Deckers – Charlotte Ferguson has lived alone in the rugged canyon near this riverside village for the past 12 years. She is 68. She and her yellow house on a hill survived the nightmarish Hayman wildfire that torched 138,000 acres and some four million trees as it hop-scotched around her property a few years back. Last month she and the house escaped a roaring flood that snapped off 50-foot pines and telephone poles just outside her front door. All that’s left, she figures, is famine. And perhaps locusts.
And know this about the five-foot-three, 110-pound Ferguson: She owns a .38-caliber revolver and a chain saw, and she knows how to use both of them.
“Had a bear on the porch a while back,” she said. “Fired a shot over his head to scare him off.”
And then she looked past the porch, out over the piles of dirt and rock and ravaged trees left by the July 7 flood, at the place where her garage stood before the monstrous wall of water and mud swept down the creek and carried it away, and her eyes filled with tears.
“Living up here, you learn to do for yourself,” she said, her voice just a whisper. “But this time I need some help.”
The heavy clouds moved slowly over the jagged peaks on Friday, July 7. By 6 p.m. the sky was scary dark. The rain came hard. Four miles to the north a small reservoir overflowed. The water surged down the creek. Three inches of rain fell in one hour. The ground, laid bare by the great fire of 2002 and just starting to recover, couldn’t absorb any more.
Ferguson was afraid. When she saw a light on the road below she poked her head outside. A Douglas County Sheriff’s deputy, his car parked on Colorado 67 on the other side of the creek, was shouting into a bullhorn. “Get to higher ground,” he hollered.
And then Ferguson saw it coming.
“It was a wall of water coming from behind the deputy and his car,” she said. “It was throwing trees and telephone poles into the air.”
The deputy stomped on the gas pedal and escaped. Ferguson grabbed her pistol – bears and mountain lions are frequent companions in the canyon – ran outside and climbed hard on her hands and knees until she reached the top of a steep hill. And there, as the rain slashed and nighttime swallowed up the land, she huddled under a tree.
The small creek was now 25 feet deep, 50 yards wide and moving at an astonishing speed. It tore away the dirt beneath her garage and, as Ferguson watched, smashed the building into splinters. At 2 a.m., a swift-water rescue team from the town of Parker arrived. The water had subsided enough for them to stretch a rope from the highway onto Ferguson’s land. They found her, soaked and shivering and alone on the hill.
“I didn’t think anyone was coming for me,” she said.
Today, the front of her 6-acre property is gone. The creek tore away the trees and bushes and boulders to within six feet of the house. It also carried away two treasured wagon wheels that had adorned her driveway. Days later a road worker found one miles downstream and brought it back.
And the road is being rebuilt. Cars are led through the construction maze by a pilot car. Officials say work should be done by late October.
Ferguson had owned the Deckers General Store for 25 years, selling food and drink and ice and bait seven days a week. Earlier this year she sold the store, which was left untouched by the flood. She turns over the keys this Friday.
“I thought 25 years at the store was enough,” she said. “I thought I might move to New Mexico.”
And so she was trying to sell the yellow house on the hill, too. Without a garage. Her insurance company paid her $6,500 for the loss of that building, roughly the value of the tools she had inside of it. Someone put down earnest money on the property early in the summer. But since the flood she hasn’t heard from the potential buyers. And, for the first time since she bought the store and made the canyon her home, she asked for help.
Douglas County road workers took thousands of tons of dirt from a hillside – the same hillside she climbed on the night when the skies unleashed the thumping rain – and tried to rebuild the creek bank alongside her house. They re-formed her dirt bridge from the road and put in four gigantic steel tubes to allow the creek to pass through.
Ferguson’s house now sits 12 feet from a steep drop into the still-muddy creek. Her driveway slopes dangerously. She’s afraid that in the winter, when the snow and ice come, her car will slide down the embankment.
Denny Gibson of the county public works department told Ferguson on Thursday he’d get more boulders and pile them along the bank between her home and the creek. Might even put down a layer of gravel on the long driveway.
But the land that she loved so much, the trees and the shrubs and the flowers she’d fussed over for the past decade, was forever changed on that dreadful night when the creek roared.
Thursday afternoon, dark clouds gathered again over the mountains and it began to rain. Ferguson stood on her porch and looked to the sky.
“I don’t like this anymore,” she said softly.
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
