GRAND JUNCTION — The founders of five Western Slope startups walked out of the second-annual Greater Colorado Pitch Series with more than $3 million in funding on July 16. Eight rural innovators — gleaned from more than 100 contenders — were vying for $1.3 million in capital from four different investors as part of […]
Grand Junction
Posted inClimate, Energy, Environment, News, Politics and Government
“We need to provide a path forward for clarity”: Interior Secretary Deb Haaland visits new Bureau of Land Management HQ in Grand Junction
GRAND JUNCTION — Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Friday paid her first visit to the new Colorado headquarters of her department’s Bureau of Land Management after its relocation from the nation’s capital by the Trump administration sparked criticism that the move was intended to gut the agency that oversees vast tracts of public lands in […]
Posted inClimate, Growth, News, Water
Drought forces Grand Junction to dip into Colorado River for drinking water for the first time in more than 50 years
For 65 years, the Ute Water Conservancy District serving Grand Junction and Mesa County has let the Colorado River flow on by, while drawing drinking water from pristine runoff 11,000 feet high on Grand Mesa. The severe, ongoing drought has now forced other plans. The utility has for the first time begun to mix Colorado […]
Posted inNews
Colorado ranchers are selling off cattle to survive another year of dried-up grass and parched soil
Janie VanWinkle can hear it in the discontented way her cows call to their calves, the way the dried grass crunches into powder under her boots. It’s the sound of drought. The landscape where her cows graze in Grand Junction doesn’t have a green tint this spring. It’s gray and brown, ugly and parched. “And […]
Posted inColoradans, News
JUCO World Series is back in its panoramic Grand Junction home
By Richard Rosenblatt, The Associated Press GRAND JUNCTION — The games are played at Sam Suplizio Field, a dandy of a baseball diamond with a magnificent view from behind home plate of the Grand Mesa — the country’s largest flattop mountain. The NJCAA’s Division I Junior College Baseball World Series is on after being canceled […]
Posted inCOVID, Health, News
Cases of coronavirus variant from India nearly tripled in less than a week in Mesa County
GRAND JUNCTION — Health officials in Colorado have reported the number of infections from the COVID-19 variant from India nearly tripled in less than a week in Mesa County, the only county in the state with reported variant cases. Mesa County Public Health Director Jeff Kuhr told county commissioners on Monday that the county, which […]
Posted inColoradans, Crime and Courts, News
“The reading man” of Grand Junction was killed by a stranger. His friends in downtown aren’t done telling his story.
GRAND JUNCTION — To those who never knew his name, Warren Barnes was simply “the reading man.” He was as much a fixture in downtown Grand Junction as the sculptures that line Main Street. For years, the grizzled old man could be found most days hunched over a book on a bench in a breezeway […]
Posted inColoradans, Crime and Courts, Health, News
How fake blue pills killed people on the Western Slope and led to Colorado’s first counterfeit opioid death conviction
The pill was light blue and stamped with “30” and “M,” just like a real 30mg oxycodone. Except it was a counterfeit, cooked up in an illegal Mexican lab rather than precisely measured in a pharmaceutical factory. The fentanyl it contained was potent enough to kill Jonathan Ellington in a matter of seconds. He died […]
Posted inNews, Politics and Government
Interior nominee Deb Haaland in the sights of lobbying campaign to keep BLM headquarters in Colorado
GRAND JUNCTION — Members of Colorado’s congressional delegation and Grand Junction business leaders plan to lobby President Joe Biden’s Interior secretary nominee to keep the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management in the Western Slope city. The Grand Junction Sentinel reports that Democratic U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, […]
Posted inEconomy, News, Outdoors, Politics and Government
Grand Junction fights to keep Bureau of Land Management headquarters with its future under Biden unclear
President Joe Biden’s first day in office spurred to action a team of Mesa County “first responders” who are working to keep the federal Bureau of Land Management headquarters in Grand Junction amid concerns the new administration may move it back to Washington, D.C. The local business leaders on Wednesday met to discuss plans to […]