Human Waste Challenges (and Toilet Trap) at San Juan National Forest

The tremendous popularity of Rocky Mountain National Park — it’s currently the third-most visited national park in the country — has brought with it a number of less positive developments, including isolated incidents of parking-lot rage and a high volume of human waste. While most of the latter is left in structures…

Colorado’s Superfund Sites Stretch From Silverton to East Colfax Avenue

On Monday the Navajo Nation formally endorsed a Superfund cleanup of contaminated mines in southwestern Colorado – including an Environmental Protection Agency-caused spill at the Gold King Mine site that released millions of gallons of contaminated water into the Animas River last August, tainting land stretching from Silverton down to…

The Ten Most Walkable Cities in Colorado

In the wake of our updated list of Denver’s most walkable neighborhoods, we recently posted about the ten least walkable cities in Colorado according to the online resource Walkscore.com. Now, we flip to the other side of the coin. Continue to check out the site’s picks for the ten most…

The Ten Least Walkable Cities in Colorado

Earlier this month, we posted about the ten most walkable Denver neighborhoods according to Walkscore.com. Now we’re going from micro to macro by looking at cities across the entire state — many of which aren’t very walkable at all. Below, see the ten Colorado cities with the site’s lowest walking…

High Line Canal: Planners Want to Transform Its 71-Mile Course

When he was a boy, acclaimed naturalist Robert Michael Pyle found what he describes as an “imaginary wilderness” not far from his back door in Aurora — a muddy, weedy, man-made ditch where all sorts of interesting flora and fauna had managed to survive the relentless march of suburbia. The High…

Colorado Introduces First Hemp Seed Approval System in Country

The Colorado Department of Agriculture is hoping to help bring hemp into the limelight with a new program that’s a first for the country. Under its brand-new seed certification program, created in conjunction with the Colorado Seed Growers Association (CSGA) and Colorado State University, the CDA aims to give the…

Prairie Dogs Find Powerful Political Allies: Third-Graders

The Colorado Department of Agriculture refers to them as “destructive rodent pests.” The state’s wildlife conservation strategy describes them as a “species of greatest conservation need.” Ranchers and developers want to nuke them. Environmentalists say they’re a key component in a rapidly vanishing ecosystem. Colorado’s deeply ambivalent, love-hate relationship with…

Colorado Personalities We Don’t Want to See in the New Year

To everything and everyone, there comes an ending. Here at the end of 2015, we’d like to offer up this handful of people for nomination to Colorado’s mutual “unfriend” list. It’s nothing personal (okay, in some cases, it totally is), but in the spirit of new beginnings and resolving to…

Recycled Water Controversy: Denver Zoo Backs Off the Purple Pipe

Denver Water’s recycled water program, a supposedly green solution for the increasing demands on one of the metro area’s most precious resources, has been coming under some tough scrutiny lately. As detailed our recent cover story, “What’s Killing the Trees in Denver’s Parks?”, neighborhood groups and park advocates believe that…

Denver Digs Trees Gears Up to Fight Emerald Ash Borer

The current Westword cover story, “What’s Killing the Trees in Denver Parks?”, examines an emerging controversy over Denver Water’s recycled water program, which provides wastewater that’s been sufficiently treated for irrigation purposes at a fraction of the cost of potable water. Denver’s parks department has saved millions by switching numerous…

Rocky Flats Cold War Museum Is Out in the Cold

The former Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant was officially declared cleaned up – or as close to clean as it was going to get – ten years ago. That was fifteen years after the FBI led a pre-dawn raid on the facility that produced plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs, a…