Judy Ceretto and her husband Ron, a retired Fort Lupton firefighter, were traveling through Nevada when they happened upon a sea of American flags.

“We had been out there for a week and we went by when they were just putting the flags out,” Ceretto said. “We didn't get to see any of the events but just the flags, and we stopped and looked at it. I thought, 'Wow. We need to bring it back home.'”

The patriotic display was her first encounter with Fields of Honor, part of a national effort to help communities celebrate their local heroes — veterans and police, fire and emergency medical first responders.

“I had to stop and go find out who was behind it and how to go about doing it myself,” Ceretto said. “I told my husband, we are going to go home and we are going to do that in Fort Lupton.”

This is the third year Ceretto and a group of local volunteers, working the Colonial Flag Foundation, have filled Fort Lupton's Pearson Park Fields with American flags for the Great Plains Field of Honor.

For 2023, the field features 1,020 flags. More than half — 677 flags, to be exact — have been sponsored, paid for by local family and friends. They all want to honor their family that have served publicly, as veterans and as first responders.

“It's the same for me now,” Ceretto said. “Each time I come up that hill and see those flags, I still bust out crying.”

It's the third time in four year Ceretto and her friends have volunteered to make the event happen. The first two years, in 2020 and 2021, the Fort Lupton event has held November. Two factors complicated both events, she said: The weather, with November gloom and early sunsets, and the calendar.

“We had to work around the recreation department schedule and the weather, so they decided we needed to move to April,” she said. “There wasn't enough time to do it by April 2022, so we postponed it until now.”

The event's proximity to Veterans Day also made finding speakers and presenters that much more difficult, she said.

“We couldn't get speakers, we couldn't get flyovers, we couldn't get anything like that,” she said. “In November, they're already spoken for. This year, we have plenty.”

There's no lack of speakers this year at the April 29 ceremony. Featured guests include retired Larimer County Sheriff Justin Smith, a flyover featuring military helicopters, a 21 gun salute and a 13 folds ceremony, in which each fold of the flag represents a special meaning. There will also be bagpipes from the Colorado Emerald Society and an honor bell. The ceremony is scheduled for 1 p.m. April 29 at the fields, northeast of the intersection of Highway 85 and Highway 52 in Fort Lupton.

But the field of flags, the thing that caught Ceretto's eye, are still the main draw. Volunteers opened the decorated field on April 26, posting them in rows deep. The sponsored flags all carry memorial cards saying who is being honored, from World War I and II veterans, those from Vietnam, the Gulf War and Afghanistan to first responders around the country with local family.

Flag sponsorships cost $25 per flag. Proceeds from those sponsorships go to Warrior NOW, an effort to end veteran suicide, and Building Warriors. That's a non-profit group that seeks to provide wellness services to first responders and their families.

The field has been open daily in the field since, from noon to 8 p.m. Sitting in a green tent at the entrance, volunteers have a listing of every sponsored flag on display and can help people find the flag honoring their loved ones.

People are welcome to visit the field at anytime,  and just take it all in, she said.