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.

In Archuleta County, the first flood damaged at least 800 buildings, including 540 homes, and left about 150 miles of county roads impassable. Broader damage assessments put the number of impacted homes at at least 700 by Friday, Pagosa Springs Mayor Shari Pierce said.

One of those homes belonged to James “Jimmy” Bankston, 75. He found out parts of his house were on the brink of collapsing into the river after seeing a post on social media. It was crushing.

“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.