By Savannah Eller and Mary Shinn

The Gazette

Nearly two weeks after the Aspen Acres fire exploded onto the landscape, residents are beginning to reckon with the destruction, even as the fire burns on.

On Saturday, the fire had charred 97,505 acres and destroyed about 850 structures, including at least 254 homes in Pueblo County and 83 homes in Custer County. 

The fire is the seventh-largest in state history and far more expansive than Colorado Springs’ largest fires, Waldo Canyon and Black Forest. Waldo Canyon burned 18,247 acres and Black Forest consumed 14,000 acres.

But firefighters have made substantial progress in recent days, with containment jumping up to 34% Saturday from 28% on Friday.

Beulah was hit especially hard, during the first day of the fire, which broke out June 29 and quickly grew into a rampaging inferno.

The current map of the fire has a hole – an eye of the storm, if you will – where the tiny town of Beulah is located. 

In the fire’s first few days, the community was completely engulfed in a smoke column that reached high into the atmosphere.

Even so, nearly two weeks later, the valley floor and many of the town’s key buildings remain intact. A blue haze of smoke hangs in higher elevations in all directions. The town is still surrounded, but no longer besieged. 

The Alaska Complex Incident Management Team 1 announced Saturday many Beulah residents may begin to return home in a phased reentry process, unless conditions change.

For some, it may be a chance to assess the damage.  

The fire took plenty of houses – a fifth of the town, by the estimation of Beulah Fire Protection and Ambulance District Chief Bryan Ware. 

In one area of Pine Drive southwest of the valley late last week, everything, from the bare earth to the tops of the skeletal trees, was the same brittle black in a dusting of white ash. 

In other places, the fire was capricious. Metal slag has cooled in rivulets from two burned out cars which melted as the house beside them was demolished in the blaze. On the same street, other houses seem completely untouched. 

They likely aren’t. 

Beulah as a whole will be facing infrastructure fallout from the Aspen Acres fire for years. Ware said an immediate concern is the restoration of potable water, since the town’s water systems have been damaged and contaminated. Residents will now also have to live with the threat of flash flooding. 

“These [problems] are going to be ongoing for years,” he said.

Justin Burk said he watched the fire with binoculars from the edge of the Mountain Shadows Mobile Estates on June 29, as flames roared over Signal Mountain to the west. The mobile home community is along Colorado 78 outside Beulah, which is still officially evacuated.

He evacuated the same day, and only learned that his mobile home had survived more than a week later. 

The fire scar now stops about two football fields away, and curves around the community on both sides. 

“We got pretty lucky, that’s for sure,” he said. 

Burk was one of the first to return. He managed a couple days on bottled water before his tap was turned back on. 

“I feel like I can breathe now,” he said. 

A number of Aspen Acres evacuees found out their homes were gone – or, miraculously, survived – through screens.

Imelda Struwe saw the remnants of her 1924 cabin in a video shared online that showed the home’s distinctive rock chimney.  

“I just cried and cried, it’s devastating,” she said. 

The historic home was near the Horseshoe Lodge that hosted classes and gatherings, often for those visiting the surrounding Pueblo Mountain Park. The lodge also burned in the fire.  

Struwe purchased the cabin as a getaway from her home in Thornton, and her husband lives there almost full time. 

She said she was captivated by the rustic style, including the built-in dining table and support beams left to look like tree trunks.

Struwe filled it with gifts from her children and mom, who lives in the Philippines and decorated a whole room with memorabilia from her favorite band, Green Day, to help make it her happy place.

Likewise, her husband filled the home with collections from his parents and grandparents, she said. 

The items were gifts and mementos that can’t be replaced, she said. 

Her husband had planned to go to the cabin the Monday the fire broke out and sent a neighbor a text message before leaving. The neighbor told her husband the whole area was evacuating.

They have not yet been to see the home or decided what to do, Struwe said.

“It’s too much to think about,” she said

Joseph Armeanio was in Monument on June 29, part of a long-term tag-team arrangement with his siblings to help care for their father, who’d suffered a stroke, when he learned his remote home in the San Isabel National Forest was in the path of the fast-growing Aspen Acres fire.

Armeanio turned to his tech, which confirmed his worst fears about the fate of the 80-acre property he and his family had spent years sculpting into a “warm and welcoming place surrounded by the beauty of nature.”

“I’ve got video from Ring cameras of just everything going up and the fire moving through, and the cameras going offline,” Armeanio said. “Based on where my property is and how the wind moves up there, you know, I could say with pretty high certainty that everything up there is lost.

“But in a way, that’s somewhat of a relief relative to watching a lot of people from the community with uncertainty.”

For those who lost homes and everything they own the only option now is to try to be grateful there have been no casualties. Try to make peace with what happened, and find a way to whatever’s next.

Armeanio said he hasn’t yet received the official OK to return to his property, but already he’s been researching online, trying to find good plants for hydrophobic soils.

“After a forest fire like that, the top of the topsoil basically hardens kind of like the top of a crème brûlée,” Armeanio said. 

Radishes are a good option. Dandelions, too. 

“I need to fix the land,” he said, “make it beautiful again.”

Gazette’s Stephanie Earls and Nick Smith contributed to this report.