Environment

In Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, we have a particular breed of twenty-first century conservative, a champion of states’ rights (when it suits him) and poor, beleaguered industries, including poor little Big Oil and much-maligned King Coal.

In the twilight of the Obama administration, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell came to Denver yesterday to announce the adoption of long-range plans to protect the Roan Plateau and the Thompson Divide — two spectacularly scenic and environmentally fragile areas on the Western Slope — from oil and gas drilling.

Plutonium has a half-life of 24,100 years — and it looks like stories about the former Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant, which produced plutonium triggers for bombs at a facility sixteen miles northwest of Denver, could keep coming for about as long. The legacy of the plant includes ongoing concerns…

On Halloween, the scariest day of the year, Aspen officials filed legal paperwork preserving the resort town’s conditional rights to make use of water from two of the last free-flowing creeks in the Roaring Fork watershed. A mundane matter for most municipalities, perhaps, but not in Aspen, where the move…

Glass is infinitely recyclable, so it’s easy to imagine that all those bottles and jars you put out at the curb every week are headed off to be melted down and remade — baby-food jar into baby-food jar, beer bottle into beer bottle, forever and ever, amen. But as Melanie…

If you’ve driven through the high country in recent days, you’ve likely seen roadkill along the roadside. But collisions involving wildlife don’t only kill animals — especially during this time of year, when migration patterns result in more deadly encounters between vehicles and large game such as deer and elk…

More than sixty years ago, when the Atomic Energy Commission decided to place one of thirteen nuclear weapons plants on a windy plain sixteen miles northwest of Denver, few people lived nearby. Rocky Flats was just that — a largely flat, rocky area by the foothills, with few houses nearby…

There’s no quick way to get to get to Porcupine. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, but Rob Pyatt has been driving back and forth between there and Boulder just about every month for five years now. It takes about six hours, depending on whether you head straight up…

Last December, the Colorado Department of Transportation debuted what it dubbed a Peak Period Shoulder Lane — shorthanded as PPSL — constructed along a thirteen-mile stretch of Interstate 70 heading eastbound from Empire to Floyd Hill. The idea was to ease traffic on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays for people returning to Denver…

Tomorrow, untold thousands of Coloradans will hit the road and head to public lands across the state in order to enjoy nature’s splendor during one of summer 2016’s final weekends. But those who would like to drive to Hanging Lake, in White River National Forest, are in for a disappointment…

Stagecoach State Park, south of Steamboat Springs near Oak Creek, is among many gorgeous slices of land incorporated in the Colorado Parks and Wildlife system. But late last month, the bucolic setting played host to a gruesome scene of the sort officials hope to avoid over Labor Day weekend, summer’s…