While most Coloradans are busy planning how to spend the state tax refunds they will receive thanks to our booming economy, residents of Huerfano County are anticipating the opposite: Homeowners in the southern Colorado county could actually pay higher taxes this year to make up for money their local government…

Betty Gibbs carefully aims her Isuzu Trooper down a steep dirt road carved out of the side of Fourmile Canyon. It is snowing, and the narrow path has become slippery; with hair-raising dropoffs to the south, drivers must cooperate to negotiate the route safely. But as an oncoming Volkswagen van…

On a recent afternoon, eleven members of the Territorial Daughters of Colorado convene their final monthly meeting before the winter holiday break. They have a full program: the officers’ reports (the checking account stands at $543.07), the minutes of the October meeting (approved), a membership update (nothing to report), food…

Last March a 35-million-year-old stingray fossil found in Wyoming became a television star and a symbol of all that is wrong with private fossil hunters. Now a national organization of fossil hunters and collectors has mounted a rebuttal campaign and threatened a lawsuit, arguing that a National Geographic TV show…

It seems like an all-too-familiar tale of the electronic age: A woman goes online, stops by an Internet chat room and falls for a guy thousands of miles away. She thinks it’s love, while he’s in it for less noble reasons. After months of torrid correspondence, they meet; it is…

At precisely 10:15 p.m., 75 fashionably late minutes from the start of her annual Halloween party, Dottie Grisby parts the orange and black crepe-paper streamers and glides into her dream. Dottie’s Social Club is starting to hop. Dottie is gotten up as a French maid: short black dress, white apron,…

The beginnings of WCCR/88.3 FM (“grassroots radio at the bottom of your FM dial”) probably can be traced back to Angel Babudro’s childhood fascination with radio. But being forcibly banned from KVNF, the public-radio station in the western Colorado town of Paonia, was a crucial factor, too. Still, that’s being…

To anyone who commutes along Sixth Avenue, the reservoir in front of the Oak Express furniture store is a familiar landmark. Several years ago Kenny’s Marina used it as a watery test track, where customers could try out new boats. More recently, Oak Express installed a giant fountain that blasts…

Associated Press, September 27, 1997: A dime-sized finished diamond that tips the scales at more than 16 carats, found in a Colorado mine, may be the biggest cut stone of its kind from North America. Rocky Mountain News, November 19, 1872: The Denver Diamond Company has “had prospectors in the…

There aren’t many patients rich or important enough for a hospital to consider building a brand-new wing just for them. But Denver Health Medical Center is on the verge of bestowing such VIP treatment on one group: prisoners. Last week, administrators for the medical center (formerly Denver General) pitched the…

About five years ago, a couple of male postal clerks at the downtown post office at 20th and Curtis streets started coming up with nicknames for some of their co-workers, who are mostly female. “Roly-poly ass,” “big black cow,” “horse teeth” and “black butt” are a few examples. “Wackadoo,” “Mack…

For several years, Rudy Reveles, a young attorney with the state’s public defenders’ office, represented the indigent and the criminally accused of Trinidad, a city of 9,700 in Las Animas County, from an office in Pueblo. But by September 1995, the business of defending Trinidad’s poor had become so big…

In the mid-Eighties, investors from around the country began pouring money into a proposed real estate development just outside the town of Morrison. Over the next few years they wrote checks for tens of millions of dollars; one Pennsylvania bank alone injected close to $50 million into the project, called…

Early on a Monday morning just before Thanksgiving break last year, somebody stepped onto the campus of the Community College of Aurora with a stack of neon-green leaflets and began plastering them on building walls. The anonymous author of the fliers, which also were inserted into faculty mailboxes, seemed intent…

On June 29 the state commissioner of agriculture, Thomas Kourlis, traveled to Salida to address the Colorado Beekeepers Association. The beekeepers consider themselves an underappreciated group, the overlooked child of Colorado agriculture, and this was the first time the government’s top farm official was paying them close personal attention. They…

At first glance, or even second, it would seem that Vickie Corder doesn’t have a good feel for bingo. The thirty-year-old Arvada resident recently reported she was down $30,000 from playing Pickles, a lottery-like pull-tab game popular in bingo halls. (An acquaintance says the figure is actually closer to $60,000.)…

On his deathbed in 1880, the great Ute chief Ouray instructed a protege named Buckskin Charlie to stay with the Utes and help lead the tribe through the difficult times ahead. It was a lousy last request. The Utes, seeking a permanent place to call their own in Colorado, were…

Nine months ago, Paul Cooper, a Denver attorney, wrote a letter to another local attorney, Jay Horowitz. The two lawyers represent different parties in the infamous ethnic-intimidation/wiretapping dispute between two Evergreen families, the Aronsons and the Quigleys. “Dear Jay,” the November 20, 1996, letter began, cordially enough. “When I asked…

At first Ken Kosanke’s research was underappreciated. “We were making these colored balls of fire, and so to see what they looked like, we’d throw them up in the air, because the chemistry changes,” he recalls. “Unfortunately, we had a neighbor whose garage had burned down after it was struck…

“I call it the gargoyle,” says Scott Stone, owner and sole proprietor of the Stone Fossil Co. of Frontier, Wyoming. “It’s one of the most incredible finds ever. I mean, it’s a fifty-million-year-old gargoyle.” Stone has never seen the piece, but, like many others, he has heard about it. He…

At age 37 but looking younger, Michael Garcia, a former schoolboy baseball and football player, keeps in shape by working out four days a week. Two of those days he trains at a nearby dojo, where he refines his skills in tae kwon do, a Korean martial art he has…

At the small Colorado Springs offices of Bereavement: A Magazine of Hope and Healing, the excitement started last year, when a writer for the prime-time show Promised Land placed a call to publisher Andrea Gambill. The television drama is a spinoff of the surprise CBS hit Touched by an Angel…