Deckers
Nearly four years have passed since the Hayman fire ravaged the land in this rugged part of Colorado, wiping out nearly everything that grew on a staggering 137,760 acres and turning some 4 million trees into eerie blackened sticks.
Today, left on their own, only the toughest have come back. Mostly, they are things that aren’t native to Colorado. Yellow toad flax. Knapweed. Thistle.
And Charlotte Ferguson.
Ferguson was born in Michigan and found this remote place in 1980 after her parents settled down the road and began raising cattle. They asked her to visit.
“I got lost,” Ferguson said, “and then I started wondering who the hell would live in a place like this.”
The answer, of course, was her.
For 25 years she has owned the Deckers Store, selling everything from night crawlers and groceries to used frying pans and old pants. The fire danced all around the store and her home in those six unimaginable weeks in June and July of 2002. Somehow, both structures survived. And so did Ferguson.
Today, she sits behind the counter of the general store near the banks of the South Platte River and tells a tale of survival.
“For the two years after the fire, everything was just so horrible,” said Ferguson, perhaps a decade short of her planned retirement age of 70. “In 2003 and 2004 I made no money. None. I’d sit in here some days and not a single customer would come in.”
And so she dug in. Literally. To her savings account.
“I took out $10,000 that first year just to pay bills and eat, and $10,000 the second year, too,” she said. “And another $10,000 to build a retaining wall around my house because of the mudslides.”
Even after 45 months, the de vastation is startling. In addition to the nonnative vegetation, some of the hillsides are now covered with native grasses such as wheat grass and mountain brome. Most of it was planted by forestry workers and volunteers.
“And we’re starting to see some really good aspen growth,” said Jonathan Bruno, executive director of the Coalition for the Upper South Platte, a conservation group that has, Bruno said, put in 20,000 volunteer hours in the burn area. “Right after the fire, for months, you didn’t even hear a bird up here. Now the birds have come back.
“But the fire was so hot that it burned all of the seed source for most of the trees. There has been no regrowth of Douglas fir or ponderosa pine. None of that is coming back.”
Visually, Bruno said, the worst is yet to come.
“All of the burned trees … will fall,” he said. “And it will look more and more like the moonscape. Sometimes I think people have forgotten that it’s still pretty desolate out there.”
Ferguson hasn’t forgotten. Not the fire. Not the smoke. And not the person who started it all. On Monday it was announced that former Forest Service employee Terry Barton will be resentenced by a jury on July 18. She pleaded guilty to setting the blaze and had been sentenced to 12 years in prison in a Colorado criminal case.
“She doesn’t deserve a resentencing,” Ferguson said. “She hasn’t paid enough. She says she wants to come up here and help, to work on the land. But you can’t do that because up here, someone would knock her off.”
Despite the still-hot resentment, the loneliness and the dwindling bank account during the worst of days, there was never a moment when Ferguson thought about giving up.
“I just knew I didn’t want to be anywhere else,” she said.
The famed trout stream that runs by her door was blackened by the soot and ash but now runs clean and clear. With its rebirth has come the return of anglers and campers.
On Sunday, according to her cash register receipts, nearly 400 customers walked through her door. And in a few weeks, the nearby YMCA camp, much of which was destroyed by fire but has been rebuilt, will open for the season and bring even more customers.
Ferguson smiles.
“I always knew,” she said, “that this place would come back.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
