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Articles by Dana Coffield
New Castle man, two sons killed in crash of small plane
A New Castle man and two of his sons died when the plane he was piloting crashed Saturday morning in a remote wilderness area southwest of Crested Butte. The Gunnison County coroner said Mark Hendrickson, 46, Alan Hendrickson, 15, and Case Hendrickson, 13, all of New Castle, died in the crash, which was reported around 9:20 a.m. Saturday.
Colorado businesses near this national park are working together to ride out seasonal ups and downs
MANCOS — At Hand in Hand, you can settle into a comfy window seat with a glass of wine, a deck of cards or a board game, and gaze across the room at colorful shelves of books. If you get peckish, you can order a snack to go with your wine — the bookstore and wine shop doesn’t have a kitchen, but the Boathouse on Grand next door does. The only issue — if you can call it that — is trying not to drip olive oil from the pan con tomate on your backgammon board.
A Vail mountaineer is vying to be the first American woman to scale the world’s tallest volcanoes
In August 2024, Vail’s Nicole Otake climbed Papua New Guinea’s Mount Giluwe, the highest volcano in Oceania. Getting there required the kind of logistics that adventurous travelers love: “A guy picked us up at the airport, then handed us off to another guy and his son who connected us to someone else,” Otake said. This story first appeared in The Outsider, the premium outdoor newsletter by Jason Blevins.
Peter Moore: Some of the rare birds of Colorado even have feathers
A piratic flycatcher was spotted in Yuma County at the end of September and birders flocked (har!) to catch a glimpse. This bird ordinarily hangs out in Central and South America, hence all the binoculars focused on the twig where it rested. You can’t blame the flycatcher. Who wouldn’t want to live here? Well, actually, lots of people. Our state’s reputation as U-Haul Heaven has lately taken a beating.
Colorado bakeries have a good reason to bet on local grains despite rising food costs
As Denver Bake Fest returns Saturday for its third year celebrating the craft and community of local baked goods, many of the state’s commercial bakers have found themselves enmeshed in the even broader agricultural community. These bakers and grain millers are finding strong and increased demand for a more bespoke, traceable experience that breaks away from a commodity agricultural system that treats grain as a generic, interchangeable ingredient.
Tax-funding squabble ends in defeat for Pueblo’s da Vinci Museum
Without a word, the Pueblo City Council on Monday shot down the Leonardo da Vinci Museum’s request for $885,000 of the city’s half-cent sales tax revenue. The 5-2 vote to defeat the ordinance was a sharp contrast to a raucous meeting in August where tempers flared during questions as the public, council members and the mayor sparred over whether the voter-approved sales tax could be used to support a tourism project without being tied specifically to primary job creation. A work session Sept.
The journey from farm to table is becoming more unpredictable. It takes a flexible chef to keep local food on the menu.
CRESTED BUTTE — Most Sundays, chef John Leonardi goes to Hotchkiss. Earlier this summer, he got some bad news during one of his trips. The tomato plants were dead at Thistle Whistle Farm, where Mark Waltermire has been growing specialty produce for farmers markets, a small CSA, local chefs and nonprofit partners since 2006. That posed a problem for Leonardi, who uses many of Waltermire’s juicy heirloom varieties on the summer menu at Soupçon, his tiny Crested Butte restaurant.
New housing development opens in Broomfield for people with disabilities, but demand far exceeds available units
Every morning at around 8:45 a.m., David Myers wakes up and starts getting ready for work. Myers, 36, has two jobs. One is at an arc Thrift Store in Louisville, where he sorts donations and organizes merchandise. He’s worked there for more than a decade. His other job is at The Post Colorado restaurant in Longmont, where he bags to-go orders. “David works every day of the week,” said Sue Myers, David’s mother.
Peter Moore: How dry we are
(Peter Moore, Special to The Colorado Sun) Lately, clickbait for me is any headline with the phrase “El Niño” in it. The term refers to a weather pattern born in the ocean off the west coast of South America that sends moisture into our dry, inland state. Anything is better than La Niña, which we suffered through last ski season. For me, it was an experience of driving two hours to Copper Mountain, in February, for no particular reason. My Ikon pass devolved into a $1,100 plastic necklace.
Colorado Sun takes top public service award, 26 other prizes at journalism awards ceremony
An ongoing series of stories in The Colorado Sun that explored the challenges of aging earned top honors for public service in the 2025 Colorado Better News Media Contest sponsored by the Colorado Press Association — one of 26 awards, including a dozen first-place finishes, collected by The Sun staff at the annual CPA ceremony Saturday night.
