The best part of the Age-Friendly Carbondale (AFC) booth at July’s First Friday was the Wheel of Fortune. Modeled after the TV show’s giant spinning wheel, this one was a petite, blue, yellow, red and green handmade version. Instead of winning money, contestants won items to stock a “go bag,” like a flashlight, first aid kit, cellphone charger or emergency whistle and even had a chance to win the bright red bag itself. That is, provided they correctly answer a random question about wildfire preparedness since that’s what the booth was all about.
Carbondale resident and the Age-Friendly Treasurer Ted Zislis made the wheel and just about everything else in the booth, including two panels, each covered with a collage of information, photos and graphics from wildfire preparedness brochures by local fire departments, Colorado State University and the Colorado State Forest Service.
“This presentation is hopefully to encourage people who have not been concerned enough about wildfires coming into Carbondale,” Zislis explained. “Everybody’s breathing the smoke, but everybody seems to have a general feeling, like, ‘It’s never going to affect us.’”
Zislis told The Sopris Sun that the 2025 Palisades Fire in Los Angeles spooked him.
“We are similar [because] basically we consider ourselves a relatively safe, urbanized community,” he said. “But we live in what’s called the wilderness-urban interface, where we’re totally surrounded by wilderness and very susceptible to fire sweeping down.”
Over the past three decades, the Roaring Fork Valley has experienced several major wildfires, including the 1994 South Canyon fire, which killed 14 firefighters, the 2002 Coal Seam fire that swept through West Glenwood Springs, the 2018 Lake Christine fire, ignited by tracer bullets at the local shooting range, and the Grizzly Creek fire in 2020 that closed the Glenwood Canyon for two weeks at the height of the summer tourist season.
Last summer, the Elk Fire threatened Rifle. This year, Western Colorado is dealing with smoke from fires east, south and west of the Roaring Fork Valley that have consumed thousands of acres and killed three firefighters.
So with the help of an AARP Community Challenge Capacity-Building microgrant, Zislis took on a project to educate the community about how to prepare their homes for wildfire and what to take with them if they have to leave. According to AARP’s website, these $2,500 microgrants support projects that benefit all ages. Categories include bike audits, walk audits, home modifications and disaster preparedness.
Age-Friendly Carbondale has already finished a walk audit which resulted in lighted crosswalks on Highway 133, said Marisa Volpe, associate state director for livable communities for AARP Colorado.
”Their due diligence in doing robust outreach, listening in two languages, incorporating communities of color — I really see them as the gold standard of Age Friendly,” she said, adding that Colorado is one of 14 Age-Friendly states.
Volpe said that AFC’s application was selected this year due to the group’s track record of getting things done.
“They are a tight-knit, strong community and we like to see that,” she explained. “They’ve been in the work in terms of a project that meets the needs of the community, and I can’t think of a better one than emergency preparedness for our state.”
Zislis, who is also a certified ambassador for Fire Adapted Colorado, used the grant money to purchase supplies that would support what’s going on in the booth. Other than the go-bag goodies, a plethora of information and the Wheel of Fortune, AFC has a fire resilience survey and the dreaded evacuation list.
Sue Zislis, Ted’s partner, carried the survey on her clipboard through Friday’s crowd. One thing the survey missed, she said, was renters, who can be fairly powerless to create defensible spaces around their homes.
“They’re concerned about go bags and that sort of thing,” she told The Sun. “But they’re frustrated with their landlords who may not even be, you know, fixing a leak, let alone mitigating fire risk on the property [or] giving them information about what they should do.”
Ted and his crew will take the booth to First Fridays and the Carbondale Farmers Market this summer. He said that this is not about AFC telling people what to do.
“If I clean up my yard but my neighbor hasn’t done a good job of cleaning up his yard,” he explained, “it’s to my advantage to engage in a discussion with my neighbors to get them all to agree that it’s to all of our mutual advantage to work together.”
What have you done to prepare in case of wildfire? Chime in on the conversation on Community Hub (formerly Mountain Perspectives), a homegrown digital dialogue platform powered by The Sopris Sun.