When the only hospital in Leadville started to close down seven years ago, officials in the highest-altitude city in the country worried they would lose their “heart and soul.” There were layoffs in the nursing department. Extended care patients were moved to nursing homes. A city council member feared retirees would flee to other areas […]
Climax Mine
Posted inEnvironment, Growth, News, Outdoors, Politics and Government, Water
Aurora, Colorado Springs own water near Leadville. They may need to redraw a wilderness area to access it.
Aurora and Colorado Springs want to siphon more water from Homestake Creek, even if it requires slightly shrinking the boundary of the Holy Cross Wilderness to build a new reservoir. The cities’ request to drill test holes to better study the viability of a new dam below their Homestake Reservoir comes as Colorado’s congressional delegation […]
Posted inColoradans, Culture, Environment, Outdoors
Chris McDougall takes another run at extreme athletics, this time running with burros
Hal Walter was on a sprint toward a steep trail above Georgetown a few summers ago when he lost control of his running partner, a mammoth burro named Full Tilt Boogie. “The burro started stampeding, going faster than I could go. I had to wrap the rope around my hips and go into a full-body […]
Posted inBusiness, Energy, Environment, Growth, Outdoors
Are Colorado’s oil and gas and recreation industries all that different? Economists say no — and we need to protect them both
When the mines closed and the railroad left town in the 1980s, “pretty much everyone in Salida was unemployed,” Mayor P.T. Wood remembers. And when the West Slope oil and gas industry took a nosedive in 2014, sales tax revenue in Fruita plummeted 90%. Both communities have filled at least part of the void left […]