The Aspen Acres fire was rampaging north through the Wet Mountains, glowing on the horizon like an unwelcome sunrise, but 82-year-old Bill Peyton had a plan — and what he figured was a fighting chance.

His daughter, Daisy Weeks, rushed around their ridge-top property getting cellphone videos of their homes, their belongings, everything she could for insurance purposes. Smoke thickened in the sky, turning the sun from a golden smudge to a laser pinpoint behind billows of gray. Then, ash began to fall like snow.

Still, Bill wouldn’t budge.

“Is that for the fire?” he asked, as the eye of Daisy’s camera swept over him calmly puttering about, hours after the first evacuation notices went out June 29 for those in the path of a fast-moving wildfire ignited that morning, about 20 miles to the southwest of their neighborhood near Beulah.

In another video taken later that day, Daisy recorded what she thought might be the final interaction with the man who’d raised her, who’d saved her life when she was 16, performing CPR and reviving her after she stopped breathing during a severe asthma attack.

“Last chance,” Daisy said. 

Her father remained resolute: Nope.

At that time, the Aspen Acres fire was “about 3 miles away,” Daisy said. 

She didn’t want to leave her dad — it “tore out my heart” — but she relies on oxygen and is awaiting a double lung transplant. Flames aren’t the only threat when one is already struggling to breathe.

“I talked to my aunt and my sister. They said, ‘You’re sick. You’ve got to go,’” she said.

Daisy drove away in tears, with her dog, Mocha, what precious belongings she could fit into her car — and an empty spot where her dad, his go-bag and beloved cat, Puddy, were meant to ride with her to safety.

“I really thought, this is the last time I’m ever going to see him,” Daisy said.

Bill, though, was confident in his last-minute fire mitigation strategy.

“A 100-foot hose, lots of water and I thought I could put out the fire. It’s as simple as that,” he said. 

He’d lost a home to fire decades before while living near Creede and wasn’t about to give up this time without doing everything possible to stand his ground.

“I thought I’d stay there and understand the fire and put it out, let it burn in certain places and put it out in others,” Bill said. 

He now acknowledges it was a calculus of hope, and hubris, that nearly proved fatal. 

Fire burns houses, but wildfires are not house fires.

“It became more and more obvious that it was a raging inferno,” Bill said. “Plus, there was a lot of wind coming from illogical directions. Plus, the fire itself created wind. It was quite … amazing.”

After his daughter drove away down the long dirt lane, Bill set about the strategy he hoped would save their home — his house, Daisy’s live-in fifth-wheel next door, the chickens and coop, tool shed and cliff house Daisy recently had constructed partway down a steep ravine at the north edge of the land, where it spills down to a bramble-choked gully running alongside Pueblo Mountain Park Road.

“It was adrenaline and concentrating, trying to do the right thing logically because I knew it was very dangerous,” said Bill, later recalling how balls of flame gobbled up ponderosa pines in single, sizzling whooshes all around him.

“There was a stack of freshly cut firewood that just combusted,” he said. “I watched it happen. I had no idea.”

The escape

Still, he had his weapons — a hose, water and a plan. 

“It was frightening, but I thought I could really put out the fire,” he said.

Then the water stopped flowing.

“This area has a gravity-fed water system. Theoretically, it doesn’t need electricity, but then halfway through the water dribbled out,” he said. “I’m standing there, fire all around, with a 100-foot hose and no water. 

“How would that make you feel?”

Helpless, but not yet hopeless.

Daisy remembers her father later describing how, at one point, he could see the flames advancing toward him through the windows, and the neighbor’s home begin to burn.

When the heat became too much, and one of Daisy’s oxygen tanks exploded, Bill said he could feel the impact in his chest.

Time to go. 

He had a bag prepared and Puddy in a cat carrier, but no car and no cell phone. By that point, though, exiting by driveway wasn’t an option. The fire had turned the trees flanking League Trail into towering torches. The sheriff’s car parked down the lane earlier — authorities were making door-knocking rounds to alert those who may not have gotten, or may have ignored, the evacuation notices — was gone. 

Bill Peyton was not the only resident who dismissed original evacuation notifications.

The owner of the Beulah General Store told The Gazette she estimated 10% of the community stayed through the evacuations — which were mandatory, but led to no arrests for those who chose to defy them and try their luck.

“The driveway is extremely steep, and there were 120-year-old ponderosa pines burning furiously on both sides,” Bill said.

The rescue

The back route wasn’t any less steep, but slightly less ablaze.

After giving up on saving the property — which was “really hard” — Bill said he set about his escape down “the cliff.” That “beautiful” run of vertiginous stairs Daisy had constructed to provide a path down was ablaze, as was the structure they led to, which Daisy had built.

“So, I took my chances going down a grass-covered cliff,” Bill said.

When he says “grass-covered cliff,” what he means is a ravine face as steep as a ski jump, riddled by flames and pocked by rocks and sandy soil that alternately try to trip you or collapse under your feet like quicksand.

“But I made it, carrying my bag in one hand and Puddy in the other,” Bill said. 

Gulping clean breaths of air in the moments the fire direction shifted, which it did often, Bill said he then paused to take in the gauntlet he’d just miraculously traversed. 

In that moment, awe surpassed gratitude.

“Maybe 35 feet above, there’s this roaring, beautiful, frightening burn along the top of the cliff threatening to come down,” he said. “Big fire, big roaring fire, eating everything in its path.”

He’d forgotten to grab his flashlight before fleeing the house, but as it turned out he didn’t need it. 

“Ask me how I saw, at midnight?” Bill said. “It was so bright it was like daylight because of the fire.”

After reaching the base of the cliff, Bill scrambled through gnarled and occasionally smoldering brush to make it to the road. 

That’s where he was when a Pueblo County Sheriff’s Department officer found him and picked him up in short order.

“He said, ‘Are you ready to leave now?’” Bill said.

“I said, ‘Yes.’”

Forging ahead

The Aspen Acres fire continues to burn, surpassing 100,000 acres this week. It currently stands as Colorado’s seventh-largest wildfire in history. No human casualties have been reported, but as of Tuesday, more than 850 structures had burned, 337 of them residences.

Bill Peyton’s and Daisy Weeks’ homes were among those losses. 

The mourning came in waves, said Daisy. She’d remember a new thing lost, it seems, each morning after she woke and would have to mourn its passing.

“Memories would rush back,” Daisy said. “Each time, it was like a different thing or that I’d lost and remembered and I had to grieve.”

But those things … are just things. 

“I’ve got my dad, and that is all that matters,” she said.

On Friday, July 17, father and daughter returned to their burn-scarred property at the end of League Trail for the first time since the fire. 

Everything they left behind had been melted or reduced to ash; not even the footprint of floor plans remained. 

Segments of the 100-foot hose Bill imagined would save them slithered across the drive like flash-burned snakes.

Daisy thought she’d cried herself out. She was wrong.

“I’m going to do it again,” she said, tearing up as she crouched in the ashes to uncover a ceramic artifact created by her daughter and miraculously still intact. 

Bill had said he wanted to rebuild, but — now —  he’s open to negotiation.

As of Tuesday, Daisy said she and her dad are working with a real estate agent, searching for a new place to live, together, in the valley that is so dear to their hearts. 

But not here, not in this place.

That would be too much.

“Wherever we go and whatever happens in the future, it’s a ‘we,’ not an ‘I,’” Daisy said. “We’re a team.”