What: Reopening of the Mount Lemmon General Store and Gift Shop
When: Ribbon cutting at 10 a.m. today; store is open for business after that.
Where: 12856 N. Sabino Canyon Parkway, Summerhaven. Take Catalina Highway to Summerhaven; the store is on the left.
The Aspen Fire roared through Summerhaven on June 19, 2003, burning more than 70 percent of the village's homes and vacation cabins and seven of its businesses.
The fire, which had started two days before, would rage for a month through 84,750 acres of the Santa Catalina Mountains and destroy 333 structures, most of them homes, before being surrounded by fire lines and extinguished by monsoon moisture.
Today, as the Mount Lemmon General Store and Gift Shop becomes the first burned business to reopen, the natural and man-made landscape below the summit of Mount Lemmon is slowly reviving.
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Arizona Daily Star photographer David Sanders, whose award-winning photographs captured the fiery destruction of Summerhaven, revisited the mountain this month. His photos and essay show how it looked that day and how it looks now.
