When you walk into a room full of people you don’t know, you may pull out your phone and avoid eye contact. If you’re at a contra dance, you might as well smile, because the odds are good that you’ll have do-see-doed with most of the room by the night’s end. Contra is a traditional community dance. It's social, done with both big groups and partners. Its modern followers in the Roaring Fork Valley see it as an antidote for an increasingly isolated world.

Snowmass resident Renee Linnell’s new memoir, "The Burn Zone," explores why a worldly, well-educated person would join a cult.

Ben Marcus is the author of five books of fiction: The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet, Leaving the Sea, and Notes from the Fog. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and New American Stories. Since 2000 he has taught on the faculty at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

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Pitkin County has committed to using science to protect wildlife and habitat on the 5,000 acres of open space property it owns, and last week, the Open Space and Trails Board recommended spending more than $200,000 studying area wildlife.

Up high in the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness, there’s an abandoned metal snow fence — well, there used to be. A diverse group of volunteers joined a team of mules and horses to haul tons of rebar out of the backcountry last month. Pack strings are one of the few ways to get heavy work done in protected wilderness areas, but their future is uncertain.

Hundreds of thousands of people visited Hanging Lake last year, and the U.S. Forest Service says too much traffic has caused damage to the sensitive ecosystem. On Friday, the agency released its final decision to require hikers to get permits to visit the popular spot.