Luc Hatlestad

5280 Magazine — The Strangest Show On Earth On a humid Tennessee morning this past April, the vast ballroom of Nashville's Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center is pulsing with anticipation. A football field long, the hall accommodates some 3,000 giddy men and women who await the arrival of Kent Thiry, the gregarious, unrestrained, 56-year-old health-care magnate who happens to be their boss. Thiry is the CEO and chairman of the board of Denver-based DaVita, the second-largest kidney dialysis company in the world and one of Colorado's latest additions to the Fortune 500. Each year, DaVita produces this event-it's formally called "Nationwide"-to honor its brightest stars.

5280 Magazine — Changing Nature They were too late; he could feel it. Three hours into the frantic search for his missing friend, 30-year-old Chris Klingelheber and a specialist from the Alpine Rescue Team were huffing up a mountain some 3,000 feet above the flickering lights in the town of Empire. As their headlamp beams darted about in the winter storm on that March night in 2006, Klingelheber's stomach grew queasier with every passing moment, as he became more and more convinced of what they would find. Klingelheber shouldn't have been there. Although he had survival training, he wasn't an EMT or rescue specialist, meaning he was a legal liability for Alpine.

5280 Magazine — Sin City Lust. Greed. Wrath. Sloth. Gluttony. Pride. Envy. Think you won't find the seven deadly sins in abundance here in sun-kissed Denver? Think again: It turns out that Front Range residents are unrepentantly indulging in what have traditionally been considered dire moral offenses, and they're having a pretty damn good time-and often making some money-while doing it. ? But fear not: These folks are merely carrying on our venerable tradition of debauchery. Denver was founded and developed by a motley coterie of adventurers, vagabonds, charlatans, and whores who flocked to this once-lawless oasis, lured by the siren song of the boundless West and the infinite riches it claimed to offer.

5280 Magazine — What's the real cost of being an adrenaline junkie?

www.menshealth.com — I AM INTIMATELY ACQUAINTED with the menus at America's obesity mongers. The McDonald's Filet-O-Fish, Taco Bell's Beefy 5-Layer Burrito, the Frosty, the Whopper, you name it. Even the occasional (inevitable?) bouts of intestinal distress these foods trigger don't scare me away for long: A whiff of In-N-Out Burger's fries can launch me right back to the drive-thru. Still, I'm more into sugar than salt and fat. I wallow in mini-addictions that last weeks or months as various confections-Pop-Tarts, Reese's, those little generic gummy snacks at Target-enter my airspace. Most recently I was hooked on coconut M&Ms, which I could find only at a certain gas station near my house.

www.menshealth.com — STEVEN G. ISN'T YOUR TYPICAL TECH-OBSESSED guy, but he'll readily admit he can't live without his iPhone. As often as five times a day, the 46-year-old hedge fund manager connects his phone to a docking station and uses the attached arm cuff to check his blood pressure. After each reading, an ingenious app called iHealth tracks, analyzes, and shares Steven's numbers with his doctor by e-mail. "If I had an alarming day, I'd probably just call him myself," says Steven. "But this helps me verify that my readings have been in the target range." Steven wasn't always this obsessive.

5280 Magazine — I attended college in the late-1980s at a small liberal arts school in central Iowa. It was notoriously liberal, sometimes insufferably so: During the 1988 presidential primary campaign tours, Republican candidate Jack Kemp visited but was booed off the stage before he could utter a word. These occasional mortifications aside, the climate at the school was such that traditionally "outside" groups such as women, minorities, and gays enjoyed a status that was at least a few years ahead of its time. That's why the notion of female students as wallflowers, afraid to speak up in class, is completely alien to me.

5280 Magazine — How fitting that this week's political gamesmanship -better known as the backroom bullshit that makes voters yearn for term limits and recall elections-has devolved into a feckless round of he said/he said. On one side of the debate over the civil unions bill is Speaker of the House Frank McNulty. On the other is Governor Hickenlooper. One of them either steamrolled or stonewalled the other one, and who you think is wrong probably depends on your partisan perspective. While they sort out who gets to pay what political price, a thought: I don't get it. I don't get the opposition to gay marriage.