Happy frigid Colorado Sunday, friends.
It’s been a minute since the forecast had so many of us so far in the temperature cellar. And I can’t remember a time when so much snow was piling up in the central mountains with winds in the forecast so fierce that the Colorado Avalanche Information Center spent days campaigning against heading into the backcountry. (Watch Jason Blevins’ interview with the forecasters on our YouTube channel.)
The threat of avalanche is considerable to high right now in most of the places backcountry adventurers target on holiday weekends. But it’s a temporary condition that, with any luck, will resolve itself safely. It just takes time.
In this week’s cover story, Mark Jaffe reports on a handful of high-elevation southwestern Colorado communities that have grown weary of waiting for the in-town impacts of avalanches to be resolved and are investing in solar and battery microgrids to keep the lights on when mountains of snow break their connections to the power grid.
Senior Editor
The Cover Story
Southern Colorado towns look for their own light in the storm
“Happy families are alike,” Leo Tolstoy wrote. “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” And while Colorado mountains towns are more happy than unhappy, each is very much whatever it is in its own way.
This one has an ice park. That one has an art quilting retreat center. That other one a frozen dead guy.
Four communities in the San Juan Mountains, however, are very much unhappy in the same way and for the same reason: The lights keep going out.
The towns of Silverton, Rico and Ophir are victims of repeated blackouts as storms and avalanches knock out their power line, leaving townsfolk — about 1,200 in the three communities — in the dark, sometimes with no cellphone service to boot.
A fourth town, Ridgway, has more grid backup, but is also at risk of the dreaded — usually in the dead of winter — outage.
The local electric cooperative, the San Miguel Power Association, working with the towns, is trying to put microgrids — a combination of a solar array and a large battery — in each community as backup power.
There are tens of millions of state and federal dollars available for rural microgrids, and the four towns have already garnered about a quarter-million dollars for planning the facilities.
So all systems go. What could possibly go wrong? Ah, every Colorado mountain town, Tolstoy might say, is quirky in its own way, as nonplussed and flummoxed co-op and town officials found.
In a town like Silverton, which passes its winters with skiers being pulled through town by galloping horses in a sport called skijoring, or in Ophir, where watching an avalanche cut off the town is a big form of entertainment, you can bet things aren’t going to go exactly to script.
READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE
^MarkJaffe^2
The Colorado Lens
In case you missed it, we’ve curated our own visual feed of reporting to catch you up. Here are a few of our favorite snippets of everyday places, people and moments from every corner of Colorado this week.
Section by Olivia Sun | Staff Photographer
Flavor of the Week
A photography program helping veterans to process
When Samantha Johnston was hired as director of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center in 2015, one of her first initiatives was to create more community programs. After consulting with various community leaders, including Curtis Bean, who runs the Art of War Project, she created the Veterans Workshop Series. The program teaches veterans how to plan, produce and market a photography project. It culminates in an exhibition, “Through Their Lens: Personal Projects by Veterans,” opening this weekend.
Every veteran comes into the program with a different skill level and objective. For Yvens “Alex” Saintil, the workshop motivated him to reach out to soldiers he served with in Iraq and collect photographs they had taken.
“A lot of my motivation is thinking about people who served in World War II and Vietnam. A lot of those stories are lost,” he said. “Those guys served and went through things that they didn’t even talk to their families about, just because the mental health system wasn’t the way it is today. So I’m just trying to preserve a part of history that I was a part of. I think my guys, their families, their kids deserve it.”
While Saintil outsourced many of his photos, Cherie Sutton, who participated in this year’s workshop, turned inward for her inspiration. Her photo series, titled “Fleeting Beauty,” uses a technique in which images are layered on top of one another, creating a double-exposure effect. Sutton laid floral patterns from 17th-century Dutch paintings over self-portraits. Her project was a way of dealing with the incessant thoughts about aging.
Each of the 27 veterans featured in the exhibition chose two photographs to display, creating a collection of over 50 photos ranging from shot-from-the-hip combat zone images to portraits, landscapes and lighthouses.
