Orchard
“Big B’s is a place of connection. A place that makes you want to be fully present.”
Down a winding country road through Colorado’s North Fork Valley, Big B’s Delicious Orchards emerges through the trees like an oasis: thirty acres of fruit trees against the high desert, cottonwoods holding rope swings, ponds for paddling, and the West Elk Mountains rising beyond the orchard.
Big B’s has been taking shape for more than sixty years. Bob Kokes planted the orchard in 1965. In 1973, Bernie Heideman (Big B himself!) began pressing local fruit into juice. The Schwartz family later added cider and brought Delicious Orchards into Big B’s in 2006. Over time, Big B’s organically grew into a place to gather, play, celebrate, and belong. Part of what makes Big B’s unusual is how fully it invites people into the life of the orchard. Visitors can camp between the fruit trees. Full campground facilities make it possible to stay comfortably, while the café becomes a gathering place where campers share meals, listen to live music, and spend the evening together.
Alli and Daniel Coffey have invited friends to camp beneath the trees every year since 2020 to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles, a Jewish festival celebrating God’s provision in the wilderness through shared meals and temporary shelters. Beneath a row of fruit trees, they set one long table and string lights through the branches. Candles are lit. A friend who is a chef prepares a feast with food sourced from Colorado, including fruits and vegetables grown at Big B’s. Children ride bikes through the orchard while friends gather around the table to sing, laugh, tell stories, and share both what they are grateful for and what they still long for.
“There is something Sabbath-like about Big B’s,” shares Alli. It’s a place that makes you want to explore and experience with all your senses: to taste a ripe Honeycrisp, feel the thrill of swinging on the rope swing, notice the changing light, and eat with friends until the stars appear. Alli calls it a place of “friendly wildness.”
And then there are years like this one. An April freeze devastated much of Western Colorado’s orchards, including Big B’s fruit crop, leaving the orchard without its usual harvest in 2026. We are so accustomed to produce year-round in our grocery stores that it can be easy to forget what it means to belong to an organic world. We expect abundance without season and provision without much attention to the conditions that make it possible. But orchards remind us that life is seasonal, vulnerable, and dependent. Frost, rain, soil, and timing all matter. Fruit is never guaranteed. This year that was evident to every guest at Big B’s.
An orchard returns us to limits we have learned to resist. There are years of abundance and years of loss, and we are not separate from those rhythms, even if modern life makes it easy to imagine that we are. Orchards give us a place to imagine what it might mean to walk with God again, not outside the limits of the created world, but within them. We make room for play without productivity, delight without usefulness, and attention without hurry. We remember that we are creatures within an organic world, not machines standing outside of it. Orchards invite us back into seasonality, dependence, risk, rest, play, and delight. Big B’s Delicious Orchards is a sacred place.
Katie Lukashow is the Creative Director for Sacred Place. She and her husband spent several fall afternoons at Big B’s, sipping cold-pressed cider under the orchard limbs. Now living in New Mexico, she still considers Colorado’s Western Slope her home away from home.
Thank you to Alli Coffey for the conversation and contribution to this article.
