8 OCTOBER 23-29, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Of Fire and Friendship NEDERLAND’S BRIGHTWOOD MUSIC IS COMING OUT OF A DARK TIME. BY MIC HAEL ROBERT S Doug Armitage has devoted much of his life to the crafting and care of musical instruments. It makes perfect sense, then, that for him, the destruction of his beloved business, Bright- wood Music, and seventeen others in a fi re that consumed Nederland’s Caribou Village Shopping Center is symbolized by a guitar. “I arrived in Nederland on September 20 of 1975, when I was twenty years old,” recalls Armitage, who’s originally from New Jersey. “I had a backpack and a twelve-string Martin guitar, a D12-28, which I sold to a store in Boulder so I could pay rent on a little cottage in Nederland.” That specifi c guitar is history. But years later, Armitage obtained another Martin D12-28 that he could share with Brightwood customers. “It was hanging on the wall for people to play,” he says. Today, that wall is no more, and all of Brightwood’s meticulously main- tained stock is ashes as well – the communal Martin D12-28 included. “It’s a sort of goes-around-comes- around-and-goes-away-again type of feeling,” he says. Barbara Hardt, Armitage’s wife, is more direct when describing her emotions in the aftermath of the blaze, as befi ts her background as a journalist. In addition to co-own- ing Brightwood, she’s the manag- ing editor of The Mountain-Ear, a 48-year-old Nederland newspaper that captures all that’s best about the community it serves. “We’ve been building Brightwood for the past sixteen years together,” Hardt says. “This was our retirement – what we’ve been building up so we could have a retirement. So it’s devas- tating for us. But it’s also devastating watching all our friends and neighbors, people we’ve worked with every day, go through this.” Plenty of questions about the Caribou Vil- lage fi re remain, with the biggest being its cause, which authorities have not yet deter- mined (although foul play has been taken off the table). But the scope of the catastrophe is clear. Along with Brightwood, multiple eater- ies, wine and liquor purveyors, art galleries and assorted other enterprises were incinerated. The conflagration was first reported around 3:40 a.m. on October 9 by a Boulder County Sheriff’s Offi ce deputy on patrol. The location was certainly familiar: A sheriff’s offi ce substation was located at the center. The news reached Hardt quickly. She was driving to Nederland at 4 a.m. to pick up a couple of Mountain-Ear staffers who were scheduled to accompany her to that week’s National Newspaper Association conference in Minneapolis when “I got the call that the shopping center was on fi re,” she recalls. “Sure enough, it was. I pulled in and called Doug and told him what was going on – and we canceled Minneapolis.” Instead, the Mountain-Ear crew got to work providing the best, most comprehensive coverage of the disaster to date. The fi re was extinguished in “a couple of hours,” Hardt estimates, “but it smoked for a day and a half.” By then, it was clear there was little to salvage. “We’ve been watching crews take the wreck- age apart with a giant excavator,” she says, “but other than a couple of signs that were outside businesses, there’s nothing there.” For longtime Nederland residents, the fate of Caribou Village Shopping Center echoes what happened forty years earlier to a Neder- land landmark with a similar name: Caribou Ranch, a famed recording studio that ceased operations after a 1985 fi re. And coinciden- tally, Caribou Ranch is part of Armitage’s personal history, too. He worked at the facility for three years during the 1970s, when many of the most famous musical acts of the era recorded there – bands such as Chicago and The Beach Boys and solo artists ranging from Joe Walsh and Dan Fogelberg to Elton John, who named his 1974 album Caribou. Not that Armitage spent much time rub- bing shoulders with the rich and fabulous. “I met a bunch of people and I wish I could give you all the names, but I don’t remember a lot of that,” he admits. “I was working as a security guard in the guard shed from midnight to eight in the morning. I’d like to say it was the most fun I had with my clothes on, but I’ve had more fun.” Indeed, he was so broke that he had to walk to work from the cottage he obtained by selling his Martin D12-28 for the fi rst year, “until I could afford the down payment on a Volkswagen Beetle with horrible tires.” Armitage subsequently hit the road, set- tling in Boulder for a time while employed at OME Banjos before traveling to Port An- gelis, Washington, where he worked in a local music store before heading back to New Jersey and embarking on a career as a professional luthier. “I’ve got a lot of knowledge from hav- ing been in woodworking for many, many, many, many years,” he allows. “I also have a lot of experience repairing a lot of different instruments. For a long time, I didn’t play any music myself. I gave it up while I was in the woodworking business. Then I got back to repairing instruments, and I’d been doing that for a good fi fteen years before I moved back to Nederland.” Upon his return to Colorado, Armitage launched Brightwood Music (the name is a lighter version of Darkwood Music, a store he worked at while living in Florida) out of his home and began giving lessons to folks who wanted to try their hand at a stringed instrument. One such person was Hardt, who owned The Mountain-Ear at the time. “We had covered Brightwood Music – not me, but other people on staff – when it opened, and I went in to take a couple of mandolin lessons,” Hardt says. “Then I bought a mandolin and continued the les- sons, and Doug and I kept running into each other. We’d play pool, and eventually, we started hanging out.” Little by little, mastering the mandolin became less important to Hardt, to Armitage’s delight. “After a couple of lessons, she decided she had more interest in me,” he main- tains. “I responded by absolutely falling in love with her.” The couple married in 2010 and set up housekeeping in what Armit- age describes as “the Town of Cardi- nal, this tiny little ghost town that my sister owns up Caribou Road.” Five years later, they moved their home to another spot in Gilpin County and their business to Nederland. The Caribou Village Shopping Cen- ter, their second space in Nederland, allowed Brightwood Music to expand substantially. The store catered to Ned- erland’s large and exuberant acoustic-music scene by way of instruments and associated products suited for beginners and experts alike. “One of the great things about being the only guy in a town with a bunch of musicians who happens to have a music store is that most of the time, people would at least buy strings from us,” he says. “It was nice being part of that crew.” The camaraderie naturally led to Armit- age’s membership in Windy Pines, a group formed in 2023 that blends bluegrass, jazz and blues. “It’s a good band,” stresses Armit- age, who plucks the NEWS continued on page 10 KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS The Caribou Village Shopping Center was destroyed by fi re on October 9. Doug Armitage and Barbara Hardt in Nederland. PHOTO COURTESY OF DOUG ARMITAGE AND BARBARA HARDT PHOTO COURTESY OF DOUG ARMITAGE AND BARBARA HARDT
