Their town has been burned, flooded and nearly cut in half. But residents want you to know “Pagosa is here.”

Don’t cross the crack. That was the rule at the Pagosa Springs History Museum on Wednesday as volunteers rushed to remove historic items while part of the building hung over the San Juan River with nothing but air and water beneath it. 

The 1-inch crack in the concrete floor had widened in the days since historic floods devastated parts of the small town in southwestern Colorado. On the other side of the crack, the floor had separated from the walls or fallen away entirely. 

The only view was of the rushing water yards away. 

“We eventually want to move all this stuff into this room,” David Hamilton, the museum board president, told about 10 community members inside the building. Their goal was to move items into the parts of the building still on solid ground. “We wanted to tell you that it’s really not that safe in here.”

Locals were already familiar with the demands of disaster response long before historic back-to-back floods swept through the town in late October. The raging rivers came after dozens of fires, flooding a year prior, a record-dry winter and deep summer drought, and on top of ongoing construction along Pagosa and San Juan streets, the town’s main commercial corridor.

In Pagosa Springs, the latest disaster left residents in shock and isolated between broken sections of a vital highway, without cellphone service for days. Now, Archuleta County, along with other communities across southern Colorado and the Four Corners region, is facing another long recovery.

The town is just starting to figure out what recovery might look like — and whether they can get what they need to make it happen. The push to save the museum’s collection was a first step, a small way to find comfort and a sense of normalcy by turning to each other.

“For two summers we’ve been trying to shop downtown to keep these businesses going, and then a flood hits early October, and they had to stop construction on the main street,” Hamilton said, standing outside the museum. “And then another flood hits.”

Top left: Volunteers remove fragile objects from the damaged Pagosa Springs History Museum. Top right: Pagosa Springs museum board president David Hamilton helps haul antique furniture out of the building, which was built around the city’s old waterworks building constructed by the Works Progress Administration in 1938. Hamilton and his wife, Penny, stand in front of the museum, where a “history vault” was created this year containing books, local family histories and writings, and oral histories. The vault was locked with the promise that it not be opened until Colorado celebrates its bicentennial in 2076. Bottom: Locals stand in the parking lot to survey damage to the museum, which is raising money to rebuild (Cheney Orr, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

The left side of the front porch still featured a half-barrel planter and cozy bench. The right side, with its “open” sign and “enhance your visit” poster, was dangling over the swollen river. Volunteers interrupted Hamilton occasionally with a question about where to put the rescued artifacts.

“My hope is that we can get our main street thriving, we can get tourism back into the town,” he said. “We can clean up the muck and the mud. We can be better than we were before and support each other.”

One round of storms carried tropical moisture from the Pacific Ocean, the remnants of Hurricane Trudy, and a clear fingerprint of this year’s “super” El Niño. The second carried moisture from the Pacific via an “atmospheric river,” a narrow band of concentrated water vapor in the atmosphere.

More than 20 trillion gallons or rain, equivalent to 10 months of the flow over Niagara Falls, have fallen on the Four Corners states and Nevada in the past two weeks, former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief scientist Ryan Maue estimates.

For most of the summer, the San Juan River’s flow measured between 8 cubic feet per second and 40 cfs through Pagosa Springs, according to a U.S. Geological Survey stream gauge. At its peak, the river rushed through town at about 10,400 cfs. 

“We would get out in the evening when all the cars were gone, and you could hear the river roaring,” Hamilton said. “To me, it sounded like a jet taking off, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I wonder what’s going on at the museum.’”

After the first flood peaked Oct. 23, communities across the Four Corners region watched as another storm threatened to push river levels higher than ever recorded. The second flood hit Nov. 1.

While last Sunday’s storm caused more damage than the Oct. 22-23 storm, the impacts may have been lessened because the previous flooding widened the river channel, allowing water to spread across a wider area, county officials said.

Still, the damage was catastrophic. A house floated down the San Juan River, and splintered as it slammed into a bridge. Basements flooded. Town parks along the river were scoured, eroded and buried in silt. Some evacuees from the first flood still hadn’t made it back home. 

While crews found no immediate threats to life in the southern valley, the full extent of the flooding’s damage was only beginning to emerge. 

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis requested nearly $27 million in federal aid after the first round of flooding — and that number is expected to climb, state officials said. 

“We know that there’s a lot of new damage, especially in La Plata County, which was harder hit this time around than it was the first time,” Trevor Denney, director of the state Emergency Management Office, said. “So from that standpoint, I feel pretty confident that we’re going to find a significantly higher dollar amount of damages in this second round.”

“Best laid plans”

When Karen Evans, 55, heard about the potential flooding Oct. 22, she thought she and her boyfriend would be fine. It wasn’t until she was crossing a flooded section of U.S. 160 on her way home that she realized the storm could be worse than she expected.

