PUEBLO — By the time Daisy Weeks drove away from her 82-year-old father’s home in Beulah, the flames from the Aspen Acres fire were only 3 miles away.
Weeks, who is awaiting a double lung transplant, loaded her car with scrapbooks, medicine and clothing, but was forced to leave her father and his cat behind as he tried to ride out the fire.
“I had a big space for Dad and his cat, and his bag, and he wouldn’t go,” Weeks said. “He was belligerent. He wouldn’t go.”
Her sister, her aunt, and a sheriff’s deputy all pleaded with him to get in the car, but he refused.
So, Weeks made a decision as 100-mph wind gusts fueled flames and pushed embers across dry timber and parched fuels.
“I had to leave,” Weeks said through tears outside an emergency evacuation shelter in Pueblo the next day. “It was the strangest thing I’ve ever done — is leave my father while I went to safety and he stayed there.”
She drove north to Colorado Springs with her dog to stay with friends, spending hours not knowing whether her father was dead or alive.
Around midnight, she got a call from a deputy: “I have your dad.”
“I thought he was gone,” Weeks, 55, said.
The two reunited outside the Red Cross emergency shelter Tuesday afternoon, hours after a deputy sheriff found Weeks’ father, Bill Peyton, walking down a dark road carrying his cat, Puddy, in a cage, and his go bag. He had walked about a quarter mile before climbing into the cruiser, Peyton said, before the deputy raced through roadblocks toward safety.
Not long after, the flames devoured Weeks’ and Peyton’s homes.
“I was mad,” Weeks said. “I said, this is literally the hill you’re gonna die on? This one, our hill? This is your last stand.”
Their story underscores the challenges officials face when persuading residents to leave the homes and communities they love, and the importance of heeding evacuation orders.
Officials say at least 180 structures in Pueblo and Custer counties have been lost in the Aspen Acres fire, now the largest wildfire burning across Colorado. That number is expected to rise as the fire grows and teams can safely enter neighborhoods to conduct assessments.
Had Peyton or Weeks stayed in their homes, both would have died.
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“Everything’s a total loss. But I’m glad you got Puddy,” Weeks said to her dad.
Peyton was one of the last people to leave Upper Pine Drive in Beulah after the Aspen Acres fire raced toward homes and county officials ordered evacuations. He stood with a hose as he saw flames over 100 feet high devour ancient ponderosa pines, in a last-ditch effort to save his home and neighbors’, he said.
He remembered hearing explosions from about a dozen propane tanks in the distance and the wind created by the fire as it climbed a ponderosa pine.
“There is a frightening, astounding roar,” Peyton said.
“We had to leave. The whole neighborhood was on fire,” Peyton said Tuesday, his voice hoarse from the smoke.
For six years, Puddy, whom Peyton adopted from the Humane Society, freely wandered in and out of the house and through the woods. When she came in and stood by her cage wanting to get in, Peyton knew something was wrong.
Weeks, who is recently retired, moved to Beulah last August to rest and recover.
“I fell in love with it when I got sick and knew this is a place for me to go to find wellness. I fell in love with the people,” she said.
“I wanted to make my home, my new place, and my friends, and my family, and my whole culture (in) Beulah and I don’t know if that’s going to happen. All we have is a spot of burnt land.”
Both homes were insured, but they lost family heirlooms.
“We have nothing, this is it,” Peyton said, referring to his daughter and their pets.
“Both that dog and this cat are still alive, along with my daughter and me.”