Where homes overlooking the Wet Mountains once stood in the tiny town of Beulah, an ashen cemetery now stretches across neighborhoods. Piles of mangled metal, charred furniture and burned out cars are strewn in the same places residents planted deep roots, some for decades.
The Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office has tallied at least 254 homes the Aspen Acres fire demolished in Pueblo County, most located in the Beulah area.
Gone is so much of the community — but not the people who tether it together.
“Everybody waves,” longtime Beulah resident Kathryn Luzardo told The Colorado Sun in a phone interview. “They know when you’re sick. They know if someone’s not good for the community. I think we all band together and, dislikes or likes, we all make up a beautiful valley that’s just so welcoming and together. We’ve experienced flood, drought, plague, everything. Fire. And Beulah’s a beautiful place to be.”
The Sun interviewed survivors of the Aspen Acres fire about how they are making their first steps forward into a future filled with questions they hoped they would never face.
Left with two suitcases, earrings, perfume, documents and a cat named Steve
Luzardo never had the chance to pack up any of the hand-crafted quilts or scraps of fabric she was saving in the lime-green, she-shed-turned sewing studio next to the Beulah house she called home for more than 30 years.
Nor did her husband get even a few minutes to grab some of the tools he’d used to build the front porch where the couple would take refuge many evenings. There, while catching up on each of their days, they’d watch turkey vultures roost, catch sight of bats emerging for the night and listen to nearby eagles.
Luzardo and her husband, Guy Schepmoes, learned June 29 the Aspen Acres fire was bearing down on their beloved Beulah while about to fly home from Seattle after an Alaskan cruise. One of their neighbors called Luzardo to deliver the gutting news and assure them she would rescue their Maine Coon mix, Steve, before flames leveled their neighborhood, forcing everyone to evacuate.
“It burned it flat,” Luzardo, 68, said. “I don’t think you could even go up there with a fork and get out any pieces of anything that is left.”
A file cabinet storing hundreds of patterns for Luzardo’s sewing and quilting projects is just about the only possession that survived the blaze and is still standing, depicted in photos the pair received from an insurance adjuster.
Everything else has been reduced to particles of ash and rubble: family photos, travel souvenirs, prized ribbons from successful cooking competitions at the Colorado State Fair, purses, a fabric collection Luzardo estimates adds up to $20,000, threads, a collection of handmade quilts, the refrigerator holding lamp chops for a special occasion. More critically, Luzardo lost her diabetes supplies as well as a giant oxygen tank and two oxygen concentrators to help her with her asthma and respiratory failure.
The few things they had left included a pair of earrings and perfume Luzardo bought on their trip, two suitcases of warm clothes and a few personal documents.
In the days since the fire engulfed their home, Luzardo and Schepmoes, 66, have found their way through the lingering smog and smoke, trying to make sense of the sudden erasure of everything they’ve known. They’ve started navigating the insurance process, making progress after their insurance company mistakenly told them they didn’t have an active policy and, within a day, called back to let them know they had located their policy.
Luzardo was able to pick up medication right away and, after two days, was able to secure an oxygen concentrator from her healthcare provider.
They have also bought tools, a sewing machine and an Instant Pot from Walmart, a few basics to give them a swing of momentum while they stay in an extended-stay hotel in Pueblo before hopefully moving into a rental home in Beulah, though they don’t know when.
Waves of support have flowed from family and strangers. A woman behind them in the checkout line at Walmart handed them $40. Another woman and her son gave them a Subway gift card while they shopped for bins in a dollar store. Family members have shipped them essentials to replace some of what the fire stole.
“There’s something about telling relatives your underwear size and, all of a sudden, a box shows up from a company you like and in your size,” Luzardo said.
Humor has helped them cope just as much. Luzardo jokes that they will get a yurt and, after they rebuild their home, they will convert it into the “Beulah Land Gardens” with white fluffy towels and pink salt lamps, charging a spa fee and becoming “one with the ash.”
First, they must return once the winds and hot spots die down and it’s safe. Luzardo said she feels torn between a rush to get back and a hesitation to take in the devastating aftermath.
As a retired psychiatric nurse, she is practicing “radical acceptance” with a deep understanding that neither her circumstances nor her surroundings are in her control.
She is also finding reasons for hope that her little patch of “nirvana” will soon show hints of new life. After a previous fire scorched land close to Beulah, Luzardo remembers watching the landscape heal itself over time, color rushing back in with new plants, leaves and animals.