“I could not see anything, and I was so scared for a moment,” said Evans, who lives near Chimney Rock National Monument southwest of Pagosa Springs.

Within hours, water was pouring out of a culvert under the highway and torrential rain was still coming down. Suddenly, the sound of rushing water got louder. The nearby creek was rising, starting to approach some of the other lots in the RV park where she rents a cabin.

“It was like water was coming from all directions,” she said.

Then water started seeping under the door to the kitchen. She and her boyfriend worked to get his family members, including a small baby, to safer areas while alerting neighbors and gathering supplies. She packed her blood pressure and diabetes medications, and her continuous positive airway pressure and oxygen machines.

A sheriff’s deputy arrived, using a loudspeaker to announce a mandatory evacuation. By the time Evans and her family left, it was 10 p.m. on Oct. 22, the night rivers hit their peak flows during the first storm. They had to pass the same flooded section of U.S. 160 on the way back into Pagosa Springs, this time with a baby and a stressed dog in the car. 

“I was driving, and it was dark and rainy, and I was scared. I’m just thinking of the baby in the back. I just want to keep him safe,” she said, apologizing as she teared up. “I didn’t realize I was going to cry.”

Evans didn’t realize her clothes were soaking wet until she arrived at the evacuation center. Or that she’d forgotten the injection needles for her diabetes medication, which she retrieved between storms. 

Colorado declared an emergency during the first flood that spanned 12 counties in southern Colorado. The historic floodwaters tore through communities in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. 

In southwestern Colorado, damaged roads are the top concern. Churning rivers tore apart the Piedra Bridge on U.S. 160 west of Pagosa Springs, isolating it and other communities like Durango, Bayfield and Ignacio. To the east of Pagosa Springs, more water damaged other sections of the highway, the main route to the rest of Colorado. 

With U.S. 160 damaged, the only highway into Pagosa Springs is U.S. 84, which runs south into New Mexico.

Even that route was temporarily closed entirely and was undergoing repairs on some sections as of Thursday.

“What in the world are we going to do if that gives way? We will then become an island, and we will not have any connectivity into Archuleta County, particularly Pagosa,” Archuleta County Commissioner Warren Brown said Wednesday.

For a rural community like Archuleta County, washed-out roads mean more than longer commutes. It adds hours to trips for food vendors, natural gas deliveries and medical care. 

The detour also complicates road repairs: Archuleta County has no operating gravel pits, so crews must bring in gravel from outside the county. 

On Wednesday, Evans worried about mold issues. About losing her bed, which helps with her back issues. About having to remove everything from the house. About making it to the regional medical center in Durango for doctor’s appointments now that the drive is over three hours instead of one.

She signed up for renters insurance in September and thought it covered flooding, only to find out afterward that it didn’t. 

“Best laid plans, you know?” she said.

“It all adds up”

The floods were the latest in a list of disasters for Archuleta County.

The county of about 14,000 residents was still recovering from significant flooding in 2025 and the Rio Blanco fire, which burned near Pagosa Springs last summer. The county responded to 26 wildfires in the past few months, Brown of Archuleta County said, adding that some of the homes that just survived the flames were washed away by the flood.

Now, the county is facing yet another recovery — and the looming question of how to make it happen.

“I’m still in shock,” he said. 

He lives in Texas most of the year, but he and his family have been coming to the area for 40 years. It’s where they’ve spent summers, gone fishing, done horse-packing trips and celebrated holidays. 

In the 2000s, he and his wife bought the house and spent four months fixing it up. They spent days on their knees pulling staples out of baseboards and walls. In June, he redid the deck and added a new hot tub. 

“It’s really the glue, the center of our universe for the last 20 years,” he said over the sound of rushing water. “This is the heart and soul of the family.”

Now, the deck and hot tub are gone. The San Juan River cut into its bank, eroding about 20 or 25 feet and flowing under what used to be his living room. He lost a rock fireplace, a couch, the space where some of his grandchildren learned to walk. 

“It all adds up,” he said.

In less than two years, Archuleta County has been included in two federal major disaster declarations and faced a state disaster emergency as wildfires and flooding repeatedly threatened homes, businesses and infrastructure. 

Last November, state officials requested federal aid to help communities in La Plata, Archuleta and Mineral counties recover after heavy rain fell between Oct. 10 and Oct. 14 and overwhelmed watersheds. President Donald Trump denied the request and the state’s appeal.

Without that money, the county and town had to fund repairs on their own or through grants. Their budgets rely heavily on the tourism industry — which declined after people heard about the 2025 floods. 

Brown, the county commissioner, said the federal denial hurt the community’s recovery. 

