82-Year-Old Bill Peyton Rides Out Aspen Acres Fire in Beulah

The wind gusts hit 100 miles per hour, turning the dry timber of Beulah into kindling. Daisy Weeks watched the flames from her driveway, the heat already pressing against her skin, but her father, Bill Peyton, stood his ground. He was 82 years old, stubborn, and refusing to get in the car.

“I had a big space for Dad and his cat, and his bag, and he wouldn’t go,” Weeks said. “He was belligerent. He wouldn’t go.”

It wasn’t just her. Her sister, her aunt, and a sheriff’s deputy all pleaded with him to leave. They pulled up to the house, windows rolled down, voices raised over the roar of the approaching fire. But Bill Peyton held his hill. He stayed behind to ride out the Aspen Acres fire, leaving Weeks to make the hardest decision of her life.

Weeks, 55 and awaiting a double lung transplant, loaded her car with scrapbooks, medicine, and clothing. She left her dog, Mocha, with friends in Colorado Springs, but she couldn’t take her father. She drove north, leaving him to the inferno, spending hours in the dark wondering if he was dead or alive.

Around midnight, her phone rang. It was a deputy. “I have your dad.”

“I thought he was gone,” Weeks said, still shaking from the adrenaline of the day.

The reunion happened Tuesday morning at a Red Cross shelter in Pueblo, but the story of how Bill got there is stranger than fiction. A deputy sheriff found him walking down a dark road, carrying his cat, Puddy, in a cage, and his go bag. He had walked about a quarter mile before climbing into the cruiser. The deputy raced him through roadblocks toward safety just as the flames devoured their home.

Not exactly a dignified exit for an 82-year-old man, but effective.

This is the challenge officials face when persuading residents to leave the homes and communities they love. It’s easy to issue an evacuation order from a command center. It’s much harder to convince someone who has lived in the same house for decades that it’s time to go. Bill Peyton tried to ride it out. He thought he could handle it. The fire had other plans.

Weeks remembers asking him, “This is literally the hill you’re gonna die on? This one, our hill? This is your last stand.”

He didn’t die. But they lost their home.

The Aspen Acres fire tore through Beulah on Monday, and the wind was the enemy. It pushed embers across parched fuels, jumping firebreaks and igniting new spots faster than crews could contain them. Weeks drove north to Colorado Springs with her dog to stay with friends, while Bill walked south, eventually finding his way to a deputy’s cruiser.

They reunited outside the Red Cross emergency shelter Tuesday afternoon. Weeks was exhausted. Bill was exhausted. But they were together.

Picture this: two people, one car, one cat, and a quarter-mile walk in the dark. That’s the reality of evacuation. It’s not always a orderly line of buses. Sometimes it’s a stubborn old man and a deputy who refuses to take no for an answer.

The fire claimed at least 180 structures, but the human cost is measured in moments like these. In the decision to leave. In the fear that you might not see your loved one again. In the relief when a voice on the phone says, “I have your dad.”

Weeks and Peyton lost their homes, but they kept each other. That’s a win, even if the house is gone.