part 1 of 2 September 15, 1994–Denver General Hospital Dr. Adam Myers picks a surgical mask off the wall outside an isolation room on the ninth floor. Placing it over his mouth and nose and smoothing his short, silver-gray hair, he knocks on the door and enters. The mask is…

part 2 of 2 There’s not much sense lecturing someone in an HIV clinic about the long-term hazards of smoking, although Myers suspects a link between smoking and Kaposi’s ability to attack the lungs of people with AIDS. Sam has a more immediate concern. At first, the Daunoxome reduced the…

The Colorado Supreme Court told him to get with the program. The publicity of a family sex scandal put his potential for personal bias in the spotlight. But one year later, critics say Denver Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Dana Wakefield has found another way to stonewall the state law that…

part 1 of 2 After a steep ascent, the trail plunged down a rocky slope toward a wall of sheer cliffs. Kenny Frost pulled up short. U.S. Forest Service archaeologist Bill Kight stopped and looked at his friend, the Ute tribe’s liaison with the Forest Service and the Bureau of…

part 2 of 2 In 1973 Congress passed the Archaeological Resource Protection Act, which prohibits disturbing sites of human habitation over fifty years old. Seventeen years later the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act was made law, requiring that human remains be returned to Native Americans for reburial. Still,…

A national watchdog of charitable donations on behalf of the nation’s disadvantaged trotted into town Tuesday to sink its teeth into one of Denver’s largest philanthropic foundations. But Robert Lee, the executive director of the Denver Foundation, says it was a case of a bark being worse than a bite…

The young man sitting in the downtown coffeeshop pulled the newspaper clipping out of his schoolbook. The dominant article on the page reported that the 50,000 hikers a year who climb Colorado’s 54 peaks over 14,000 feet–commonly called Fourteeners–were seriously damaging plants and soil. A much smaller article next to…

part 2 of 2 For all Georgia’s boundless patience and energy, there was one type of patient she couldn’t warm up to. In the early Eighties DGH had begun seeing its first people with what the medical communities on the East and West coasts were calling the “gay disease.” By…

part 1 of 2 The red light on her answering machine was blinking frantically when Georgia Caven walked into the living room of her Lakewood home. She pressed the button. “Georgia, this is Adam. I need to speak to you. Call me when you get in.” It was the voice…

It really wasn’t much of a tree. The little conifer that grew next to a roadside cutoff on Highway 74 outside of Evergreen was only four feet tall and, compared with the impressive specimens on the hillside above it, the tree’s misshapen branches and crooked trunk were hardly worth a…

part 1 of 2 John Trost takes a deep breath. Dressed in a sports jacket and tie that speak of upper-class tastes, the slight, boyish-looking man and his “wife” bustle onto the stage at the Theatre on Broadway. “Boy, have we got a story to tell you,” exclaims another couple…

part 2 of 2 But it was a certain group of sixth-grade boys who gave Trost the most trouble. On January 12, a week after the West Side Story incident, Trost was once again having a hard time making himself heard. One of the loudest kids was a boy he’d…

One book at a time, Professor Ron Grimes clears the shelves of his small office at the University of Colorado. There are several hundred. Black Elk Speaks. The Book of the Hopi. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Grimes, who looks the part of a religious-studies scholar–which he is–with his…

To AIDS activists in Denver, the reaction from Colorado Springs was typical: The only county health director in the state to object to a particular policy on AIDS testing that they support was the guy down in–where else?–conservative El Paso County. Coming from the home of Colorado for Family Values…

part 2 of 2 Avis Little Eagle joined Indian Country Today fresh out of journalism school. She is Hunkpapa Lakota, the people of medicine man Sitting Bull, from the Standing Rock reservation near Little Eagle, South Dakota. At first Little Eagle did the usual small stories handed to young reporters…

part 1 of 2 Kayla Moonwatcher remembers putting the finishing touches on the sweat-lodge altar. It’s perfect, she thought, as she looked around the field outside Lyons. Just right for the most important day of my life. In three days she would be adopted there by her spiritual mentor, Oscar…

Leslie Whited didn’t think that it was too much to ask that her daughter be allowed to attend elementary school only a few blocks away from home instead of taking a forty-minute bus ride to another school. After all, Whited had a medical excuse–her own serious head injury–for wanting her…

part 2 of 2 In the spring of 1991 Tony entered an Alamosa pawn shop carrying his television. The family had moved to the San Luis Valley almost a year before, and things weren’t going so well. He’d been reduced to selling his possessions in order to feed his children…

part 1 of 2 Allah-who-akbar. At the call to prayer, the Brown family assembled in the living room of their home near the tiny town of Mosca, in the San Luis Valley. Rolling out their prayer rugs in rows–the males in front of the females–they faced northeast, having determined that…

The outgoing senior-class president of Denver’s Manual High School blames the principal for the fracas that marred the school’s centennial graduation ceremonies on May 29. The principal blames the kid and the kid’s mother. The media blames Kinshasa Sayers, the graduating senior who commandeered the microphone. And meanwhile, Sayers says,…

Old and lonely, Mabel Smith sat in her Denver apartment, looking forward to the telephone calls from her “friends”–those sweet young people who would inform her about the wonderful prizes coming her way. “You’ve won a car, Mabel!” “Mabel, you’re the winner of our $20,000 grand prize!” “You’ve been selected,…

If Jamey O’Donnell builds it, they will come. And that’s what worries political consultant Rick Reiter. “They” are the homeless, whom Reiter envisions flocking to a new Capitol Hill food bank proposed by O’Donnell, a 37-year-old former drug addict who founded the National Organization Against Homelessness less than two months…