LOVELAND — For Stanley Rupe’s first birthday, his mom made him a star-shaped cake, with blue and green frosting. He’d never eaten sugar before, and his dad, John, expected him to attack the pastry. But instead he daintily picked at it, as family watched over Zoom.

It was Aug. 13, and a fire had started 20 miles from the family’s cabin at the Shambhala Mountain Center, a 600-acre Buddhist retreat near Red Feather Lakes. Two months later, the Cameron Peak fire is still burning. As of Sunday, it had burned through 134,559 acres, making it one of the largest fires in Colorado history.

That night, John and Kristen Fledderjohn, his girlfriend and Stanley’s mom, walked outside, and the clouds were orange above them.

“You could see the smoke over our house, and we were like, ‘Oh that’s crazy. Is that from the California fires? It couldn’t be California,'” he said Saturday, sitting in the lobby of a Loveland hotel where Red Cross workers were preparing lunch for him and other evacuees. Friday night was chicken parmesan, Saturday afternoon offered brown-bagged sandwiches. He, Kristen and Stanley — Stan, as John calls him — have been away from their mountain retreat since Sept. 20.

“It was totally surreal,” he said. “We would hear about the spread, we were looking at the maps all the time. At first it wasn’t threatening our location at all; it was spreading in different directions.” 

“We didn’t think it would impact us,” John added. “It really didn’t occur to us that it would happen.” 

They were “in limbo” until they were evacuated in September; they were given two hours to get out. They packed essentials — birth certificates, Social Security cards, external hard drives, some clothes, some of their camera gear — and left behind attachments: John left behind all of his books, books he’d been collecting in his 5-foot shelf for years, because he couldn’t pick just one. 

“A week after we evacuated, it hit the land,” John said. He calls the mountain center “the land.” John runs the water utility there. He says if he were to check a religious box, it would be Buddhist. But he doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed, and his spirituality can be summed up by the golden rule: Treat others how you want to be treated.

John, Kirsten and Stan had gone to Steamboat, where their family is. A map showed the area surrounding their home bathed in red. 

“We just kinda looked at each other and cried and said, ‘That’s it.’ After that we assumed all of our stuff was gone,” he said. “A couple of days later, the map improved and we actually got reports of photos from firefighters of the damaged buildings, and ours was fine.”

In the weeks before they evacuated, the three of them would lay out on a blanket, turn the radio to 105.5 and watch the helicopters fly overhead toward the fire. The fire had come within a few dozen feet of their home and had singed the grass they’d laid on.

The family spent the end of September in Steamboat. John came down here, to the Wingate hotel in Loveland, a week before Kristen and Stan followed (“Being away from a 13 month old sucks,” he said). They’re joined by roughly 100 other evacuees displaced by the fire. The hotel provides their breakfast, and the Red Cross hands out lunch and dinner.

Kathy Coffey, the organization’s supervisor at the hotel, sits in the lobby and checks names, serves food, coordinates. She started working for the Red Cross earlier this year, after her husband, a firefighter, died. She calls it a gift, exactly what she and her husband had wanted to do before he’d gotten sick and exactly what she needed after he’d passed.

For some of the evacuees here, the situation is improving back home. On Saturday, a few people were loading up their cars with luggage carts overflowing with suitcases, coffee makers, trash bags full of clothes, stuffed animals, a huge Barbie doll. John’s traveled up to the mountain center a few times to check out the damage. The power’s shot, and the water tanks are drained, pumped empty to fight the fire. There’s no running water. The repairs are “daunting,” he said.

But he’s optimistic, upbeat. They’re hoping to be back home soon, and even if it’s still a little while longer, they feel at home here.

“When I first got here from Steamboat, I ran into someone (from the Buddhist center) in the hallway. They were like, ‘Hey welcome home!’ and it was this sense of — home is the community. Home isn’t the property up there. it was being with the people.”

Other evacuees, like Christie Christensen of Crystal Lakes, had their mandatory evacuation orders lifted over the weekend. Christie and her husband had just retired and moved to Colorado from Cheyenne, Wyoming. It was their first summer here. They drove a trailer up to their home Saturday, stayed at the Wingate one last time that night, and drove home Sunday.

Tom Sudduth is upbeat, too. He lives near Rustic, up Pingree Hill and not far as the crow flies from the mountain center. He was evacuated at first on Sept. 7, and then again on Sept. 26. He’s been at the hotel since then. 

He didn’t pack much when he left. He filled his backpack as if he were going on a hiking trip, turned off the lights and the power, and closed the door. Everything he left behind was valuable: “Nail by nail,” his parents had built the cabin he lived in. Nearby was the family’s previous home, itself built from materials culled from a 19th century mining camp. 

“The whole place is a treasure,” he said. “I really thought it was going to burn.”

It didn’t, he said, thanks to the efforts of the firefighters. The area all around it is blackened, but the cabins — which tie his family back to the gold rush — are still standing. If they had burned, he would’ve moved back and lived in a trailer, and he would have rebuilt.