The best part of Age-Friendly Carbondale’s First Friday booth is the Wheel of Fortune. Modeled after the TV show’s giant, spinning wheel, this one is a petite, blue, yellow, red, and green handmade version. Instead of winning money, contestants win items to stock a “go bag”.
“Like flashlights and emergency whistles and a first aid kit and a water bowl for your dog, cellphone charger or emergency whistle,” explained Carbondale resident and Age-Friendly Treasurer Ted Zislis. “Just ‘starter’ things to help people [think] about what they need to do if they do need to evacuate.”
Zislis made the wheel and just about everything else in the booth, including two panels, each covered with a collage of information, photos and graphics from wildfire preparedness booklets by local fire departments, Colorado State University and the Colorado State Forest Service.
“This presentation is hopefully to encourage people who have not been concerned enough about wildfires coming into Carbondale,” he said. “Everybody’s breathing the smoke, but everybody seems to have a general feeling, like, ‘It’s never going to affect us.”
So, Zislis, a certified ambassador for Fire Adapted Colorado, decided to do something about that.
With the help of a $2500 microgrant from AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, he took on a project to educate the community about how to prepare their homes for wildfire and what to take with them if they have to leave.
These AARP microgrants support projects that benefit all ages. Categories include bike audits, walk audits, home modifications and disaster preparedness.
Marisa Volpe, associate state director of Liveable Communities for AARP, told KDNK that AARP is not just about retirees anymore. “There definitely has been a rebrand,” she explained. “Typically we were known as, you know, the Association for Retired People. And so we got that idea that we were for folks when they were coming into retirement, and sort of got correlated with Social Security.” But, she adds, the optics of aging are evolving.
“We know that there's really a changing face of retirement. And we need to start having these conversations much earlier,” she said. “What does it mean to look at financial resilience and security, and, you know, we don't have the pensions like many of our families might have had.”
Volpe said aging applies to everyone. And that it’s time for younger generations to prepare. “What does it mean, for me and my generation and network? You know, I have 20 girlfriends that I sent an email out about solo aging, where we may be single, don't have kids,” she told KDNK. “What's that going to look like, and are we gonna do [1985 TV sitcom] The Golden Girls? It feels much more relevant that I'll be in a group and we'll start to talk about these issues.”
She added that Age-Friendly Carbondale’s application was selected this year due to the group’s track record, including a walk audit which resulted in lighted crosswalks on Highway 133. “They are a tight-knit, strong community and they've been in the work in terms of a project that meets the needs of the community,” she said. “And I can't think of a better one than emergency preparedness.”
Zislis said his project was inspired by the 2025 Palisades Fire in Los Angeles. “We are similar [because] basically we consider ourselves a relatively safe, urbanized community,” he explained. “But we live in what's called the wilderness-urban interface, where we're totally surrounded by wilderness and very susceptible to fire sweeping down. “
Wildfires have definitely swept down on and around the Roaring Fork Valley over the past three decades. The 1994 South Canyon fire killed 14 firefighters, the 2002 Coal Seam fire swept through West Glenwood Springs, the 2018 Lake Christine fire was ignited by tracer bullets at the Basalt shooting range. The Grizzly Creek fire six years ago closed Glenwood Canyon for two weeks at the height of summer.
Wildfire smoke has plagued the area this year from other large fires on the Western Slope and in Utah.
Zislis used the AARP grant money to purchase supplies for the booth. Other than the go-bag goodies, a plethora of information and the Wheel of Fortune, the booth offers a list of personal things to grab in case of evacuation and a fire resilience survey.
Sue Zislis, Ted’s partner, carried the survey on her clipboard through a recent First Friday crowd. But, she realized something was missing: renters, who can be powerless to create defensible spaces around their homes. “They're concerned about go bags and that sort of thing,” she explained. “But they're frustrated with their landlords who may not even be, you know, fixing a leak, let alone mitigating fire risk on the property, let alone giving them information about what they should do.”
Ted and his crew will take the booth to First Fridays and the Wednesday Carbondale Farmers Market for the rest of the summer.