Tempers flare in southern Colorado as popular museum requests nearly $1M in taxpayer support
There was plenty of gushing over the wonders and popularity of the gleaming new Leonardo da Vinci Museum on the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk at Monday night’s Pueblo City Council meeting — before tempers flared and accusations were hurled. The two-hour discussion was the first public airing of the museum’s request for $885,000 in sales tax funding and came days after a Pueblo businesswoman publicly challenged the legality of the proposed ordinance that would allocate the money.
Renters in this western Colorado town were almost displaced. Here’s how a public-private partnership kept them home.
EAGLE — When Julieth Kennedy talks about what makes living at Eagle Villas special, her face lights up. “The kids,” she says. “This is a kids’ property. They run this place.” She points to the playground behind the apartment complex’s leasing office, where the bright orange spiral of a slide glistens in the sun. It’s a place her five children, ages 3 to 12, know well. “My kids love being here,” she says. “When it’s warm they bike to school. The bus drops them off out front. They have friends nonstop.
Meet Colorado’s chunkiest alpine residents and pick your fave to support research during Fat Marmot Week
GOTHIC — Colorado has spent much of this summer talking about bears that aren’t getting enough to eat. On Monday, the state gets to celebrate an animal that has made eating its entire personality. Starting Monday, yellow-bellied marmots will get their own version of the wildly popular Fat Bear Week, the annual online tournament in which people vote for their favorite Alaskan brown bears bulking up at Brooks Falls ahead of winter. Welcome to Fat Marmot Week.
PHOTOS: The charm of Colorado hummingbirds
August is peak hummingbird season in Colorado. You can tell by the otherworldly trills and buzzing in the trees as tiny birds work feeders and flowers to prepare for the long migration south. Hummingbirds remember particular feeders and flowery meadows during their migration. Banded hummingbirds have arrived back at the same yards, meadows and feeders on the exact same day every year and will nest in the same tree.
Colorado’s bears are hungry. And they’re dining in town.
ASPEN — For the past 30 years, bears have been part of the job at the Hickory House. This story first appeared in The Outsider, the premium outdoor newsletter by Jason Blevins. In it, he covers the industry from the inside out, plus the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state. The Aspen barbecue joint sits at the western edge of town, where the houses give way to open space and Castle Creek torrents toward the Roaring Fork River.
A new Colorado law tougher on people who feed bears took effect this week. Here’s what it does.
This year is shaping up to be a recordbreaker for bear reports in Colorado. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has received 6,129 reports of bear sightings and conflicts statewide through Aug. 13 — nearly twice as many as during the same period last year. The number has already surpassed the 5,299 reports CPW received during all of 2025. The surge reflects a difficult year for Colorado’s bears in the wild.
Drought stinks and you can smell it in Cañon City’s water
CAÑON CITY — Residents here are complaining loudly about the musty taste and smell of water flowing from their taps since late July, the result of drought conditions that let algae take hold in the city’s water system. The culprit is geosmin, a naturally occurring compound associated with algae growth in the water system. There is no known health risk from the low levels of geosmin detected, according to city officials and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
Colorado’s youth mental health corps improves student attendance and behavior
Marissa Garcia can barely finish a sentence before a student stops to chat with her. She’s sitting in the blue-walled wellness room in the high school wing of York International School in Thornton. The calmly lit space is decked out with pillows, fidget spinners, games and a small hygiene closet. A steady stream of backpack-laden students walks past the open room between class bells. Garcia, who has curly black hair and is wearing gold-hoop earrings, a nose ring and a hoodie, looks a lot like them.
Peter Moore: Our data centers have a drinking problem
There are at least five ways that data centers suck up the water supplies that we don’t actually have right now. With water-cooled chillers, these cavernous constructions keep overloaded wires from melting down. With enormous water-driven swamp coolers, these absurdly huge hothouses keep the air inside those enormous buildings below Hades-level. With free-cooling systems, these Brobdingnagian bunkers use outside water to cool inside air down from fire-breathing-dragon levels.
