LAS ANIMAS — The farther the white van got from Denver, away from the sirens and honking horns and closer to desolate stretches of two-lane highway through corn fields and melon farms, the more panicked Linda Fitzgerald became. When the van pulled into Fort Lyon, a former Army fort and then tuberculosis sanitarium, she had […]
Growth
Posted inBusiness, Energy, Environment, Growth, Health, News, Politics and Government
“It is going to be very messy”: Opposing oil and gas ballot measures respond to Colorado’s contentious drilling climate
Call it “Clash of the Ballot Initiatives.” Two measures — either of which would be, if passed, disastrous, critics say — seek to set new land-use standards in Colorado. One would require oil and gas drill rigs be set back 2,500 feet from homes and natural features such as streams. The other would give landowners […]
Posted inEnvironment, Growth, Health, News, Outdoors, Politics and Government
Three years after the Gold King Mine spill there’s no fix to leaky abandoned mines. What’s the holdup?
CLEAR CREEK COUNTY — When the Gold King Mine spill sent a plume of yellow sludge cascading down the Animas River in southwest Colorado three years ago, environmentalists and conservationists saw an opportunity to educate the public about a problem that’s been around for decades. They also saw it as a way to draw new […]
Posted inBusiness, Coloradans, Environment, Growth, News, Water
Colorado’s hot summer of dry ditches and empty reservoirs has left distressed farmers sweating: Will it get worse?
OLATHE — John Harold charges his Chevy through chest-high stalks of sweet corn. He’s talking on his phone, scribbling notes. He’s got corn-harvesting crews spread across the Uncompahgre Valley, picking more than 100,000 ears a day of his trademarked Olathe Sweet. The fields of onions need weeding. His beans, too. More than 100 fields of […]
Posted inNews
High-country Colorado towns wrangle big-city problems with homelessness
DURANGO — From his vantage point in a homeless camp on a scrubby mesa above Durango, Corey Davis could look down this summer on what resembled a Western-themed diorama. Tiny figures darted up and down Main Avenue as a coal-fired steam train chugged out of a historic depot trailing a black cloud of coal smoke. […]