Happy Colorado Sunday, fam.
I hope you had a great weekend and marked the nation’s anniversary appropriately — not by doing something landscape-threatening to celebrate, like presenting a birthday cake with 249 lit candles to your backyard barbecue guests. (If that actually happened somewhere, I do not want to hear about it.)
This week’s cover story feels a bit personal to me. I was recently up in the valley Tracy Ross writes about, on a ranch owned by people whose relatives are main characters in her story. We were there for a gloriously intimate and informal wedding, with guests from all over the country and all over Pitkin County.
After the promises to love and cherish were made, high on a hill with Mount Sopris as a backdrop, guests settled into conversation as little boys in cowboy hats practiced roping posh young city women wearing party finery. Many people talked, at least a little, about wolves and how their reintroduction to the valley has caused trouble for our host, whose family has ranched there for three generations.
Later, as leftover tacos made from beef raised on the ranch were boxed up to go, we looked down over vast pastures lately owned by titans of fashion and finance, and wondered if the flashing lights in the far distance were cars carrying fancy folk home to their secluded spreads, or ranchers and range riders trying to haze wolves from cattle.
In her story, Tracy explores this beautiful place where cultures are colliding and people with real stakes in the game are dreaming up creative solutions to resolve the conflict.
Dana Coffield
Editor
The Cover Story
Wolf reintroduction is like a soap opera — but with ecological implications
A wolf moves past a game camera on the Lost Marbles Ranch. (Pete McBride, Special to The Colorado Sun)If you’re anything like me, you’ve been obsessed with Colorado’s reintroduction of gray wolves since the first five wolves, captured by Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials in Oregon, were released in Grand County the week before Christmas 2023. In my humble opinion, reintroduction bests any of the soap operas my mom has watched consistently since I was a child (“Days of Our Lives,” anyone?).
Joking aside, what has unfolded on the Western Slope, largely between ranchers and wolves, has become the story I cover that keeps me up at night. I worry about the wolves, I worry about the ranchers and I worry about the CPW wildlife managers on the ground in the state’s “wolf impacted” counties. And it’s not just because of the drama, it’s because, over time, I’ve come to care: about the wolves, the ranchers, the CPW folks and the people who believe bringing wolves to Colorado — the one geographic puzzle piece missing in the restoration from Canada to Mexico — is desperately important.
The wolves are here by no choice of their own, and some are having a pretty hard time of it. The ranchers have had the wolves thrust upon them, and many are truly struggling. The mental health challenges CPW employees are facing are said to be unprecedented. And the reintroduction advocates — maintaining their belief that animal-human-predator coexistence is evolutionarily important — may be onto something.
As Joanna Lambert, a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation biology at the University of Colorado who is heavily involved in the reintroduction told me, there have only been five great extinctions in 3.5 million years of the evolutionary history of life on Earth and we’re in the midst of the sixth one. Every single year, she said, there are more and more humans, less and less habitat and fewer resources for humans and other species. “So I keep going back to, OK, all right, wolves are inconvenient, and in fact, make life very difficult … but what’s the option?”
When you read my story this week, you’ll see, it’s complicated.
READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE
Tracy Ross | Reporter
The Colorado Lens
It was a good week to see people as they are. Here are a few of our favorite images of people expressing themselves at work and at play.
Stalled contract negotiations led Safeway and Albertsons workers to walk off the job and join picket lines at stores all over Colorado, including the Safeway at East Sixth Avenue and Corona Street in Denver on Tuesday. On Saturday, UFCW Local 7, the union that represents the striking workers, announced the end of the strike after a tentative contract deal containing increased benefits and wages was reached. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun) Mia Villalobos poses for quinceanera photos at the Colorado State Capitol on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) A visitor Tuesday photographs the portrait of President Donald Trump chosen to temporarily replace one the president objected to and described as “distorted” after it hung in the Colorado State Capitol in Denver for six years. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) Participants carry a flag as they take part in the 51st annual Denver Pride Parade on June 29. Organizers estimated about 100,000 people showed up for the parade, which had a new route this year because of construction on East Colfax Avenue. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski) A teacher engages an infant in a learning activity at Family Star Montessori School on June 27 in Denver. Cuts to a state program that subsidizes early childhood education is threatening the school, which cares for 250 children at two locations. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun).Dana Coffield | Editor
Flavor of the Week
For whom Otto Mears’ roads toll
We use transponders now to pay for toll roads across Colorado, but when the Otto Mears Toll Road opened it cost 10 cents cash to drive one way on the 11-mile road. The 4-wheel-drive road tops out at more than 11,200 feet with outstanding views of Mount Ouray and the Silver Creek valley. (David Krause, The Colorado Sun)Long before a turnpike connected Boulder and Denver in 1952 or express lanes started opening up and down the Front Range and into the mountains, Otto Mears was crafting ways to charge for easier travel in Colorado in the late 1800s.
I stumbled on his name when my wife and I — children of the TV generation — went on a Sunday drive in search of Bonanza, Colorado. We didn’t find the Cartwrights, but we did get our first introduction to Otto Mears and his toll road empire, which started in the 1870s to help commerce flow between the San Luis and Arkansas River valleys.
After doing a bit of reading about Mears, it’s no wonder this 11-mile stretch between Bonanza and the town of Shirley later earned him the moniker “Pathfinder of the San Juans.” The Otto Mears Toll Road west of Poncha Pass tops out around 11,230 feet and was the first of nearly 450 road miles (200 of them tolled) and rail lines he built across southern Colorado.
