GREAT SAND DUNES NATIONAL PARK, CO — In the mountains of Great Sand Dunes National Park in the San Luis Valley just north of Alamosa, Medano Creek flows down into the valley. The river helps shape the dunes. “A key piece of this is the role of water,” said Fred Bunch, chief of resource management…
ALAMOSA – Agriculture has been the base of the San Luis Valley’s economy since before farmer Cleave Simpson can remember. “I’m the fourth generation in my family trying to eek out a living here,” Simpson said during a recent meeting with Colorado College students at his Rio Grande Water Conservation District office. Like most farmers…
SUMMITVILLE — The Summitville cleanup site, between towering San Juan Mountain peaks in southwest Colorado, has cost taxpayers almost $300 million thus far. It will continue to cost an additional $2 million every year, according to site manager Mark Rudolph of the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment. He oversees an industrial water-cleaning…
GREAT SAND DUNES – With encroaching light pollution, agricultural water diversion, and climate change, managers at the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, the iconic park located in the San Luis Valley outside of Hooper, Colorado, have increasing reasons to monitor the land outside the park’s borders. “If we’re in the natural business,” says…
GREAT SAND DUNES NATIONAL PARK — Rangers at Great Sand Dunes are fighting to save the population of Rio Grande cutthroat trout within its borders, according to Park Resources Manager Fred Bunch. The fish has seen serious population decline in the southwestern part of Colorado after invasive Brown and Rainbow trout push cutthroats out…
COLORADO SPRINGS – Monster hurricanes associated with climate change once again have hammered the southeastern coast of the United States. New federal research finds water is also likely to cause havoc in landlocked states such as Colorado. “More run-off, more rain, more snow,” says U.S. Geologic Survey research hydrologist William Battaglin. “As temperatures go up,…
DENVER – Call him the Ice Librarian. He wears a brown beanie over a long ponytail. He has a curly goatee and glasses. Richard Nunn. His library is not books. He is the keeper of the nation’s ice cores, up to 420,000 years old, pulled from deep under Greenland, Alaska, and Antarctica. The library is…
COLORADO SPRINGS–Colorado College students noticed a change in their morning routine at the start of the school year. Bon Appetit, CC’s contracted caterers, announced that they will no longer be serving straws at their cafés. Bon Appetit stated that this reform will be in keeping with their promise of “Food service for a sustainable future”. …
Becoming straw-free is suddenly the newest, trendiest, environmentally conscious action to take. The impetus of the movement, according to various straw-free campaign organizations like the Plastic Pollution Coalition, is thought to come from a 2015 video of scientists pulling a straw from the bleeding nose of a turtle. In the past year, the video has…
COLORADO SPRINGS — The shovel bit into my palm as I sliced its metal blade into the soil, heaving up the remnant roots of chard and vines of weeds that twisted over the garden bed. My muscles quivered from the manual labor, swing after swing as I churned the cold, dark earth after a summer…
