King Soopers case

Sep. 11—In the summer of 2013, Suzanne Sophocles spent every moment she could in her garden. A grove of pear and apple trees flourished beside more than 2,000 different plants. A winding path led guests around blooming bulbs, and Sophocles' kitchen was always filled with fresh-picked vegetables from her garden.

"It was better than Monet's garden," Sophocles' husband, Aris, said. "It was wonderful."

The landscape reflected 35 years of growth that Suzanne Sophocles, now 72, worked to nurture and maintain.

The flood and rescue

Then on September 12, 2013, Sophocles woke up early in the morning to heavy rain and called her husband, who was in Denver at a quarterly book club meeting. She told him, "I'm trapped! Do you know what's happening here?" and then the line cut.

Over the next two days, rushing water surrounding Sophocles' Lefthand Canyon home filled her basement and rose through her furnace ducts. As Lefthand Creek overflowed, the dirt road in front of Sophocles' home became a strong and wide river. As her garden was washed away, Sophocles was forced to crawl out onto her garage roof for help while her two dogs remained safely in kennels inside.

"(I was) spending time up on the roof watching the helicopters go by that were rescuing people from Jamestown, but they couldn't get near enough to me to rescue me," Sophocles said. "But I could see people along the ridge and somehow I knew that they were going to be able to come get me soon."

Sophocles was right. The Summit County Rescue Group, a Breckenridge-based volunteer group, had been called in to help with the rescue effort.

The group consisted of four men who had traveled into Boulder to help assist with the floods.

Upon arriving in the neighborhood, Preston Burns, a rescuer who has been with SCRG for 13 years, described the conditions as "very strong currents, deep, unpredictable" and said they saw Sophocles sitting on her roof waving a cloth at them.

"Going into that area blind, it was unique," Burns said. "For me, my senses were very heightened on the environment as well as her. I remember seeing the house and just how trashed it was from the event."

The men made their way over to her, but with the loss of a pole they used for guidance and support, the men turned to a shovel they found in a neighbor's garage, which they later returned.

John Reller, who has now been with the group for 33 years, said of all the rescues he took part in that day, he remembered Sophocles the most due to how grateful and emotional she was.

"I just remember the emotional release she had," Reller said, recounting the moment they made contact with Sophocles. "The great feeling of being able to talk to somebody; it had been days. And then once we talked to her it was the shock of, 'OK, how are we going to get out of here?'"

Reller and the team made a V-shaped formation with Sophocles in the middle. In this form, they could "part the water" and make sure Sophocles was secure.

"The guys behind me had such a tight grasp on her that at one point while we were in the water, I felt something hitting the back of my calves and I realized it was her feet hitting me because they had her held up off the ground," Reller said.

After getting Sophocles to safety, Reller returned to her home to retrieve her dogs.

The photo

As the rescuers and Sophocles crossed the road, Daily Camera photographer Jeremy Papasso snapped a picture — an image that would end up on the front cover of Prairie Mountain Media's book, "A Thousand Year Rain: The Historic Flood of 2013 in Boulder and Larimer Counties."

Papasso said he was advised by his editor at the time to stay within Boulder city limits, but knowing the significance of the flood, he ventured out to Lefthand Canyon where he followed SCRG to Sophocles.

"Once I was up there, it was carnage," Papasso said. "There were houses down, bridges down, there was no way out and no way in."

Papasso risked his own life to capture the floods. Along with fighting the rushing waters, Papasso recounted a mountain lion interaction where he found himself frozen and locking eyes with a mountain lion 15 feet in front of him.

Papasso said it was scary to witness Sophocles go through her own near-death experience but "a really happy moment" once she was reunited with her dogs.

"It made me feel good that a photo I took made a difference in her life," Papasso said after hearing from Sophocles about the support she received. "It was probably one of the few times in my career that a photo I took had such a positive impact on the community."

The Daily Camera later nominated Papasso's photo for a Pulitzer Prize.

The impact of losing her garden

Sophocles and her two dogs were safe, and her home was intact, but once the water stopped flowing and Sophocles and her husband returned home a week later, she saw there was nothing left of her garden, not even the chain-link fence that wrapped around the property.

In the following weeks, Sophocles stayed with her husband's daughter in Hawaii, where she helped her tend to her small garden, before returning to Colorado and moving into a rental home next door.

"I pretty much shut down for a year," Sophocles said. "I went to visit his daughter, and I just thought, 'I will never be able to do this again. I've lost everything.'"

Sophocles said her devastation with the loss of the garden caused her to cry "all the time" and she eventually had to go see a psychiatrist.

Along with her appointments, Sophocles and her husband found support by meeting with their neighbors every Sunday, where they would talk, reminisce and organize their recovery plan.

"For three years, we had a potluck every Sunday morning," Suzanne Sophocles said. "It was emotional, it was also educational. We knew who had spoken to what division to learn about what we should all be doing next, and we had speakers come in to talk about revegetation or weed control."

Sophocles said the No. 1 priority of the group was to dig out the streambed by her home to prevent further flooding. The group established the Lower Left Hand Flood Recovery Inc. and successfully lobbied for the county to deepen the streambed before the following spring when the water runoff usually reaches its peak.

"It really got the neighborhood together," Aris Sophocles said. "Everyone became friends and worked together."

Recovering through gardening

A hundred truckloads of asphalt, soil and gravel followed, and four years later, the Sophocleses were able to move from the rental home next door and back into their home. Little by little, Sophocles said, she started gardening again.

First, it started with just putting down some grass and a fence for her dogs.

"As soon as I see a patch of grass, then you have to have a gravel path to walk around the grass, so we put in a gravel path," Sophocles said. "Then once you have a fence, you have to have some nice grasses and a few vines to grow up the fence. And then you have this little patch of shade where you have to have plants, and then it just goes from there — and it ends up like this."

Sophocles said her neighbor knew someone who worked for a marijuana grower and "magically" a truck came every week to dump free soil with peat, vermiculite and marijuana roots that she would use to cover the sandy banks surrounding her home.

Sophocles' garden today

Today, bright blooming bulbs can be seen across Sophocles' garden. Hummingbirds are spotted pollinating flowers, and a flowing stream can be heard with the chirping birds that Suzanne calls out by species name.

"It's took 10 years to really get it going," Suzanne Sophocles said. "This spring, with the help of all the rain, this is the biggest blast of greenery."

The garden sits in front of a backdrop of burned trees, likely from the Lefthand Canyon Fire in 2020 — a reflection of the disaster-prone area the Sophocleses reside in.

"You feel battle-hardened after events like this," Aris Sophocles said. "You learn resiliency."

Despite surviving more natural disasters than most, the Sophocleses said they're lucky.

"Four days after the flood, a typhoon hit the Philippines and killed 10,000 people," Aris Sophocles said. "That kind of put things in perspective for us. We were alive. We still had a shell of a house. We realized that things could be much, much worse."