After studying plans for Montrose’s new library, religiously conservative residents of the Western Slope town fear that their children will be checking out hellish images instead of heavenly reading material. An October 20 library board meeting was packed with residents decrying the planned use of four gargoyles on the exterior…

On a brilliant October afternoon at the future site of the Parade of Homes at the former Lowry Air Force Base, the only new structure standing is a tent set up for a press conference. Construction workers from the site take a break to join the small crowd waiting for…

Local boxing aficionados are so desperate for a revived state boxing commission that one of them, Dr. Russell Simpson, even attempted to recruit his friend Liz Romer, the governor’s daughter, to deliver a message to the governor beseeching him to appoint a commissioner by executive order. But despite the unorthodox…

The U.S. Forest Service and the Vail ski resort have pressured Colorado Division of Wildlife personnel to stop grumbling about an expansion by the giant ski resort that would damage what is possibly the last refuge of the state’s elusive lynx population. The war of words over the lynx, revealed…

The Denver Urban Renewal Authority’s most persistent problem lately doesn’t stem from any of the agency’s multi-million-dollar downtown development projects. Instead, it’s coming from a lone homeowner who holds DURA responsible for a four-foot crack in his home’s foundation. The ongoing fracas has seen DURA officials file criminal harassment charges…

The Adams County Sheriff’s Department has put together a manual to help landlords spot potential troublemakers–did you know that Asian gangsters like Japanese vehicles?–and is trying to spread the word on the Front Range about gangs and drugs. But after deputies took their “Landlord Training Program” up to Georgetown, a…

Moments after a sobbing Gene Sanchez staggers out of Denver County Courtroom 303-W, having just lost custody of his four kids, Judge Lawrence Manzanares bursts out of the adjoining clerk’s office in pursuit. At first, the people lingering outside the courtroom don’t recognize the judge out of his robes–he looks…

The only thing standing between Paul Fox and his seven-year quest to open a topless club is a mobile home parked across the street from his property. Last week the Adams County Board of Adjustments upheld a previous ruling that determined that Fox’s property at 6000 Pecos failed to meet…

Down the tree-lined streets of the Hill in Boulder, where many of the University of Colorado’s fraternities are located, you can see the signs of an uneasy cease-fire in the booze war between CU frat boys and Boulder police. In the quiet blocks around the Greek houses, people walk their…

The nation’s top outdoor-recreation official, Lyle Laverty, isn’t scheduled to take over the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain region until November, and Colorado environmentalists are already howling like a pack of wolves. “Recreation is the new game,” says Roz McClellan of the Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project, “and as a result,…

After five-year-old Dustin Redd drowned in City Park’s Ferrel Lake last June while attending a city-run day camp, Mayor Wellington Webb and parks manager B.J. Brooks rushed to name a new playground at the park in the boy’s memory. However well meant, that gesture hasn’t stopped Redd’s family from filing…

The passengers have to wait for the driver to stop flirting with the female ticket agent so he can start loading the Tuesday morning bus to El Paso. Mothers keep one eye on their children dressed in their Sunday best while rearranging the luggage around their feet–old Samsonites fortified with…

Eighty-year-old Jane Spence of Denver didn’t plan on dying. But when she caught a fatal case of pneumonia this past March, her lack of foresight resulted in her estate losing a $3,500 damage deposit she had put down at the Golden Orchard assisted-living home in Littleton. Golden Orchard, which offers…

Get ready for a cutthroat battle. The Winter Park ski area wants to build a road on public land along a creek, saying it’s needed to evacuate injured skiers. Environmentalists say the unpaved road would be nothing less than a ski trail to some thrilling backcountry runs on the area…

Most days, Jack Eads, 61 and blind, sits in his room at the Barth Hotel in lower downtown and putters around with one of his accordions. That’s something he can do by himself. But his deft touch recently got him in big trouble: A saleswoman at the Walgreens drugstore in…

Over the years, the Pikes Peak Hill Climb has survived fatal crashes, inclement weather on the windswept summit and even the oddball behavior of a Texan named Bill Williams, who in 1929 insisted on pushing a peanut up the 14,110-foot mountain with his nose. But a proposal to pave the…

As far as Michelle Valdez is concerned, the crowd waiting to take Elitch Gardens’ newest thrill ride may have already had their minds erased. A fight that erupted Sunday, May 18, while people stood in a three-hour-long line for the Mind Eraser roller coaster left Valdez’s eleven-year-old daughter Savannah lying…

Inside Ed Dwight’s hangar-like studio, the 63-year-old sculptor rushes between welding sparks and tables laden with his work, talking angrily about the troubles he’s having with some of his ex-employees. He almost yells in order to be heard above the din of heavy equipment used to make his art. “These…

Like an Old West marshal fixated on vice, police captain Mary Wamsley set Lakewood straight and is now determined to clean up Commerce City–whether it wants to be clean or not. Over the past two years Wamsley and sister officer Dea Aragon have zeroed in on the only four sex…

Hoping to cash in on the “American dream of home ownership” with minimal effort, a Littleton company is holding an essay contest to give away a $150,000 house. There’s just one catch: The house doesn’t exist–and neither does the $150,000. In a scheme that has already drawn the attention of…

Spanish speakers in Denver may be shocked by the impending invasion of Luscious Lulo ice cream, considering that “lulo” is slang in some Latin quarters for the female nether regions. But the dessert, made from the Latin American lulo fruit, has already made a hit on Capitol Hill and is…

Three years ago, while attempting to climb Mt. Everest’s treacherous north face, Mark Udall started to think about getting into the family business–politics. And after just ninety days of working at the Colorado House of Representatives, the Boulder Democrat has found his new career a bit treacherous, too. Making the…