Posted inClimate, Environment, News

While Colorado’s eastern half revels in rain, the Western Slope is still stuck in a drought

The Ute Mountain Ute Reservation sits at the lower end of a 40-mile, gravity-fed canal, and waits for whatever water the towering San Juan mountains will give up for the season.  By the second week of May, it was clear 2021 will be a bust. The Utes’ farm enterprise has already switched to hopes for […]

Posted inNews, Politics and Government

In Colorado’s hard-to-count communities, census outreach and coronavirus support are one and the same

To say that 2020 has not been a normal year to take a national census — well, it doesn’t quite capture the full extent of the situation. The Census Bureau’s normally nonpartisan operations have been repeatedly undercut, whether it’s in the form of chronic underfunding, the federal administration’s fear-stoking attempt in 2019 to add a […]

Posted inBusiness, Coloradans, COVID, Health, News, Politics and Government

Colorado’s rural pharmacies wrestle against big business to remain community cornerstones

CHEYENNE WELLS – Ted Billinger Jr. closed his pharmacy in this prairie town on March 13, 2019, as the worst storm on record hit Colorado. He delivered a prescription for a child with the flu and one to the local nursing home, went home, had a heart attack in his backyard and died. For nearly […]

Posted inBusiness, Coloradans, Environment, Health, News, Politics and Government

Recycling can be a hard sell in rural Colorado. That hasn’t discouraged a resourceful nonprofit effort in tiny Swink.

SWINK — Dee Hostetler walks through the quiet, cavernous brick building past pallets stacked high with translucent, kaleidoscopic bales of recycled plastic that filter the morning light like stained glass. The hollowed-out remains of this former Holly Sugar factory, all 27,000 square feet of it, stands just a block off the short strand of U.S. […]