Over the years, we’ve regularly reported about the Scarlet Ranch, a local swingers club operated by Kendall Seifert — and back in 2012, when the operation relocated from 424 Broadway to the former Northwoods Inn steakhouse in Littleton, we noted that the 18,000 square-foot log cabin-esque retreat was set on “several…
The April 6 announcement that city planners had settled on Denver’s City Park Golf Course as the logical place to build a thirty-acre “detention area” for stormwater runoff — a move that will involve closing the course for more than a year and bulldozing hundreds of trees — wasn’t exactly…
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…
Opponents of the I-70 East project are knocking on doors in Elyria and Swansea, telling residents that they can still comment on the proposal to replace the aging I-70 viaduct in their neighborhood with a partially buried, much wider highway. The project is years in the making, and thanks to…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The attack came without warning. It was carried out swiftly, with ruthless, mechanized efficiency. And when it was over, it was as if the trees had never been there in the first place. Rich Grant had never seen anything like it. A forty-year resident of the Washington Park area and…
The more people who visit the White River National Forest and other wilderness areas in Colorado, the greater the chances of encounters with bears, who seem increasingly unafraid of humans. For these reasons, White River has released emergency orders for each of the last two summers requiring that visiting backpackers…
It’s been a rough time for people who rely on the Animas River in southwestern Colorado, ever since the August 5 blowout at the Gold King Mine that released three million gallons of toxic, heavy-metal-laced gunk into the river. A consortium of businesses, public agencies, environmental groups and other stakeholders…
The former Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant was declared cleaned up — or as close as it was going to get — ten years ago this week, more than fifty years after the facility sixteen miles upwind of Denver started producing plutonium triggers for hydrogen bombs. In 2017, 5,000 acres of…
As the U.S. Bureau of Land Management sees it, last month’s removal of 167 wild horses from a rugged, remote area in Rio Blanco County was a success, easing the strain on damaged rangelands and substantially reducing a herd that had become too large to be sustainable. Wild-horse advocates tend…
Boulder is known as one of the most bike-friendly cities in the country. Yesterday, however, the Boulder City Council voted to scrap protected bike lanes along a four-block stretch of Folsom (a process dubbed “right-sizing”) in favor of returning to four lanes of traffic — the configuration that had previously…
In our 2012 post featuring ten Best of Denver bike rides, we showcased a number of locations chosen with mountain biking in mind. Now, the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit partner of the U.S. Forest Searvice, has upped the ante. The organization recently posted about eight mountain bike rides not…
Alpine Waste and Recycling has expanded the capacity of its Denver recycling plant, more than doubling its ability to process single-stream recycling material. “Alpine Waste and Recycling has invested in the future of recycling,” says Brent Hildebrand, the company’s vice president of recycling. “In investing in that future, we’ve also…
Two weeks after an EPA crew accidentally released three million gallons of toxic mine water into the headwaters of the Animas, the river has been declared safe for irrigation, recreation, and other uses. No doubt many people — including Governor John Hickenlooper, who guzzled some Animas water to demonstrate that…
Yesterday, we shared video of Governor John Hickenlooper drinking water from the Animas River in an attempt to show that pollution from the environmental catastrophe caused by the Environmental Protection Agency’s accidental discharge of millions of gallons in wastewater was beginning to dissipate. Of course, he added an iodine pill…
Yesterday, our Alan Prendergast wrote about the environmental disaster on the Animas River, caused by the Environmental Protection Agency’s accidental release of mining wastewater measured in the millions of gallons — and noted that the situation was many years in the making. During a visit to the area, Governor John Hickenlooper…
There are half a million abandoned mine sites across the western United States, including more than 23,000 in Colorado. Many of them have the potential to expose high-country waterways to runoff from a highly acidic brew of tailings, mine dumps and metal ore. Last week’s dump of millions of gallons…
It’s a Saturday morning in June, which means that Gary Lefko is cruising the Pawnee National Grassland in his 1999 green Subaru Impreza, looking for birds. With the windows down and camera and binoculars close at hand, Lefko drives along, noting any specimens that pass his sightline. There’s a red-tailed…
