This historic home nearly burned in the wildfires. A unique firefighting strategy saved it
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LOVELAND, Colo. —Jerry Godbey's house is a part of Colorado history.
It was built in 1922 as part of a destination resort for outdoorsy types, offering horseback riding and easy access to the surrounding mountain wilderness. There were guest cabins, a restaurant, and even a dance hall. They called it Nugget Springs, for the nearby waterway, which, lore has it, once produced a gold nugget so large that the miner who found it vanished forever soon after.
But by the time Godbey bought the place in 2013, Nugget Springs was in sorry shape.
“I was about the sixth or seventh person to look at it, and the others had turned it down because it was in such a bad condition,” Godbey said. “But it was so charming that I just couldn't resist trying to save this property.”
And save the property he did, devoting the next 11 years to restoring the main house with period style and modern standards.
“I put a lot of work into it and a lot of money,” he said. “This is my entire retirement investment.”
Two weeks ago, the whole place nearly burned to the ground.
A wildfire tears through
The Alexander Mountain Fire sparked on July 29 and spread rapidly in the mountain communities west of Loveland, where Godbey lives.
“We can see Alexander Mountain from here,” he said. “I was looking out the window, and we could see the flames.”
Godbey and his partner, Donna Williams, started packing even before the alert came to evacuate.
“It was obvious it was coming,” Godbey said. “I knew that if the Alexander Mountain Fire was working its way down, that it was going to be here within minutes anyway, so it was time to go.”
They moved their guns, a week’s worth of clothes, and their essential documents into their motor home and left the canyon. Williams didn’t even have time to grab her toothbrush.
Over the next several days, the Alexander Mountain Fire burned more than 9,500 acres before firefighters brought it under control. Thousands of people were evacuated from their homes. During that time, Godbey and Williams waited at an evacuation center in Loveland, tracking the fire’s movements via an app. They watched anxiously on their phones as the fire blazed through a ravine just west of the house. A full week passed before they could return home to see if Nugget Springs was still standing.
“We were constantly worried about it,” Godbey said.
When the evacuation orders were finally lifted, they drove back up the canyon to find nearly all of their 52 acres scorched to the ground. But not everything burned: the house and the handful of outbuildings on the property were pristine. The firefighters had done their job.
“When we arrived, we were relieved and in awe of how much devastation there was to the mountain,” Godbey said. “But yet, they managed to stop the fire so close to the house.”
An intensive firefighting strategy
A neighbor had stayed behind despite evacuation orders and told Godbey and Williams that two fire engines with a crew of eight were stationed at their house the whole time, making sure it didn’t burn.
“It is incredible for me that they would commit that much of a resource to protecting this particular house,” Godbey said.
KUNC was not able to independently confirm the neighbor’s account of a dedicated fire crew stationed at Godbey’s property. But firefighters did use that intensive strategy throughout the week, as multiple wildfires burned across Northern Colorado.
“With structural protection, essentially we’re assigning a unit to a house or a grouping of houses,” said Rob Stumpf, chief of the Fire Protection District in Lyons, where crews adopted that approach during a second fire — the Stone Canyon Fire — that was burning simultaneously.
“These guys are doing things like turning on lawn sprinklers and garden hoses,” he said. “You’re trying to remove any and all potential fuel sources in hopes that we can coax the fire to go around the house instead of straight into the house.”
But that kind of intensive structure protection doesn’t work in every case, according to Andy Lyon, a spokesman for the Southwest Incident Management Team, which oversaw the Alexander Mountain Fire response.
“The big thing is: do you have the engines to make that commitment?” Lyon said. “And more important than that is: do the firefighters consider the home defensible? If they don't think they can defend it safely, they're not going to stay.”
Lyon explained that firefighters consider a home defensible if they have a reasonable chance of saving it. Usually, that means there’s a buffer between the house and any dense, dry foliage that could fuel a fire and access to water.
Nugget Springs, sitting along the Big Thompson River, had both of those qualities in its favor. Many homes did not. Twenty-seven houses were destroyed by the fire.
The Aftermath
Surveying the aftermath at the property, the air still carries notes of campfire, and the ground is blackened to within 10 feet of the home.
“Look how close it is to the house here,” Williams said, pointing to charred debris mere steps from the front porch. “It burned one of our little shrubs out here, right in front of the house.”
Godbey noticed a row of hacked off stumps on the west side of the house — that’s where firefighters cleared away vegetation to make a fire break. The proximity of the fire scar tells a story of just how close the house had come to being engulfed in flames and how much effort the firefighters put in to save it.
Godbey is particularly relieved the home was saved because, at 74, he’s ready to cash out his retirement investment. He put Nugget Springs on the market earlier this summer, and the couple plans to move to a warmer climate as soon as it sells. Thanks to the firefighters' extraordinary efforts, they’ll be able to realize that dream.
Meanwhile, a piece of Colorado history will live on.
“I would like to individually thank each one of the firemen,” Godbey said. “They just did a fantastic job risking their lives and their wellbeing. To save our property. I can’t say how grateful I am.”