In Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, we have a particular breed of twenty-first century conservative, a champion of states’ rights (when it suits him) and poor, beleaguered industries, including poor little Big Oil and much-maligned King Coal.
In the twilight of the Obama administration, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell came to Denver yesterday to announce the adoption of long-range plans to protect the Roan Plateau and the Thompson Divide — two spectacularly scenic and environmentally fragile areas on the Western Slope — from oil and gas drilling.
Plutonium has a half-life of 24,100 years — and it looks like stories about the former Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant, which produced plutonium triggers for bombs at a facility sixteen miles northwest of Denver, could keep coming for about as long. The legacy of the plant includes ongoing concerns…
On Halloween, the scariest day of the year, Aspen officials filed legal paperwork preserving the resort town’s conditional rights to make use of water from two of the last free-flowing creeks in the Roaring Fork watershed. A mundane matter for most municipalities, perhaps, but not in Aspen, where the move…
Glass is infinitely recyclable, so it’s easy to imagine that all those bottles and jars you put out at the curb every week are headed off to be melted down and remade — baby-food jar into baby-food jar, beer bottle into beer bottle, forever and ever, amen. But as Melanie…
If you’ve driven through the high country in recent days, you’ve likely seen roadkill along the roadside. But collisions involving wildlife don’t only kill animals — especially during this time of year, when migration patterns result in more deadly encounters between vehicles and large game such as deer and elk…
More than sixty years ago, when the Atomic Energy Commission decided to place one of thirteen nuclear weapons plants on a windy plain sixteen miles northwest of Denver, few people lived nearby. Rocky Flats was just that — a largely flat, rocky area by the foothills, with few houses nearby…
There’s no quick way to get to get to Porcupine. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, but Rob Pyatt has been driving back and forth between there and Boulder just about every month for five years now. It takes about six hours, depending on whether you head straight up…
Last December, the Colorado Department of Transportation debuted what it dubbed a Peak Period Shoulder Lane — shorthanded as PPSL — constructed along a thirteen-mile stretch of Interstate 70 heading eastbound from Empire to Floyd Hill. The idea was to ease traffic on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays for people returning to Denver…
Tomorrow, untold thousands of Coloradans will hit the road and head to public lands across the state in order to enjoy nature’s splendor during one of summer 2016’s final weekends. But those who would like to drive to Hanging Lake, in White River National Forest, are in for a disappointment…
Stagecoach State Park, south of Steamboat Springs near Oak Creek, is among many gorgeous slices of land incorporated in the Colorado Parks and Wildlife system. But late last month, the bucolic setting played host to a gruesome scene of the sort officials hope to avoid over Labor Day weekend, summer’s…
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…
If you’ve ever decided to hike one of Colorado’s 14,000 foot mountains during a weekend in July – especially if you set out for a peak located within or close to the Front Range – then you know it can seem like half of Colorado’s residents are out on the…
When most folks think about bad behavior at Rocky Mountain National Park, they picture the likes of Casey Nocket, who recently admitted to defacing the park with her art (she typically used acrylic paint rather than chalk) and then sharing photos of her vandalism on Instagram. But there are plenty of…
On June 14, authorities at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park recovered the body of 23-year-old University of Colorado-Colorado Springs student Ryan Wood Moss, a nature lover originally from North Carolina who’d been reported missing three days earlier. Moss’s family believes he died on June 9 after falling…
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…
In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, at the exhausted end of a nine-hour meeting, the Denver City Council approved a $383 million hike in stormwater fees, more than half of which help pay for a flood-protection project in northeast Denver that has been a source of protest and angry…
It’s going to be a loooong night for the Denver City Council this evening, with a packed agenda and at least two hot-button items scheduled for final consideration that have provoked considerable comment from neighborhood groups. The first is an ordinance for the licensing and regulation of short-term rentals, an…
Forget Zika. There’s a new reason to worry this summer. The first confirmed case of an emerald ash borer infestation in Colorado outside Boulder was detected this week, in Longmont. An arborist found and reported what he thought was the tree-killing pest in an ash on private land near Ninth…
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…
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…
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…