“Bad ass” wildland firefighter memorialized in Grand Junction
GRAND JUNCTION — Nathan “Nate” Matthews was a “bad ass,” U.S. Wildland Fire Service Director Brian Fennessy said during a memorial service for Matthews Saturday in Grand Junction. He was known on the fire lines as a lover of fresh-brewed coffee and “bubbly water,” a maker of creative fire camp mocktails, a trickster, and a reliable and kind worker who was an outdoorsman to his core.
Doubled water bills turn politics in Dove Creek, the Pinto Bean Capital of the World, up to high
The Pinto Bean Capital of the World is at a boiling point. And it’s not related to the Ferris fire that has torched nearly 65,000 acres nearby. The normally quiet town of Dove Creek has gotten so politically charged that the town hall has had to lock its doors. For more than two months, the once-upon-a-time gas station that serves as town hall has been closed.
One Weld County man sold the confluence of the Poudre and South Platte rivers to honor his family’s turbulent past
GREELEY — Bob Tokuyasu had no interest in selling the land that takes in the confluence of the South Platte and Cache la Poudre rivers until Robert Henry showed him the Tower of Compassion in Kanemoto Park in Longmont.
Which came first? The craft beer or the sense of community that anchors the Colorado Brewery Running Series?
The magic begins as the heavy-duty black pickup truck and nondescript white trailer pull into a Denver-area brewery long before the normal opening time. A handful of cheerful workers, mostly volunteers, materialize and soon the area around the brewery is transformed into a 5K or, occasionally, a half-marathon venue. About six or so hours later, a reverse choreography squeezes everything back in the trailer to await the next event.
Supreme Court will hear Nebraska’s fight over access to Colorado’s South Platte River
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Nebraska’s lawsuit against Colorado over a proposed canal that would take water out of the South Platte River in Colorado and send it to a reservoir in Nebraska. Nebraska claims Colorado is deliberately obstructing efforts to build the ditch, known as the Perkins Canal, even though everyone agrees Nebraska has the right to do so. The canal is necessary, Nebraska says, because Colorado isn’t sending enough water into Nebraska.
Damage assessment teams begin work in Aspen Acres fire zone as weather gives firefighters an edge
Weather conditions will likely give firefighters working to contain the massive Aspen Acres fire an edge again Sunday. “Yesterday was our first day without red flag warnings and we have no red flag warnings for today,” Operations Section Chief Brad Washa, of Alaska Complex Incident Management Team No. 1, said in the Sunday morning briefing. “This means we are not being as defensive as we have in the past, having to chase the fire,” he said.
Peter Moore: Goldilocks and the 17,000 bears
Goldilocks is real you know. She parlayed her childhood bear encounters into a killer admissions-essay for Colorado College, where she majored in environmental studies. Now she works as a data analyst for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, out of a loft in Golden. Where else would you live, if you were named Goldilocks? “These aren’t your average porridge-eaters,” she told me in an imaginary interview, her hair glowing in destructive June sunshine. “They’re turning up everywhere!” In hot tubs.
Colorado mountain towns must tighten taps, but water shortages could have been much worse
This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org. Historic water shortages are drying out the scenic mountains that anchor Colorado’s tourist economy, prompting the state to issue emergency orders earlier this month allowing water to be shifted to the towns and ranches most likely to run dry.
Aspen Snowmass hopes to battle warmer winters by storing snow. Here’s how.
ASPEN – Early summer looks good on Buttermilk’s ski runs. The slopes are bright green, dotted with purple lupine and threaded with hiking and biking trails. Following one of the leanest winters in recent memory — a season that forced Buttermilk to close a week and a half early — the snow has long since disappeared from the mountain. Almost. Near the base area sits a massive pile of snow wrapped in thick insulated blankets.
Chief of new Wildland Fire Service confident in “unified response” to wildfire threat despite deaths of 3 firefighters
FRUITA — Despite losing three firefighters in the beginning of what is promising to be a very active fire year, Brian Fennessy, director of the newly created U.S. Department of Interior’s Wildland Fire Service, said he has confidence in the new agency. He said he anticipates it will result in a more robust ability to attack fires with unified resources. “I want to emphasize that this is truly a unified response.
Here’s what it costs to run a daycare in Colorado’s most expensive county
At the close of each annual budget cycle, Boulder Day Nursery’s treasurer has one goal: Don’t lose money. “We’re aiming for zero every year,” said Sean D’arcy, who oversees finances for the nonprofit childcare center. D’arcy is only slightly exaggerating: The actual goal is $5,000 to $15,000 in extra cash at the end of each operating year. Projections for 2026 show $141 in net income. The finances of childcare are a paradox.
