Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Just before 4 a.m. on October 9, 2025, a Vietnam War veteran named Scott Harrison grabbed garden hoses and started wetting down a building full of hand-carved wooden animals.
The Caribou Village Shopping Center at 20 Lakeview Drive was already gone, or going. Roughly 20 small businesses, the kind of places that made Nederland feel like Nederland, burning in the predawn dark. And those 20 businesses were not a small thing. Together they generated about 30 percent of the entire town's economic activity. Imagine a third of your town's livelihood catching fire in one night.
Harrison, the guy spraying water, is the reason the Carousel of Happiness next door is still standing. His carousel took only minor damage. It reopened a week later, on October 16, 2025. And that detail is the whole story, if you ask me. One man who already spent over two decades on this thing, out there at 4 a.m. refusing to let the fire take one more thing from this town.
Here is the part people outside Boulder County do not realize. Harrison did not just buy some carousel and plop it down. He bought a broken-down 1910 carousel, drove the pieces back from Utah, and then spent more than 20 years carving every single animal by hand. Two decades. One man and a workshop in the mountains.
The Carousel of Happiness has been open about 15 years now. Melody Baumhover, the executive director, called it a space for grieving and healing. And after the fire, that is exactly what it became. A place the whole town could go to feel something other than loss. Harrison says a plaque is going up near a remaining piece of charred wood, to mark the fire, the loss, and the rebuild. I love that. Not hiding the burn mark. Keeping it right there so nobody forgets.
So here is where it got messy, and honestly frustrating for anyone who lives up there.
The property owner is Tebo Properties. The plan is to redevelop the whole site. But the recovery got held up for months over a fight with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment about asbestos testing. The debris just sat there. Demolition did not even begin until April 2026. That is six months of a burned-out hole in the middle of town.
Tebo's spokesperson, Bill Rigler, said the company ran more than 80 site samples and every one came back at zero percent asbestos. Rigler said treating the site as asbestos-containing anyway would have piled on more than a million dollars in extra costs. So you had a standoff. Testing versus the state's process, and the town stuck waiting in the middle.
Cleanup finally started. And now, nearly a year to the day after the fire, Tebo was expected to submit its redevelopment plans to the town on Thursday, October 8, 2026.
Buckle up, because this is where you need to read the fine print.
Tebo's reported target is to break ground next spring, with a possible opening in 2028. But those are projected dates, not approved plans. The town still has to review everything. And two big questions are still wide open. Whether the displaced businesses actually come back to the rebuilt Caribou Village, and what the finished project even contains, are both unresolved according to the town.
That matters. A rebuild is not the same thing as bringing the same town back. You can put up new walls and still lose the character. That is the risk in any redevelopment, and it is especially real in a mountain town where the shops were the personality.
Now for the part that makes this resilience instead of ruin.
The displaced owners did not sit around for 2028. Train Cars Coffee and Kava reopened the day after the fire. The day after. Mountain Man Outdoor Store reopened October 31, 2025, right across from the center. Very Nice Brewing Company and Brightwood Music both moved across the street and kept going.
And the town showed up with its wallet. Community GoFundMe pages raised just shy of $425,000 for displaced owners and workers, and they did it in about three weeks. That is a town of a few thousand people pulling together nearly half a million dollars for its neighbors.
Which is a good thing, because the help from higher up never really came. The fire did not qualify as a federal major disaster. So the affected owners may not even be eligible for the loans that come with a presidential disaster declaration. No federal cavalry. Just GoFundMe, grit, and a carousel.
For anyone tracking the Front Range and the mountain towns above Boulder, this is the kind of moment that reshapes a place for a generation. Nederland is deciding, right now, what its center looks like for the next 50 years. The land is cleared. The plans are on the town's desk. Spring is the target to start digging.
What the town approves, who comes back, and what gets built will tell you everything about whether Nederland rebuilds its character or just its square footage.
But here is the thing. Scott Harrison already answered the hardest question a year ago, standing out there at 4 a.m. with a hose. The town was worth fighting for then. It still is.