Wingin’ It Download PDF

A Carbondale-based paraglider attempts to soar the length of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains—capricious alpine weather be damned.

On September 12, 2017, at exactly 9:32 a.m., a sunburned man with shoulder-length sandy brown hair fell from the sky in Lake City.

He appeared through broken clouds above the mining turned tourist town wedged into a narrow river valley in the San Juan Mountains. Locals who glanced up that morning witnessed his tiny figure soaring silently toward them from the west. His semitranslucent paraglider wing hung above him, the blazing late-summer sun illuminating it as if it were a shining angel descending from the heavens. Continue reading →

Mountain Time Download PDF

They say time flies when you’re having fun, and science seems to support that maxim. So why does it feel like the minutes and hours expand when we’re immersed in nature? 

On a sunny morning in early July, I set off on a solo hike to Sky Pond, a timberline lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. The trail ascends moderately, climbing 1,677 feet over 4.5 miles. Although the route isn’t terribly steep—a handful of switchbacks and long draws—it’s still demanding. As I climb, my breathing settles into a deep rhythm, coercing oxygen from the thin, high-elevation air. The steady, perpetual motion is strangely hypnotic, like aerobic meditation. Continue reading →

Can I-70’s Mountain Corridor Ever Be Fixed? Download PDF 

With CDOT’s dreadfully inadequate coffers and Colorado’s soaring population, our state’s most critical east-to-west highway is on a serious collision course.

Shailen Bhatt is hungry. The executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation is at the wheel of a white Dodge Durango SUV—an official CDOT vehicle, retrofitted with flashing amber emergency lights—when he exits Interstate 70 in Idaho Springs, swoops into a McDonald’s drive-thru, and orders an Egg McMuffin. I’m sitting in the passenger seat. “Do you want anything?” he asks. Bhatt clean-shaves his scalp and is a snappy dresser—he’s wearing a pinstripe oxford, a linen sport jacket, blue jeans, and square-toe leather loafers. At 41, Bhatt is the youngest (and undeniably the most fashionable) director to lead the transportation agency. He is also the kind of man who listens to his wife. Continue reading →