The times I’ve traveled the Otto Mears Toll Road (and all of our high country passes and dirt roads), I’ve thought about not only building the road, but those hardy enough to travel it. This time, we were bouncing around in my 2000 Jeep Wrangler, which has off-road tires and a lifted suspension, and I thought about wagons or people on horseback getting that high in the hills.
The rugged road between the mining towns started to become obsolete when a tramway was built between Bonanza and Shirley in the 1920s. What a ride that must have been.
You can certainly go into a rabbithole researching Mears, (hey, it’s better than doomscrolling). Here is a pretty comprehensive article by Colorado Central magazine, but historical groups — the Jewish Museum of the American West, History Colorado, Colorado Railroad Museum, San Juan County Historical Society — have stories to tell of the man who lived to be 91, spent time in Colorado politics and helped design the Colorado Capitol. And, as our Jason Blevins wrote this past ski season, the Mears family’s pioneer spirit still drives Wolf Creek ski area.
READ MORE OF OTTO MEARS’ STORY
David Krause | Editor
SunLit: Sneak Peek
“A Dream in the Dark”: A peek into the world of a terrified crime victim’s blindness
“As she neared the open field on her right, she shifted her cane to her left hand along with the plastic bag and reached her right hand into her coat pocket, gripping the cold metal. It was here that she had smelled the faint odor of marijuana when she had passed by the first time, and she wasn’t taking any chances that the partaker wasn’t coming out of his stupor, hungry for who knew what.”
— From “A Dream in the Dark”
EXCERPT: In this short but powerful excerpt from “A Dream in the Dark,” author Robert Justice channels the mindset of a woman previously blinded by an attacker. A finalist for the Colorado Book Award for Mystery, the story examines a miscarriage of justice after the victim identifies the alleged perpetrator through a dream — echoing a real-life Colorado case. But in this excerpt, he illustrates a world in which the victim still harbors uncertainty about her testimony and remains terrified, even on a short walk to the grocery store.
READ THE SUNLIT EXCERPT
THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: Justice explains the cases that inspired his novel as well as his ongoing work to support the Colorado-based innocence project that pursues freeing the wrongly convicted. Here’s a portion of his Q&A:
SunLit: What do you want readers to take from this book?
Justice: … Denver is a beautiful place to live and, as a Denver native, I love the city I call home. However, part of my aim in setting my novels in Denver is to shine a light on the fact that in this beautiful place to live, not everyone is living beautifully. Wrongful convictions can happen anywhere. I’ve set my novels about systemic injustice in my hometown because I must not assume that what happens in other places is not also happening in my own backyard.
READ THE INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT JUSTICE
LISTEN TO A DAILY SUN-UP PODCAST WITH THE AUTHOR
Kevin Simpson | Writer
Sunday Reading List
A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.
Could Medicaid be made harder? Cartoonist Jim Morrissey sees more red tape in the future. (Jim Morrissey, Special to The Colorado Sun)? The president’s Big, Beautiful Bill/Big, Ugly Bill (depending on which party sent the news release) passed out of the U.S. House and on to his desk on Thursday. Colorado’s representatives voted as expected: four Republicans in favor, four Democrats against.
? Why was Medicaid so front and center during House debate on the president’s domestic policy/budget bill? John Ingold explains in 14 easy-to-understand charts. It was the first of three stories on the subject, including one that looked at the impact on families caring for kids with complex medical conditions and another, by Taylor Dolven, that focused on work as a condition of eligibility.
? U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper says he’ll run again next year, but the GOP still has yet to offer a candidate with enough name recognition to stand a chance against the incumbent Democrat. Jesse Paul wondered what’s up with that and learned the Republican party seems to be a big part of the problem.
? We probably will never stop talking about housing affordability in Colorado. Brian Eason took a peek into a new report and found out that zoning is at least partially to blame, prohibiting multifamily dwellings and in some cases demanding minimum lot sizes as large as 2 acres.
? Should the feds continue to fund programs supporting high-need K-12 students, teacher recruiting and retention and after-school programs? About $70 million in funding for programs like that in Colorado seems to be stuck while the government contemplates the question. Erica Breunlin reported on what might happen if the money promised last year doesn’t show up. Attorneys general in 15 states, including Colorado, are trying to force open the spigot on another canceled grant program — for mental health pros in schools — with a lawsuit.
? If you missed the big Psychedelic Science conference last month in Denver, Jason Blevins has a dispatch. Turns out that the feds’ hands-off attitude toward developing regulations for the use of substances such as psilocybin for mental health care leaves the states to develop rules. Oregon and Colorado are leading the work.
? In our latest Aging in Colorado story, Kevin Simpson and Parker Yamasaki caught up with people suffering from the most common condition of growing old: too much stuff. This package includes a few helpful tips for shedding excess everything and a tender column by Larry Ryckman about how he was reunited with a priceless possession while cleaning out his mom’s house.
? Something to think about as you wrap up this long holiday weekend and plan for the rest of the summer: Only you can prevent forest fires and the spread of invasive zebra mussels in Colorado.
Dana Coffield | Editor
Thanks for checking in with us today, friends! We do appreciate all you do for us, whether it is sharing links to our stories with people who should be part of our crew, or gently nudging them to become members. Every little bit helps!
— Dana & the whole staff of The Sun
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