MY CAREER HAS BEEN FOR THE TREES. I earned a university degree in forestry and worked for five years as a wildland firefighter. My education and my work as a firefighter instilled in me “The Prescription” for both how to manage forests and how to stop wildfires. Nineteen years ago, with entrepreneurial enthusiasm and a …
ON FEBRUARY 1, 2003, KHEN 106.9 broadcast on-air for the first time. This moment represented years of hard work for volunteers of the Salida-based radio station. The task required both the construction of a physical space and the navigation of licensing logistics with the Federal Communications Commission. However, while KHEN might hold the honor of …
FOR FOUR YEARS, 1859-62, the hotspot of mining activity in South Park was at Tarryall City and Hamilton, situated a half mile apart on opposite banks of Tarryall Creek, 2 miles north of present-day Como. In the summer of 1859, a group of miners whose luck had run out at Gregory Diggings (Central City), including …
IT’S DIFFICULT TO TURN A CORNER ANYMORE and not see the white and red image of a Fly Agaric mushroom emblazoned on hats, scarves, shirts, earrings and even on the skin as tattoos. The irony is that the Fly Agaric — the red-capped, white-speckled amanita mushroom (Amanita muscaria) of fairy tales, is poisonous. The iconic …
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE IN DEEP RELATIONSHIP with the land on which we live? The 33rd Annual Headwaters Conference, hosted by Western Colorado University in Gunnison in December 2022, aimed to answer that question. The theme of the conference was “Land Back: Indigenous Homecoming in the Headwaters.” In recent years, the conference focused …
WE DO NOT DESERVE BEAVERS. Well, OK. American beavers can be complicated neighbors. They sometimes interfere with our plans, tunneling into canal banks, flooding farmers’ fields and blocking and rerouting waterways. They can destroy infrastructure and take down power lines. They harvest landscape plantings. But oh, the beneficial things they do for us while they …
