Happy Sunday, friends.
It was such a busy week of politics, politics and more politics, I hardly know what to do with myself on the cusp of a long holiday weekend.
Tell you what, though, I’m going to commit to stepping outside of my house, where I’ve been head down in work and all-consuming household matters, and re-engaging with my community. I can’t say what shape this might take. It might mean sharing honey collected from my hive or ice cream homemade with rhubarb from the garden, or just leaning on a spade and talking to every person who passes my yard. The activity seems somehow less important than the action of being present in my place.
Some community is where you find it, loose and discovered perhaps in a short trip to a small town in the San Luis Valley, like Danika Worthington shares in this week’s Colorado Flavor. Others are forged in fierce and focused existential battles, like the one Nancy Lofholm discovered while reporting this week’s cover story.
The people Nancy talked to in a rundown trailer park near Gunnison are disparate in age and ethnicity, experience and aspiration, and yet have somehow united in their sense of purpose and belonging. They have coalesced to protect their place — and their community.
Senior Editor
The Cover Story
>> Trailer park gets a new name. And a 73% rent hike
When I got wind of Gunnison mobile home park residents being in deep trouble because a new owner had jacked up rents, I knew it could be a story that might shake up the whole community. I travel through Gunnison regularly and have seen how affordable housing is in serious short supply lately. Workers, including most of the unique Cora Indian population that lives in the Gunnison area, are shoehorned into the trailer parks scattered around Gunnison.
These trailer dwellers are a vital part of the surrounding communities, where businesses are having to cut back hours and services because of a worker shortage. Follow the dots, and the housing shortage is behind that lack of cooks, clerks, carpenters and cleaners.
The Country Meadows park — 56 ramshackle trailers tucked under towering cottonwood trees — is home to people who have nowhere to go other than their patched-together trailers linked by potholed dirt roads and served by unreliable utilities.
Colorado laws regarding mobile home parks are changing and giving these residents more rights. But those changes are not enough and not in time for Country Meadows.
And here’s the kicker, when the new owner raised the rent for spaces in the park, he changed the name to Ski Town Village. Is that highfalutin name worth an extra 300 bucks a month to residents who live on the razor’s edge financially? >> STORY
Section by Nancy Lofholm | Reporter
FOMO Colorado
No matter the type, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) can get a bad rap — so we’ve curated our own visual feed to catch you up. Here are a few of our favorite snippets of everyday places, people, and moments from around every corner of Colorado this week.
Olivia Sun | Staff Photographer
Flavor of the Week
I’ve only ever driven through Del Norte, or maybe stopped for a quick lunch before heading off to my final destination. Whether it was a trip to Durango or heading back up to Denver, it’s fair to say I never really took the time to look around.
But while on a road trip through southern Colorado for my mini-honeymoon, we ended up staying at a hipster remodeled motel in the town after visiting the Great Sand Dunes. I must admit, dear reader, I think I fell in love. (For the second time; the first was with my adventure companion, but that’s a story for another occasion.)
It started out as casual indifference — not of malice, to clarify, more of ignorance. And then, like any good love story, I found myself quickly and unexpectedly developing a crush. The motel was truly a vibe. (We watched “Dune” in honor of the Sand Dunes.) The bakery served some delicious cinnamon rolls, which we ordered while a bunch of locals were laughing over some joke or another. And the park and riverwalk where we strolled with our morning treats were truly delightful.
But this silly little crush turned into a head-over-heels, shout-it-from-the-roof-tops love the moment we walked into The General Specific Store. I’ve been to many antique shops, but this one blew me away. It had one of the best curated collections displayed in some truly inspired ways. There were drinking glasses sporting illustrations of sage grouse, clothes your grandma — the stylish one — probably wore, medieval art depicting one saint or another (don’t tell my Catholic high school I don’t remember who they are), random contraptions that must have served some pre-internet purpose, and an old car’s front bumper.
