Yesterday, our Alan Prendergast wrote about the environmental disaster on the Animas River, caused by the Environmental Protection Agency’s accidental release of mining wastewater measured in the millions of gallons — and noted that the situation was many years in the making. During a visit to the area, Governor John Hickenlooper…
There are half a million abandoned mine sites across the western United States, including more than 23,000 in Colorado. Many of them have the potential to expose high-country waterways to runoff from a highly acidic brew of tailings, mine dumps and metal ore. Last week’s dump of millions of gallons…
It’s a Saturday morning in June, which means that Gary Lefko is cruising the Pawnee National Grassland in his 1999 green Subaru Impreza, looking for birds. With the windows down and camera and binoculars close at hand, Lefko drives along, noting any specimens that pass his sightline. There’s a red-tailed…
The Colorado Court of Appeals has dismissed a lawsuit in which four concertgoers claimed they were injured by falling rocks at Red Rocks Amphitheatre because of Denver’s negligence. The decision is a victory for the City of Denver, but a loss for the people who were hurt in the 2011 incident…
It took months of work by local activists, working in conjunction with a statewide land trust, a national conservation group, and other funding partners, but the backers of an innovative “healthy living park” in the heart of Alamosa have finally secured the money to complete the acquisition of 38 prime…
Ever wonder if all that stuff you put in your recycling bin actually gets recycled? So did we. As explained in this week’s cover story, “Breaking Bad,” none of the glass that Denver residents put in their purple bins gets recycled into new glass. Because Denver has single-stream recycling —…
At last, the weather in Colorado is heating up. But with the rise in temperatures comes increased dangers of avalanches in the high country, with numerous slides in recent days — one of which prompted a daring rescue operation. A man on Buffalo Mountain was reportedly swept over a waterfall by…
In May 2014, legendary climber Dean Potter was in Telluride for the premiere of the controversial film When Dogs Fly — controversial because it features scenes of Whisper, Potter’s dog, joining him on numerous high-flying BASE-jumping adventures. The trip to Colorado was hardly unusual for Potter, who’s spent plenty of time over…
In a move that could have far-reaching implications for the the West’s ailing coal industry, a federal judge in Denver has ruled that U.S. Department of Interior officials failed to follow the law in approving expansion plans at two Colorado coal-mining operations — and that the agency has an obligation,…
Most of the Denver residents old enough to remember the 1965 flood were, of course, quite young at the time — some in their teens or twenties, others mere children on the night the South Platte brought the city to its knees. To a kid, an event of such magnitude…
More than sixty years ago, when the federal government decided to build a nuclear weapons plant, it picked an eleven-acre spot on the Front Range northwest of Denver, a landscape studded with farms and ranches — and just sixteen miles upwind of a major city. When it opened in 1952,…
The campaign to seek national monument designation status for a rugged stretch of canyons, meadows and forests between Buena Vista and Salida, which recently shifted from a long-running battle in Congress to a call for executive action, is about to pay off. President Barack Obama is expected to announce this…
He lost a tough, key race to rising Republican media darling Cory Gardner, but Mark Udall still has some unfinished business before giving up his U.S. Senate seat in a few weeks. And at the top of the list is Udall’s push for passage of S. 1794, his bill to…
Six years after the drill-baby-drill crusaders of the Bush administration targeted one of Colorado’s most ecologically unique places for widespread energy leases, a surprisingly reasonable compromise has been hammered out over the fate of the Roan Plateau. The deal is being praised by state and federal officials as well as…
After years of battling the Pentagon’s plans to expand the 367-square-mile Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, ranchers and other residents of southeastern Colorado thought they’d finally achieved peace with honor last fall, when a top Army official formally announced that the military was abandoning any land acquisition plans for PCMS. But…
Between Buena Vista and Salida, the Arkansas River sweeps through Browns Canyon, an area of granite cliffs and rugged backcountry that’s popular with elk, bighorn sheep, mountain lions and black bears — not to mention hunters, anglers, rafters, hikers and campers. But this quintessential slice of Colorado wilderness is also…
No one denies that the vividly named Seidel’s Suckhole offers challenges aplenty to rafters navigating the Arkansas River, as witnessed by the tragic death of Sue Ann Apolinar, who’d booked a journey with a company called Arkansas Valley Adventures. Jesus Espinoza, Jr., Apolinar’s son, subsequently sued AVA, maintaining that the…
Our Adam Roy recently told you about Casey Nocket, who he described as “a graffiti artist…suspected of leaving her mark on one of the state’s most-visited slices of wilderness, Rocky Mountain National Park.” Now, Nocket is thought to have done likewise on another beautiful part of our state: Colorado National…
These are the tools you’ll need to extract sperm from some of the rarest trout in the world: a towel, a small glass dish like those used on cooking shows to hold chopped ingredients, gloves, fish tranquilizers and your thumb. On a recent day, no fewer than ten biologists, staff…
The city’s $3.25 million settlement with Jamal Hunter is just the latest hit the Denver Sheriff’s Department has sustained in recent weeks. Between charges that complaints of abuse have been ignored and accusations that guards have been drinking on the job, smuggling in drugs and porn and instructing inmates to…
WildEarth Guardians probably wouldn’t advise you to take a family day trip to the South Platte River anytime soon. The grassroots environmental group is accusing a sugar-processing mill of illegally dumping harmful pollutants into the river…
A new study of the Stapleton neighborhood, Denver’s nationally acclaimed infill project, concludes that key traffic engineering decisions have encouraged high-speed driving rather than traffic “calming,” made residential areas less safe and generally worked against efforts to develop the area as a showcase of New Urbanism — a design ethos…