“When we’re not able to do it right and to bring it up to accepted standards because we simply don’t have the money to buy the material and the manpower to get it put in place as it should be,” Brown said, “that’s a huge concern.”

The Oak fire brought another emergency to the county in September 2025, burning several structures, forcing evacuations and threatening more than 5,100 buildings, including 2,000 homes. Polis declared a state disaster emergency for federal assistance. 

Shoring up the community’s flood defenses is a critical part of rebuilding, Denney with the state’s emergency management office said. 

“One of the things we asked for and were denied in the Aspen Acres fire was the hazard mitigation grant program,” Denney said, referring to a 102,000-acre fire southwest of Pueblo, Colorado. 

Each disaster has brought new demands on emergency responders and left residents facing another round of cleanup and rebuilding.

“I think our poor community just needs a break. I think arguably five years ago, people could speculate that very little happens here,” Brown said. “That’s certainly not been the case with all of our natural disasters that have come our way.”

“It’s hard to see that just be washed away”

Pagosa Springs, along with many of its neighboring communities, is coping with a disaster, not crippled by it. Residents say they need visitors to know that.

Media coverage has been a double-edged sword, said Audrey Bliss, who owns Rosie’s Pizzeria and Bliss Scoops & Sweets. The community needs others to be aware of how devastating the floods were and to send aid. But it also makes visitors wary to come, she said. 

She saw it in June and July when visitors said they were still hesitant to book a trip after the flooding nine months earlier. This week, people were already questioning whether they should make reservations because of the latest floods — a potentially devastating blow to a tourism economy in need of cash to help with recovery.

“As soon as we get a road, we will make you our homemade chicken if we have to,” Bliss said Wednesday. “This town will do whatever to get people to know that Pagosa is here.”

Archuleta County has hardy residents, many who were drawn by access to fishing, hunting, skiing and the outdoors. They’re independent, self-reliant and don’t often ask the government for help. 

When the ice cream shop lost power, Bliss got a generator. One employee’s car tipped over during the flood. Her chef can’t get to their restaurant, while a server drove the three-hour detour route to work in Pagosa from home in Bayfield. Some employees are completely stranded — they can’t even get to a main road, let alone work. She’s searching for economic relief for them. 

“They rely on that money,” Bliss said. 

At the same time, the community — like others around the region — is facing significant challenges, starting with food supply-chain issues. 

Food-service deliveries use U.S. 160 to reach Pagosa Springs. Bliss has been trying to get in touch with key suppliers, like Cisco and Shamrock, to make sure they can still make deliveries with the hourslong detour through New Mexico. Her husband drove to Durango to bring back beer for the restaurant with his pickup truck.

“Normally we would get twice-a-week inventory,” Bliss said. “Right now, Rosie’s is running on what we had from our last delivery, and when we’re out, we’re out.”

On Nov. 1, during the worst of the flooding, officials closed access to the town. On Monday, officials slowly started reopening roads and bridges, reconnecting the western and eastern halves of the town that night.

Residents, still without cell service, drove out to polling centers to vote in the midterm elections Tuesday as the occasional medical helicopter flew overhead. If they needed help, they turned to their neighbors, said Wren Blessing, the rector at St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church. 

“I think just getting out and having those neighborly connections is actually feeling really nourishing,” she said.

By Tuesday night, cell service was back up. On Wednesday, pickup trucks with water tanks in their beds followed National Guard vehicles through downtown. The sound of the rushing river was everywhere. A “road closed” sign sat under a “trunk or treat” banner spanning one road. 

People were out grocery shopping and going to restaurants, passing concrete barricades that blocked some roads as construction workers and bulldozers worked on others.

Businesses were hurting before the floods, Bliss said. They’re going to hurt even more if winter tourists, eager to ski at Wolf Creek ski area and visit The Springs Resort and Spa, don’t arrive. 

For two years, Pagosa’s main street has been undergoing an intensive construction project, which cut off access to businesses and intersections in downtown. Crosswalks were blocked, and barricades spanned entire blocks and intersections.

Brown said the construction has “substantially impacted” the county’s tax base and revenues. Bliss knew of three businesses that permanently closed because of the project.

The work was scheduled to be done in November. Then the flooding set it back.

“We’re just not going to get this project done by the end of the year,” Julie Constan, CDOT’s director for the region, said during a town council meeting Tuesday. “We’re trying to get it as normal as possible before the winter shutdown.”

A CDOT spokesperson did not respond to The Sun’s requests for further comment by email or phone.

Town officials are focused on triage: What needs to be fixed now? Before winter? Before spring runoff? 

The town’s sewer system filled with silt, which clogged pipes and could cause sewer backups in homes and businesses, town manager David Harris said. Crews from Durango, Boulder and Carbondale came to help, bringing pipes and workers with them.

