Pinon Canyon expansion battle: Will troop reductions help or hurt?

As the Pentagon contemplates different ways to achieve reductions in force in the ramp-down from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, business leaders in Colorado Springs are pushing for a plan that would actually bring more troops to Fort Carson — while ranchers battling expansion of a maneuver site in southeastern…

Rocky Mountain National Park’s sheepish new logo is a ram job

Here at the Wild-Urban Interface Desk, we’re puzzling over the new logo just unveiled by Rocky Mountain National Park in celebration of its centennial, chosen two years early from close to a hundred entries. As you can see, it’s a highly retro design, strong on pine cones and columbines and…

Roan Plateau rethinking: Drilling delay prompts pouting, applause

The Bureau of Land Management’s decision late last week to seek additional environmental study of possible impacts of oil and gas exploration on the Roan Plateau has left energy interests fuming and sulking over the continued delays in tapping the area’s rich gas reserves — and enviro activists crunching numbers…

The ten best books about America’s prisons

This week’s cover story, “The Lifers Book Club,” reports on the Words Beyond Bars Project, a pilot progam at the Limon Correctional Facility that puts high-security prisoners, many of them serving life sentences, in a room with volunteers to discuss great books. It’s a modest effort that could transform lives…

Darrell Havens: Paralyzed inmate denied clemency, surgery

His doctors have told Darrell Havens that surgery could help relieve his deteriorating condition, but the wheelchair-bound inmate’s keepers in the Colorado Department of Corrections aren’t exactly eager to okay the operation — or to release him to seek care on his own. Havens, who was left a quadriplegic by…

Hentzell Park: Mayor Hancock forges ahead with open space land swap

Despite an emphatic recommendation against the move by her advisory board, Denver Parks and Recreation manager Lauri Dannemiller has okayed Mayor Michael Hancock’s plan to swap open space in the Cherry Creek corridor for an office building downtown. The decision sets up a showdown between the administration and some Hampden…

Kimmyan Franklin couldn’t escape her uneasy past

Take me up into your mind once or twice before I die (you know why: because the eyes of you and me will be full of dirt some day). — e.e. cummings She was always jotting down notable quotes in that journal of hers, the one her mother gave her…

Ongoing drought news great for beetles, bad for us

It’s now official: In some areas of Colorado, 2012 was the driest year since 2000. A late dump of snow in December has failed to take portions of the Western Slope and the southern part of the state out of the “extreme drought” category. And if the weather doesn’t take…