“Through Their Lens: Personal Projects by Veterans” is on display until Feb. 17 at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, 1200 Lincoln St., Denver. Admission is free.
Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
SunLit: Sneak Peek
“So Much Stuff” details a find in Boulder that fits an enduring historical narrative
EXCERPT: Anyone who has taken on the task of household decluttering no doubt has scratched their head over the theme of archaeologist and author Chip Colwell’s “So Much Stuff.” How did we manage to collect all these things? In answer, Colwell takes the long — very long, as in 3 million years — historical view in a fascinating exploration that, in this excerpt, takes us to a front yard in Boulder.
THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: The origin of Colwell’s look at our hoarding nature came from the simplest of interactions — his sister’s offhand question about why we accumulate so many possessions. Finding the answer, in the broadest historical sense, sent him on a journey across the globe. Here’s a portion of his Q&A:
SunLit: Tell us about creating this book. What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
Colwell: For more than 12 years, I was an anthropology curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and helped oversee a collection of more than 100,000 objects from countless cultures. Up until my sister asked me about the big story of stuff, I tended to look at these objects rather narrowly, as single moments in time. As I began work on this book, I began to listen to the entire collection as a symphony of human creativity played since the dawn of our kind.
Unlike my previous books, I needed to tell a vast story of all of us.
READ THE INTERVIEW WITH CHIP COLWELL
LISTEN TO THE SUN-UP PODCAST INTERVIEW
Section by Kevin Simpson | Writer
Sunday Reading List
A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.
🌞 Let’s clear the political docket first: Gov. Jared Polis gave his State of the State speech Thursday. We listened to it multiple times — all 57 minutes of it — and created an annotated and fact-checked transcript to help you get up to speed on his policy agenda. House and Senate leaders set up the start of the lawmaking term with speeches Wednesday highly focused on approaching the session with civility. And there are at least eight legislative themes that have already emerged. The agenda also includes a handful of water-related bills, including one hoping to get us to give up our love of lawns. Want to weigh in this session? We’ve written down the directions.
🌞 A Larimer County child welfare worker faces 99 criminal counts after she allegedly falsified reports about visits to see children on her client list. Jennifer Brown reports on how this case and a handful of others renewed calls to reform the child welfare system, but warns that it is unlikely any legislation will be proposed this year.
🌞 Two guardians have been named to represent Boulder Creek’s point of view in Nederland town affairs. Seriously. Michael Booth reports this is the latest expansion in the “rights of nature” movement.
🌞 We talk about snowpack in Colorado a lot. But what does it mean, really? Shannon Mullane explains in plain language how that number relates to water flowing from your tap.
🌞 A community group in Pueblo isn’t giving up on its dream that Xcel Energy will replace the coal-burning Comanche Station with next-gen nuclear generation. Mark Jaffe reports on what they’re talking about and whether small modular reactors are a viable replacement for the electric plant that will shutter by 2031.
🌞 Tatiana Flowers went along with a group of Aurora Central High School students attempting to make up course credits lost because of their chronic absences and learned how hands-on learning is helping some of them reconnect with their studies. Programs like these are designed to help improve graduation rates in Colorado, which Erica Breunlin reports are actually getting better.
🌞 Why are so many young artists setting up shop in San Luis Valley towns? It starts with affordability and flows right into providing the chance to really be part of a community. Tracy Ross visited to get a sense of the vibe.
Section by Dana Coffield | Senior Editor
Thanks for visiting with us today. As always, we are appreciative of your time and your support — especially in light of the sad news this week that after 20 years in print, the scrappy Four Corners Free Press will publish its last edition this weekend. As Kevin Simpson reports, the award-winning alt monthly will surely be missed in its community.
With that in mind, please feel free to introduce us to someone you think might be missing out on our journalism. Forward this newsletter. Share links far and wide. Encourage someone to become a member for as little as $5 a month at coloradosun.com/join. And we’ll see you back here next Colorado Sunday.
— Dana & the whole staff of The Sun
Corrections & Clarifications
Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.