Denver

B1 Energy: a sustainable recycling plan

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DO YOU EVER THINK ABOUT where your recycling goes after you place it in the bin?  Do you ever contemplate the ever-increasing mounds of trash in the landfills and wonder how it is affecting climate change? Well, John Armstrong, of Salida, thinks about these things all the time. He has been re-imagining a state-of-the-art recycling …

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About the Cover Photographer: Grant Collier

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Grant Collier grew up in the foothills above Denver and spent much of his childhood exploring Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Grant took up photography while attending college in Los Angeles. He found endless photographic opportunities in the Desert Southwest while driving to and from L.A. After graduating from college in 1996, Grant began a photographic career …

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CD Review: The Heartstring Hunters 

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By Brian Rill

From my experience as a songwriter, most love songs start as a series of passionate screams inspired by a beautiful muse, only to end in a desperate, stifled echo never to be heard by the intended recipient. The Heartstring Hunters however have a very different story. Started by husband and wife duo Carolyn and Daniel Hunter, they have collected some premiere musicians and forged an extensive Indy-Folk team. The songs act as a sort of dialog between two lovers as they pass musical notes back and forth strumming pathos symbiotically within romantic spirits everywhere.

Lead vocalist and lyricist Carolyn Hunter soars, stretching her voice into other dimensions where shadows of true love hide slumbering like dreaming dragons snoring through fields filled with smoke, while lounging atop unstable mountains of gold. Musically solid, their self-titled debut album is impactful and well-recorded. Acoustic chords strummed quietly ring with precision. Harmony vocals from Rachael Sheaffer shatter the subdued back beat and steady drum rolls. Tempestuous runs from a Fender Telecaster guitar touch upon the heavily-hooked verses. Daniel Hunter joins his wife on vocals for some truly heartfelt folk duets.

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Book Reviews – A Short History of Denver

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Stephen J. Leonard, Thomas J. Noel University of Nevada Press, paper, 212 pp, $21.95 Reviewed by Annie Dawid History and “short” don’t usually go well together, but in this case, the celebrated Denver Post columnist Thomas J. Noel and his co-writer, Stephen J. Leonard, history professor at the University of Colorado-Denver, make the combination fascinating, …

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About the Cover Photograph

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The cover photograph of a Denver and Rio Grande Railroad passenger train was taken between 1890 and 1910 for the railroad. The location is the Texas Creek Bridge, over the Arkansas River in Fremont County. The passenger train is climbing the steep grade on its way up Texas Creek to Westcliffe. Although the route was abandoned in 1937, remains of the stone embankment on the distant mountainside can still be seen today.

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Three Governors in One Day

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by Kenneth Jessen Most politics today are comprised of attack ads, but in the past, politics were downright dirty. Leave it to Colorado to raise the bar and do something unprecedented in United States history by having three different governors in one single day! The November 1904 election was so intense that few Coloradans paid …

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Regional News Roundup

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Police Close Case on Western Student’s Death An investigation into the death of a Western State Colorado University wrestler, Dammion Heard, whose body was found hanging in a tree east of Gunnison on April 2, has officially been closed. After conducting 45 interviews and receiving 187 pages of investigative reports, Gunnison police have determined that …

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On the Ground – Are We Part of a City-State?

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by George Sibley Badmouthing Denver and the Front Range metropolis that it has seeded is a pretty common sport in the nonmetropolitan parts of Colorado. But, we probably ought to all be asking ourselves if this isn’t a little disingenuous, and try to clarify our real water relationship with Denver. The water planning process the …

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Sculptor Chris Byars: A Salida Original

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By Mike Rosso

It’s quite likely there may never have been an arts scene in Salida without the arrival of sculptor Chris Byars. One of the ironies of this is that many recent artists to town have never even met the man.

While on a back roads tour of Colorado in 1971, the Denver native stopped in Salida to visit his older brother Jack, who was living there at the time. The following weekend, Chris followed suit.

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The Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad

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By Virginia McConnell Simmons

Only a few ghostly vestiges of the Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad remind us today of challenges that once played a role in the daily life of Central Colorado. This legendary narrow-gauge line, sometimes called “The Damn Slow Pulling and Pretty Rough Riding,” battled blizzards, floods, rockslides, derailments, corporate competition, and, far from least, human courage and hardship. Trains ran summer and winter on rails that crossed the Continental Divide in three places, burrowing through Alpine Tunnel (11,523 el.) to Gunnison County, and topping Boreas Pass (11,482 el.) and Fremont Pass (11,318 el.) to the Blue River and Leadville.

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The Easy Way to Denver (and Beyond …)

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By Mike Rosso

Mass transportation in Central Colorado? Up until recently that meant piling as many folks as possible into the bed of a pickup for a trip to WalMart.

The last passenger train service around these parts stopped running in July of 1967, according to Ed Quillen. But in the last few years this has changed thanks to an effort by the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) to improve transportation options to rural areas of Colorado.

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