We had met co-owner Corey Hubbard at the bakery in the morning, and she said she’d be opening the store late but promised we’d be able to stop by before we left town. Sure enough, she was there like a guardian angel, ushering us into her beautiful shop and telling us all about this young, energetic, entrepreneurial spirit taking over the less than 2,000-person town.
You should go visit the store, ask Corey all about the big plans she and her friends have in mind for the town, and I dare you not to fall in love, too.
Danika Worthington | Presentation Editor
SunLit: Sneak Peek
In “Red Rabbit on the Run,” a woman with a strange story isn’t sure where to turn
EXCERPT: Tiffany Morrow, recently escaped from a sex slavery nightmare, is on the run — from her captors, but also from the people hired by her parents to rescue her. “Red Rabbit on the Run” is a romantic-thriller follow up to Jodi Bowersox’s award winning novel “The Diamond Diva Vendetta” and delves into the mind of a character dealing with schizophrenia — a uniquely unreliable narrator.
>> Read the entire SunLit excerpt.
THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: When a contributing character from her previous novel became a key element of “Red Rabbit,” Bowersox faced the challenge of fleshing out exactly who Tiffany Morrow really was. That’s when she started exploring how a character with such a mental health challenge might fit into a mystery, and how she could present her as accurately as possible. Here’s an excerpt from the author Q&A:
SunLit: Tell us about creating this book. What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you actually sat down to write the book?
Bowersox: In the previous book, Tiffany was just a college student from Denver that they were searching for. Now I had to flesh her out and make her into a real person. I had thought about the paranoia of schizophrenics and how that could complicate a mystery. How would those trying to help her know if her perceptions were real or not?
Much research ensued. I read about schizophrenia. I read first-hand accounts of those afflicted. I read about current treatments and drugs. I read about those who could live a normal life as long as they stayed on their meds, and I read about those who never quite made it to normal — who never escaped the voices completely.
>> Read the entire interview with author Jodi Bowersox.
Kevin Simpson | Writer
Sunday Reading List
A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.
🌞 About six months ago today, we were beginning to come to terms with what was left after 100 mph winds sent the Marshall fire racing across Boulder County open space and into the towns of Superior and Louisville. More than 1,000 families lost their homes. Erica Breunlin, Jennifer Brown, Shannon Najmabadi, Olivia Prentzel, Olivia Sun and Hugh Carey have kept up with four of those families. >> STORY
🌞 The primary election on Tuesday was very much a battle of bucks, with stacks of cash flowing in at the last minute. But Democrats deploying a spending strategy that was successful a couple of elections ago found out voters are more savvy today. And our Politics Team reported results from all of the big-deal races. GOP voters rejected most candidates who embraced election conspiracy theories. But Tina Peters isn’t giving up a second chapter of the narrative. And have you met the man whose identity Peters allegedly stole? >> STORY, STORY, STORY, STORY, STORY, STORY
🌞 It only took — checks notes — 5,600 hours, but Aspen has completed an overhaul of zoning and other rules to try to keep some housing in glitter gulch attainable. Jason Blevins has the details of the plan unanimously approved by a city council that includes people who “put community first,” even though their own pocketbooks are likely to take a hit. >> STORY
🌞 School buses are the largest transportation fleet in the country and converting them to cleaner fuel could have a huge impact on reducing climate-changing greenhouse gases. But Erica Breunlin learned it’s going to be expensive. >> STORY
🌞 Mystery solved: That big solar installation going up in Olathe that looked like it might be a cryptocurrency mine actually is a cryptocurrency mine. Mark Jaffe adds some of the details that he couldn’t get the first time he wrote about the conversion of an old lumber mill. >> STORY
Section by Dana Coffield | Senior Editor
Well that’s a wrap on the recap of an incredibly busy week. We’ll be off on Monday, settling in for some camaraderie and a good fireworks show, and hope you do, too. See you back here on Sunday for another look at the things and people that make Colorado great. If you want to bring a friend, send them over to sign up at coloradosun/sunday.
— Dana & the whole staff of The Sun