“The town lost half of the businesses, which means they’re losing a lot of sales tax,” he said. “They’re already struggling with paying bills, so I hope they pay attention to the money coming in before the fire and after the fire.
“It’s wonderful to have pie-in-the-sky projects such as a bigger teen center and day care and things like that. But building those things is nothing compared to their long-term maintenance and upkeep. That’s where small business comes in. If the town is collecting around 5 cents for every dollar of a 10% sales tax, get those small businesses open. Get people spending money here, and make it easy to streamline opening those businesses.”