Happy Colorado Sunday, friends!
Thanks for stopping in for our weekly conversation about the ideas, issues, people and places that help define Colorado.
Some of those conversations last longer than others, including the one tackled by Shannon Mullane this week in the cover story. She’s been following along the past few months as the Southern Ute Indian Tribe finally got access to water it stores in Lake Nighthorse near Durango. When she looked a little more closely at the rubber tubes bringing water from the lake for use in oil and gas production on the reservation, she learned that the welter of ideas being put into action this summer had been contemplated since 1904.
Editor
The Cover Story
Lake Nighthorse’s long promise
Looking out at people swimming in Lake Nighthorse outside of Durango or bouncing on its inflatable aqua park a few weeks ago, I was left wondering how much they knew about the water around them.
That expanse of cool, blue water was the center of a decades-long fight. Originally, what is now Lake Nighthorse was a dream to give farmers and ranchers a more stable water supply. It turned into a vision for the Animas-La Plata Project, which at a certain point included multiple reservoirs, pipes and canals across La Plata County.
Steadfast supporters pushed it through long debates in Congress from the 1960s through the early 2000s. Opponents fought hard over environmental, financial and interstate concerns. What ultimately drove it past the finish line was the idea that, with this project, two tribal nations could — once and for all — settle their water rights in Colorado.
It’s a lot of history to take in for the newcomer. These days, living memory is fuzzy. People don’t know the key years or the name of that one fish that stalled the project in the ’90s. It took hours of flipping pages in an archive at Fort Lewis College and driving out to visit former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, now 92, to tie together loose ends.
What I found were century-old water debates that still come up in our Colorado River discussions today and many tribal water claims left to settle in the basin.
This summer, one tribe — the Southern Ute Indian Tribe — finally put its water in the Animas-La Plata Project to use for the first time. This is the story of what it took to make it happen.
READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE
Shannon Mullane | Water Reporter
The Colorado Lens
From the heights of burro racing to the home of the slopper, the colors of the Colorado summer were popping all week. Here are some of our favorite images of the week.
Eric Lubbers | CTO & Newsletter Wrangler
Flavor of the Week
What’s your favorite Colorado thing to do or place to visit?
Now that Gov. Jared Polis has promised he will chain himself to the Capitol plaza to block construction of the pedestrian bridge he proposed to be built from there to Civic Center to mark the state’s 150th anniversary, we are left to contemplate ways other than scaffolding and traffic jams to celebrate Colorado for the next year.
Polis is nothing if not a team player, so his office has compiled its annual Celebrate Colorado list of things to do and places to go on the cheap now through next weekend, which takes in Aug. 1, the day in 1876 that Colorado became the nation’s 38th state.
It’s a start. But we’ve got 52 more weeks until the official sesquicentennial celebration. So we are turning to you, dear readers, to help us identify the things to do and places to visit that make Colorado, well, Colorado.
What events or places do you think stand out as the ultimate in Colorado experiences? Drop us a note at newsroom@coloradosun.com with “Colorado 150” in the subject line and we’ll report them back over the next year.
Dana Coffield | Editor
SunLit: Sneak Peek
“Countdown” charts the course from first nuclear test to the present
EXCERPT: From tales of the first nuclear explosion in New Mexico — an event dubbed Trinity — to the ongoing battle for nuclear supremacy, author Sarah Scoles carries the reader along on a literary journey as harrowing as it is enlightening. “Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons,” acknowledges the complicated past of the U.S. nuclear program (remember Rocky Flats?) but also its future as scientists continue to refine and upgrade our arsenal. As I write this, the book is a finalist in General Nonfiction for a Colorado Book Award, whose winners were announced last night.
THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: Scoles was granted access to some of the scientists working on the nuclear program, but interviews were difficult and forced her to learn how to have meaningful and thoughtful conversations with people dealing with legal constraints on what they could tell her. Here’s a slice of her Q&A with SunLit:
SunLit: What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
Scoles: Before I was a journalist, I was planning to be a scientist. I studied physics and astronomy. And in my early research for “Countdown,” I learned that many of the people who end up working on nuclear weapons come from those fields. They’d begun their careers studying stars and supernovae and whatnot, and then they’d translated that physical expertise — with atoms and explosions and fission and fusion — into something much more earthbound. I became fascinated with what made each of them pivot their careers, and how different their lives were than if they’d become astronomy professors.
READ THE INTERVIEW WITH SARAH SCOLES
LISTEN TO A DAILY SUN-UP PODCAST WITH THE AUTHOR
Kevin Simpson | Writer
Sunday Reading List
A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.
🌞 Colorado has some pretty lofty goals when it comes to cleaning up greenhouse gas emissions. Mark Jaffe looked at the many ways in which the Trump administration is getting in the way of that progress. Oh, and also, leaning back into power generated using natural gas is going to be expensive — for customers of those power plants.
🌞 Speaking of the federal government slow-rolling long planned programs, Tamara Chuang talked with dozens of broadband service providers in line for grants to improve or add service in remote rural areas. All of them had to reapply for their grants and reprioritize cost over quality. And let’s just say the process of doing everything over wasn’t cheap.
🌞 The Western Slope fires we’ve been watching closely aren’t quite out, but Olivia Prentzel learned that the same folks responsible for tamping the flames now have turned their attention to restoring the land that was dug up to slow the spread of fire.
🌞 About that plan for Nederland to buy Eldora Mountain Resort, Jason Blevins heard from industry execs who like the idea, but say it’s going to be a complicated deal to get done.
🌞 Did the state release the personal data of Coloradans in response to ICE subpoenas? At first the governor wasn’t saying. Then Taylor Dolven learned that the state responded to four of nine subpoenas, one of which was in error.
🌞 Colorado’s National Women’s Soccer League team finally has a name. And Lincoln Roch found it means Colorado’s professional ultimate Frisbee team will surrender its name.
🌞 Just when we got the regulatory system for one psychedelic substance squared away, it’s time to start talking about another. Gabe Allen took a look at where we stand with ibogaine, and how it might be integrated into Colorado’s existing framework for psychedelic healing centers.
🌞 This week in wolf news, Colorado Parks and Wildlife released the cause of death for two gray wolves released here in January. One died as a result of a legal foothold trap set for coyotes.
🌞 We can do no better than the headline on Michael Booth’s most interesting story of the week: Colorado lichenologists name discoveries after Indigo Girls and bring science closer to fine.
🌞 Technology: Can’t live with it, can’t live without it. That was on clear display this week when search and rescue teams in the mountains announced they’d received a bunch of weirdly written text message calls for help. Jason Blevins found out they were the result of some iPhone-related malfunction that screamed things like “MULTIPLE PEOPLE ON FIRE.”
Dana Coffield | Editor
Thanks, friends, for spending a little time with us today. We appreciate everything you do to support us, whether it is reading our stories, forwarding them on to a friend, or encouraging others to sign up for this newsletter. Have a great week!
— Dana & the whole staff of The Sun
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