“We’re stabilizing the patient at this point,” Harris said, his button-up shirt slightly rumpled and a calendar filled with meetings showing on his desktop computer. He, like most county and town staff, had been working long hours to respond to the flooding.

Floodwaters from the first storm alone caused an estimated $8.5 million in damage to parks and recreation facilities, including the destruction of in-river recreation structures along the San Juan River where all of the boulders washed downstream. 

The mile-long river walk, playground and park restrooms were also damaged. A boat ramp has to be rebuilt to fit the river’s new channel. The storm littered boulders, sediment and debris across several town parks. Cars must be removed from the San Juan River park.

At one point, Harris paused as he talked about all the work they had been doing to improve the community. He took a moment to collect himself. Now, they needed to do all over again. 

“Of course it’s Mother Nature,” he said, “but it’s hard to see that just be washed away.”

“Love Pagosa more than ever”

Local officials and residents said they need federal relief funding to come through this time to help rebuild. But they’re a long way from recovery.

“I believe, in all reality, we’re years out,” Brown said. 

Archuleta County and Pagosa Springs officials did not respond to requests for information about how much money they had on hand to fund recovery without federal aid or grants.

Recovery is different from what it used to be, he added. A few years ago, officials had the luxury of focusing on growth, attracting businesses and building the workforce. Those conversations still occur, but they’ve been sidelined as officials keep dealing with crises.

Now, the community needs food, water and shelter, Brown said. Residents need usable roads so they can reach their driveways and get to school. They need to be able to count on getting food from the store and gas for their cars.

“We have to stop the bleeding before we ever worry about the broken arm,” he said. 

Pagosa Springs gets 80% to 85% of its revenue from sales tax, which is driven by tourism, Harris said. Disaster after disaster — on top of high gas prices, expensive housing, a yearslong construction project in downtown and worried consumers nationally — has been a challenge for the local tourism economy. 

“Our leadership is very acutely aware of the need to provide, not only affordable housing, but we need to diversify our economy,” Harris said. “The question is, what is that?”

The business community needs federal aid and customers to recover. People need to love Pagosa more than ever, Bliss said.

“We need that money so badly,” she said. “But that’s for rebuilding. To live, we need people.”

With the holiday season approaching, Jesse Hensle, vice president of marketing for The Springs Resort, worried businesses could close if tourists don’t return or aren’t aware that Pagosa Springs is accessible. The resort partially reopened Thursday, but Hensle estimated the business lost more than $300,000 because of the latest floods.

Hensle pointed to the aftermath of the Lahaina fires in Maui in 2023 as a cautionary tale, saying tourism can suffer long after a disaster if visitors are discouraged from returning. 

“We had trouble inviting people back, and we had a kind of hangover, if you will, throughout the entire year,” Hensle said.

Meanwhile, James Bankston was starting the recovery process by looking at ways to salvage parts of his summer home.

He was able to save some things — photos, flyfishing rods, a 1971 blue ribbon winning rug he rescued from a wall hanging over the river.  He’s calling engineers to see if it’s possible to salvage parts of the house, maybe put it on stilts and move it farther from the riverbank.

Karen Evans focused on her immediate next steps — recovery was going to have to come later. She has been receiving financial aid for flood evacuees to help with the cost of staying at an Airbnb unit. But that ends Nov. 20. It’s overwhelming.

“That’s 16 days from now,” Evans said Wednesday. “I feel like time is ticking, just waiting for that other shoe to drop.” 

She’s been taking walks and cuddling her dog. Watching calming videos online. And steering away from rain and water videos.

 “I do not want to see those,” she said.

Back at the museum, David Hamilton focused on saving the collections. For him, recovery means being able to preserve the lessons of the past for decades into the future — regardless of where these local treasures are kept. 

The town added temporary supports to the museum so volunteers could remove collections of family histories, records and antiques that mark Pagosa Springs’ history. Officials planned to demolish the metal-walled section of the building before it could fall into the river and hit the First Street bridge, one of the key access points into town. 

The volunteers gathered on a chilly, sunny morning, carrying chairs, benches, boxes of historical papers and antique machinery into a safer section of the museum, which itself is a historic former water treatment plant.

One wrapped glass items in sheets of newspaper. Some parents sent their kids to help after schools closed because of the floods. Another volunteer said she could either shovel mud at her house or help the museum — she chose the latter.

Some items would stay in the stone-walled facility. Others would go to a storage unit, Hamilton said. 

Somewhere downstream lay antique saddles and panniers, part of a display that represented the area’s ranching and farming history. Those were the only items lost after the river ate into its banks, undercutting the building and changing the museum’s future.

“After the initial shock,” Hamilton said, “you get to thinking, well, maybe there’s a bright future in this somewhere. So we’re going to try to find that silver lining.”