Universal basic food pilot program tackles food insecurity in new way
For years, the money on Jessie Dorris’ electronic benefits transfer, or EBT, card was enough to buy groceries for herself and her son. As a single mom who was working to improve their lives, she carefully maintained a tight budget every month. But grocery costs kept going up, and despite Dorris remaining frugal with her spending, the money wasn’t stretching as far. “I don’t buy fancy stuff. … It kind of snuck up on me,” the 42-year-old Denver resident said.
Eastern Colorado farmers brace for worst wheat harvest since 1965
There’s something heartbreaking about the “amber waves of grain” that normally ripple across northeast Colorado this time of year; climate conditions have crippled the 2026 winter wheat crop. Instead of mile after mile of dense, waist-high stems and heads heavy with grain, this year’s crop rises barely more than ankle-high, is sparse and projected to yield a fraction of previous crops.
Colorado helium reserves got a bounce when war with Iran cut off 30% of the world’s supply
CHEYENNE WELLS — Colorado’s southeastern plains, still brown from winter and drought, are a long way from the Middle East, but when the Iran war bottled up exports from the Persian Gulf, a resource beneath those prairies became more valuable. It isn’t oil. It’s helium. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz cut off 30% of the world’s helium supply from Qatar.
New homes and businesses in Denver will see major surge in water connection fees
Denver Water is raising the fees it charges to add new apartments, homes and businesses to its system by as much as 32% this year, a measure the giant agency says is necessary to cover the cost of expanded reservoirs, water supplies and pipelines. The utility, which serves 1.5 million people in metro Denver, hasn’t raised those rates since 2013, according to its rate manager, Fletcher Davis.
Water samples taken in Cañon City show some is unsafe to drink
CAÑON CITY — The first round of free water testing for area residents brought reassurance for most people living near a contaminated Superfund site but left unanswered questions about more than a dozen samples that were deemed unsafe to drink. In testing for uranium, 14 of the 249 samples exceeded the 30 micrograms per liter that is the maximum contaminant level for drinking water, with one of them testing at 117 MCL.
Roan Plateau parcels proposed for oil and gas lease sales, undoing protections for iconic western Colorado mesa
After nine years of protests and lawsuits, an agreement preserving the Roan Plateau in western Colorado from oil and gas development was reached in 2016. Now the Trump administration is poised to overturn that accord and open the plateau to drilling. Last week, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management proposed 114 parcels covering 126,744 acres on the Western Slope for drilling, including six parcels covering 5,000 acres on the plateau.
First came the robots. Then came the cameras. That’s when this Colorado mountain town had enough.
First, it was the robots. They were trundling along sidewalks in Paonia last summer gathering data on how accommodating those thoroughfares were for people with disabilities. The wandering robots took townspeople by complete surprise. Then came the surveillance cameras mounted on poles and walls last fall. They were capturing those doing business at the town hall, coming and going from the town’s water plant, and dancing in front of the town park’s bandstand.
Peter Moore: Ex-con seeks job opps in Colorado. Can fudge numbers as nec’y.
On June 1, Jared Polis released convicted voting system tamperer Tina Peters back into the wild. There’s no telling what she’ll do next! But I have ideas… The Prison Policy Initiative points out that formerly incarcerated people have a 62% unemployment rate. Meanwhile, 84% of women age 65-plus are out of a job.
Colorado needed more specialized schools. Now this one is facing scrutiny for restraining students.
Mark Brostrom’s 11-year-old son was struggling in public school when his school district suggested what seemed like a better fit: a new specialized school near the family’s home. Brostrom remembers thinking that the Austin Centers for Exceptional Students in Westminster could offer the flexibility that his son, who has autism, needed to thrive. A bright boy who scores well on tests, his son also sometimes responded to stress by destroying property or harming himself, his father said.
Xcel Energy customers may be hit with the largest electric rate increase ever
Xcel Energy, its corporate customers and unions are at odds with consumer advocates over a proposed settlement that would grant the utility the largest electric rate increase ever — $225 million. The proposed agreement between Xcel Energy and parties including the Colorado Public Utilities Commission staff, the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers, Walmart and Climax Molybdenum would raise the average household bill by $6.13 to $110.81 a month — a nearly 6% increase.
Colorado’s war over oil and gas is a never-ending story. New political players have upended a fragile peace.