If the rain comes, she said, “the smoke goes away, the ashes go away, the tree trunks stay and then the wildlife comes.”
She wonders what flowers and plants might sprout once again — peonies, rhubarb, wild violets, columbines, a 30-year-old strawberry plants and a lilac tree even older.
For now, Luzardo and her husband still sit together every evening like they did so many nights before the fire. A bench right outside their hotel has become their new spot to dissect their days.
She has tried to stay positive, even as a thick, stubborn layer of smoke wears on her chest.
“Breathe out the bad,” Luzardo said. “Let the wind take the bad stuff away.”
“The fire was coming on so fast. Nothing we could do about it.”
Thomas Sexton refused to leave his land in Beulah long past the first evacuation order, holding tight to the hope that the Aspen Acres fire would spare his home — until the wind changed directions after a few days and fast-moving flames suddenly left him defenseless.
Sexton, 72, has lived in Beulah for about half his life, spending the past 22 years on property that has been a home and retreat space in one. He has long welcomed patients struggling through hard times, supplying medical oils and plants and helping care for them. Sexton started with a camper and, with the help of friends and visitors over the years, built his house and a barn and added a few shipping containers for storage.
A former volunteer firefighter, Sexton said he had planned on fighting the fire should it have crept toward his land.
“But when the winds were 30 miles an hour, before we knew it, hell, it was knocking on our door,” Sexton told The Sun in a phone interview. “We stayed as long as we could and then we realized our safety was at stake so we vacated just in time. The fire was coming on so fast. Nothing we could do about it.”
At his side was Mitch Simpkins, who moved to Colorado little more than a month ago to begin transforming Sexton’s 120 acres into a wellness center to help military veterans struggling with anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health battles.
After the fire started, Simpkins, 39, began training his eyes on a small ridge in the distance and making calculations. He figured that if he could still see that ridge, then the smoke and fire weren’t racing toward them.
Then came what Simpkins calls “D-Day” on Thursday evening, July 2, when the smoke intensified, clouding the view of the ridge.
“And I see nothing but a big cloud of black smoke,” Simpkins said as he gazed out a window, realizing the winds had turned and sent the fire barreling in their direction.
He scurried out to the barn and raced upstairs where he immediately spotted flames. Simpkins said he soon decided for the both of them that they could no longer stand their ground and had to make their escape.
It was a harrowing dash to safety.
Simpkins swerved their van to the house while Sexton packed up his pets, including six West Highland white terrier puppies a few weeks old.
“All you can smell is smoke and it’s hard to breathe and it’s getting hot and you’re just sweating,” Simpkins said.
By that point, the fire had already scorched part of the property and was moving toward the backyard. When they finished loading the van, Simpkins estimates the flames were 100 or 200 feet away.
He slammed on the gas, zooming at least 40 mph down the gravel driveway with Sexton urging him to be cautious. Once they made it to the front gate and had distanced themselves from the inferno, Sexton hopped out to scan his property as it burned, standing in flip-flops while holding onto the van door.
They found a place to exhale in an open field with little fuel to entice the fire. Earlier that week, they had relocated some of their belongings to the same field — vehicles, four-wheelers, lawn mowers and pressure washers.
Worried about the dogs, Simpkins knew he had to usher them farther from the fire and pleaded with Sexton to leave, too. But Sexton insisted on staying, knowing once he stepped outside the evacuation zone he wouldn’t be able to immediately step back in. He slept in a vehicle in the field that night, heading back toward his house the next morning to find nearly everything destroyed. He took one last picture on his phone before it died and turned to finally exit the evacuation zone.
For now, Sexton is staying with friends in Pueblo. Simpkins has also temporarily landed in Pueblo at the house of another of Sexton’s’ friends.
Their paths will likely continue diverging. While Simpkins plans to move back to the land as soon as he can to begin cleaning up the wreckage, Sexton said he is ready to take time away and travel to spots across the country with “healing spaces.” An ordained minister, he’ll rely on his deep connection to his spirituality as a compass to point him on his way.
The destruction of his property and the loss of so many possessions has not shattered his sense of stability. They’re just things, Sexton said.
“I’ll always be at peace,” he said. “That’s just a given because I love life and I’m still breathing in and out. And as long as I’m alive, I’ll always be grateful for life. I love life. And at the same time, I’m ready to go any time, but as long as I’m breathing in and out, I’m here to serve and contribute and do what I can do to move the collective forward.”