Café and Mercantile
Fireweed is a café and mercantile in Rico, CO. We serve specialty coffees, smoothies, baked goods, salads and soups, and rotating deli items. We also offer housemade items to bring home to your kitchen- things like frozen soups, dips, salads, snacks, and dog treats! We support other local businesses as much as we can by providing a mercantile with local produce, meat, dairy, bulk, dry goods, as well as art and gifts! It’s our priority to bring regionally produced fresh foods to our community, and to build a community hearth for all to share.
our roots
Founders Chelsey Rajavuori and Matt Guertin opened Fireweed Café and Mercantile in the spring of 2020 and came up to speed swiftly, serving this remote mountain town during the thick of COVID-19. Over the ensuing 5+ years, they shaped Fireweed into an intentional, locally-focused place that highlighted quality food and provided a community space for the inhabitants and visitors of Rico.
Fireweed's next chapter is rooted in the same values that have always made this place special: good food, genuine connection, and a deep love for the San Juan Mountains. New owner Emily Thorn has called this region home for more than fifteen years, after growing up between northern New Mexico and Silverton. Though she's newer to Rico, she has found a lasting sense of belonging here. "Rico is where I've chosen to be," she says, "and where I hope to be forever." When the opportunity to carry Fireweed forward arrived, the timing felt less like coincidence and more like a natural next step, bringing together a lifetime of experience with a quest to commit deeply to the place she calls home.
Emily studied Environmental Science with a focus on organic food systems and has spent more than two decades working in ecological restoration, watershed conservation, sustainable agriculture, and rangeland management throughout the West, including many years partnering with communities on the Navajo Nation. That work taught her a simple truth: healthy soil, clean water, and thriving communities are inseparable. Today, that philosophy lives on at Fireweed. By offering nourishing food, local produce and groceries, supporting regional artists and makers, creating meaningful local jobs, and providing a welcoming gathering place for neighbors and visitors alike, Fireweed celebrates the people, landscapes, and community that make Rico such an extraordinary place to call home. More than just a coffee shop, Fireweed exists to serve community and ecology together.
fireweed- about our inspiration
Fireweed- chimerion angustifolium- is a plant of transition . Unflappable. Healing. It is one of the first plants to bloom after a forest fire, and arrives in Rico each summer with joyful fuchsia blooms despite decades of post-mining soil disturbances.
A plant that flourishes in scorched earth, fireweed fixes essential nutrients in the soil, readying the ground for new life to thrive. Fireweed also helps track phenological change and cycles- drawing up information from the soil, collecting air temperature and precipitation data, and blooming in accordance. Fireweed plant keeps tabs on climate change and makes adjustments constantly.
Fireweed, as a space, provides a place to land despite upheaval. Inspired by the collaborative qualities of the earth around us, we exist to build a place of grounding and thriving for our community, and we are happy to share the resilience of Rico with those who pass through. Inspired by the generosity offered by this sturdy plant, we hope to bring healing and regeneration to the folks around us, to consistently give back into this place and the people who call it home.