Colorado’s oil and gas wars broke more than two decades ago as the industry and local communities found themselves at loggerheads over the race to pull fossil fuels from lands stretching from the Utah border to the Kansas state line. Twenty years on it looks like the battle still has legs. The most recent skirmish broke out in March when Conservation Colorado filed four ballot measures aimed at tightening oil and gas operators’ liability for damages and cleanup of contaminated groundwater.
JD Vance tells Air Force Academy graduates to prepare for entirely new era of warfare
Vice President JD Vance told graduating cadets of the U.S. Air Force Academy on Thursday they are entering into an entirely new era of warfare where new technologies powered by artificial intelligence are “evolving far faster than military institutions have historically been accustomed to.” The vice president delivered the commencement address to more than 900 cadets now newly minted as officers in the Air and Space Forces.
Colorado midwives sue the state, saying regulators are making it harder for them to do their jobs safely
Kalie Caler was 8 years old when she decided that she wanted to deliver babies for a living. Born and raised in Pagosa Springs, she completed midwifery school in Florida before moving home to start Mountain Roots Midwifery in 2019. As the only midwife in town, she delivered more than a dozen babies during her first year, traveling an hour or more to support clients as far away as Mancos, Durango and Crestone. She also birthed all three of her own children at home.
Cotter Corp claims it is running out of money and can’t post a bond to assure uranium mill cleanup in Cañon City
CAÑON CITY — Amid an ongoing dispute over whether the Cotter Corp. must post a $4.7 million bond to ensure completion of risk assessment work at the Superfund site around its former uranium mill, Cotter claimed that it is running out of money. Talks about the company’s financial assets and liabilities are going on behind closed doors with the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement division, said Paul Stoick, EPA’s remedial project manager for the Lincoln Park Superfund Site.
Oil and gas companies drilled and polluted less in 2025, but emissions from each well are rising, Colorado regulators say
Oil and gas drilling activity in Colorado was down in 2025, leading to fewer total air emissions — even as emissions for each new well are projected to rise, according to a report from the state Energy and Carbon Management Commission. The commission approved 48 oil and gas development plans last year — 20% fewer than in 2024 — for drilling 801 wells on 81 sites, the commission’s annual cumulative impacts report said. In 2024, 1,168 new wells were approved.
Peter Moore: It’s time for Colorado’s non-hockey fans to pay attention to Colorado hockey
By nature I’m a basketball fan. But this year, our Denver Nuggets were fool’s gold. Meanwhile, the Rockies still stink, and there won’t be any regular-season Broncos games until Sept. 14. What’s a mile-high fan to do? GO AVALANCHE! Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know that Denver has a professional hockey team. The NHL is the least popular of the four major pro sports, drawing 5,000 fewer fans per game than Major League Soccer.
Jared Polis says his Tina Peters decision “will be remembered fondly,” despite growing outrage
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Tuesday said he doesn’t regret his decision to commute the prison sentence of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, despite widespread condemnation from Democrats and some Republicans who said it will embolden election conspiracy theorists ahead of the 2026 midterms. “I think this will be remembered fondly,” Polis said. “The nation needs to have a reconciliation and healing. “People know I’m a man of action,” he added.
Who’s testing the tap water in Cañon City? Not the agencies responsible for cleaning up the toxic plume from the Cotter Uranium Mill.
CAÑON CITY – Residents living near the toxic plume of a Superfund site are finally getting the water testing they’ve been seeking for years. But it’s not state health officials or the Environmental Protection Agency, responsible for the cleanup of the Lincoln Park Superfund site where more than 5 million tons of radioactive waste is buried, doing the testing.
Northeastern Colorado has a lot to brag about, but also big socioeconomic challenges that will take many hands to solve
The northeastern corner of Colorado is a great place to live unless you’re old, infirm or poor, and there are a lot of old, infirm and poor people living there. That’s the gist of “2026 Northeast Colorado Intersections,” research commissioned by the Community Foundation of Northern Colorado and compiled in partnership with Colorado State University.
Colorado nonprofit offers to buy water for fish, a deal that could help farms weather record drought
As the drought emergency continues, Colorado’s parched streams and struggling fish may see some relief, not just from snow earlier this month, but from a nonprofit that specializes in brokering deals that can result in more water for the environment. The Colorado Water Trust, founded in 2001, has negotiated agreements that have put more than 98,000 acre-feet of water back into streams.
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