Caribou Village Nederland Businesses Rebuild Across Town

Jeffrey Green has a specific hope for how his beer should move through the building he now shares with a restaurant. He wants people to be able to buy a pint of Very Nice Brewing Company upstairs, then carry it down to The Kitchen at The Vault for dinner. It's the opposite of how things worked at Caribou Village, where the restaurant sat above the brewery. Green isn't rebuilding his old setup. He's rebuilding a better one, in a different building, with people who used to be his neighbors down the hall and are now his neighbors on the other floor.

That building is The Vault, the converted Citywide Bank space at 26 Peak to Peak Highway. It didn't exist as a business address a year ago. Now it's arguably doing more work for downtown Nederland than the shopping center it's quietly replacing ever did, and the shopping center hasn't come back at all. On October 9, Nederland will mark one year since the Lakeview Fire tore through Caribou Village Shopping Center and took out roughly 20 businesses in under an hour. If you've been waiting to see what happens when the center reopens, the update is: the businesses already reopened. The center is still a fenced lot.

Where Everything Actually Landed

The Vault has become the closest thing Nederland has to a second downtown block, and it's worth knowing who's actually in it if you haven't been by recently:

• Very Nice Brewing Company now pours from the upper floor.
• Brightwood Music and the new sit-down restaurant The Kitchen at The Vault share the ground floor. The Kitchen is run by chef Lauran Knight, who spent years building a following with her food truck, Kaleidoscope Kitchen, before opening the brick-and-mortar space in February.
• 8z Real Estate, 8236 Gear, and Inkhaus Tattoo round out the building's tenant mix. None of the three lost anything in the fire. They moved into The Vault because it's where the foot traffic went.

That last detail matters more than it sounds. A building full of newcomers choosing to set up next to fire-displaced businesses is a sign the location works on its own, not just as a sympathy stop. Downtown Nederland didn't shrink to fit around the loss. It found a new center of gravity and grew back around that instead.

The recovery goes beyond one address. John Thompson signed a lease on a new space for Mountain Man Outdoor Store a little over a week after the fire, and after twelve years running the original store, he's now marking a rebuilt version's own milestone. Kay O'Neil reopened her stained glass studio elsewhere in town. Tadasana Mountain Yoga is back on its mat. As of this fall, at least 10 of the 22 business owners displaced by the fire have gotten back on their feet somewhere in Nederland, according to reporting updated this September. That's not the whole list, and some proprietors have decided not to start over. But it's a majority-shaped fraction for a town of 1,500 people, almost a year out, with the original building still not rebuilt.

Why 20 Lakeview Drive Is Still an Empty Lot

The lot itself is the part of this story that hasn't moved as fast. Tebo Properties, which owns the site at 20 Lakeview Drive, wanted to start clearing debris in December. Colorado's public health department required more testing first, worried the burned structure, built in 1985, might still contain asbestos even though Tebo's own sampling came back negative. The standoff dragged into the new year. Site stabilization work that would let inspectors safely access the rest of the building wasn't approved until February, and even then only the parking lot could be cleared right away.

Debris finally started coming out of the parking lot in late April, nearly seven months after the fire. Bill Rigler, the Tebo Properties spokesperson who's been the public face of the delays, called it "the first real material step toward rebuilding." Demolition of the main structure was expected to take another six to eight weeks after that, followed by more testing. There's a rendering from Tebo and UP Architects showing what a rebuilt Caribou Village could look like, and the company has said former tenants will get first right of refusal on new storefronts. What there isn't, as of this writing, is a construction start date.

For residents who drive past that fence regularly, the gap between "cleanup started" and "something is actually being built" has been the hardest part to sit with. Green, whose brewery now operates out of The Vault, described the lingering rubble as a weight the whole town has been carrying. He called it "a shadow on the town." The businesses have largely moved past that shadow. The lot hasn't yet.

The Businesses That Never Stopped

Not everything at Caribou Village burned. B&F Mountain Market, the grocery store most of Nederland relies on, sits close enough to the shopping center that it was directly threatened, but firefighters kept the flames from spreading to it. The Train Cars Coffee and Kava, the coffee shop built into a string of old rail cars, made it through the same way. The Carousel of Happiness, the 1910 carousel and community landmark next door, took some charring on one side and lost a few exterior windows, but the carousel itself and its hand-carved animals were untouched, and the building has kept operating through the year.

These three are easy to overlook in a story about what burned, because they're the businesses that simply didn't. But they're also the reason downtown Nederland never fully shut down. While The Vault and Mountain Man Outdoor Store and Very Nice Brewing were figuring out where to land, the market, the coffee shop, and the carousel were still open every day, giving the town a functioning core to rebuild the rest of downtown around.

What's Actually Happening Downtown This Week

The clearest sign that Nederland's calendar has moved on from the fire, even while the lot hasn't, is what's on it right now. The NedNed Trail Fest just wrapped its 44th year on September 12, sending runners out of Old Town on the same 5K, 10K, and half marathon courses it's used for decades, with proceeds going to TEENS, Inc. The Nederland Farmers Market is in its final weeks of the season, which typically runs May through September, and still has Gold Dirt Distillery spirits and local produce on Sundays while the weather holds. Silent Disco nights on Snyder Street have continued into late September, and Thursday trivia at 70 E 1st Street hasn't skipped a week.

None of that is news in the way the fire was news. That's the point. A year ago, the question in Nederland was whether the town's business district would survive. The answer, almost a year in, isn't at the empty lot on Lakeview Drive. It's at The Vault, where a brewer and a restaurant chef are figuring out how to share a staircase, and at the market and coffee shop that never closed their doors, and on a trail race that ran for the 44th time like it wasn't the year the center of town burned down.

If you're thinking about what it actually feels like to live somewhere and watch it rebuild itself, one storefront at a time, that's a harder thing to get from a listing photo than from a walk down Peak to Peak Highway. The Mock Group has spent years getting to know towns like Nederland from the ground up, not just the market reports. If you're curious what a move to the mountains actually looks like day to day, or you're already here and want to talk through what your place is worth in a town that's changing shape, reach out and we'll walk through it together.