Turning down Highway 133, Mount Sopris looms ahead, with a dusting of snow on its peak.
The trees are pine, the road winds up, and the Crystal River shines on the left.
At the turnoff for Redstone, welcome signs read “Population 92” and “Ruby of the Rockies.”
Tucker Farris, the new owner of the Crystal Valley Echo, waits inside the historic Redstone Inn next to a grand fireplace.
He’s wearing a blazer over a tshirt, with sunglasses perched atop his head. A large beard completes the look: true Colorado casual attire.
“I've always kind of been here,” he said. Farris grew up around the Roaring Fork and Crystal River valleys, including in Woody Creek, right by Hunter S. Thompson.
But he also had a period away from home. “I left the valley in 2012 after high school, and eventually went on to earn a Ph.D. in sociology,” he said.
Farris took some of his first steps in journalism covering the war in Ukraine.
“Now I'm home,” he said. “You can never really leave.”
When Farris first moved back to the Crystal River Valley, he covered local school districts as a correspondent for The Sopris Sun and taught sociology at Colorado Mountain College and Colorado State University.
“When I came in to teach one day, I was handed a copy of the [Crystal Valley] Echo with an ad that said it was for sale,” he recalled. “And having no money, as a bohemian intellectual, I thought, ‘I'll make an offer for keeping it going if no other offers happen.’”
His offer went through, and he took ownership of The Echo in February of this year.
Farris never thought he would enter journalism as a professional trade, let alone own a newspaper.
“And here we are,” he said.
A time before
Since Farris took over ownership at the beginning of this year, he’s increased the paper to 32 pages, filled by eight staff writers and photojournalists. From Marble to Redstone to Carbondale, they cover long form regional stories, news briefs, local features and community happenings.
Farris succeeded another longtime local, Gentrye Houghton, who ran the paper beginning in 2019. The paper started in 2003 with a grant from the Marble Charter School.
Before then, the Crystal River Valley didn't really have a dedicated newspaper for its happenings.
Jeff Bier grew up visiting a sleepier Redstone in the summers to fish, and in the winters to backcountry ski.
“When I first moved here, ‘60s Redstone was still pretty dull,” he said over ice cream from the Redstone General Store, which opens more regularly now than it did 60 years ago.
Bier is the president of the Redstone Historical Society, as well as a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker. He now lives in the old Gamekeeper’s Lodge on the Redstone Castle grounds — a place his parents bought nearly 60 years ago.
At the time, “[Redstone] was still boarded up houses,” Bier said. “The trucks used to come through Redstone, when it rained, it was just all mud. There wasn't any pavement.”
He remembers the years before cell phone towers were built and when snow plows didn't make it up the highway — a time before The Echo, and then when it was getting started.
“From almost a pamphlet to the paper it is,” Bier recalled. “But it's matured over the years, and it's been actually, I think, a great source of what's going on … So, we're lucky to have something like that just for this valley.”
State of rural Colorado newspapers
Most local newspapers on the Western Slope have been bought by larger media groups or moved to a nonprofit model.
“Local newspapers right now are struggling across the country, and in Colorado, they're disappearing at a steady clip,” said Corey Hutchins, who runs the Journalism Institute at Colorado College.
“Many counties in the country no longer have a newspaper serving them,” he said.
Even when papers don’t disappear, Hutchins said they’re increasingly owned outside the communities they serve.
The Aspen Times — a newspaper that was founded in 1881 — was bought by Ogden Newspapers in December 2021. Since then, their sister paper, the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent has decreased its frequency of print publication, and the Rifle Citizen Telegram was completely cannibalized by the Post-Independent.
Almost a year ago, in December 2025, the Aspen Daily News — the only other remaining independently owned newspaper in the Roaring Fork and Crystal River valleys — was acquired by Hoffmann Media.
Hutchins said these buy-outs are common, especially as papers that have been locally owned for decades struggle to find people to take over when longtime owners retire. But communities try to find solutions.
Carbondale’s The Sopris Sun and its Spanish language project Sol del Valle are nonprofit newspapers.
And communities try to rally around small papers.
“One thing we have seen in Colorado is when the newspaper alerts the community that it's in trouble, and that it might go out of business, particularly in small rural areas, the community has stepped up and said, ‘Oh my gosh, we didn't know. What can we do?’ And [the community] helps them out financially,” Hutchins said.
That’s what Farris hopes will happen for the Crystal Valley Echo.
Still, funding continues to be a top concern for newspapers in the variable tourism and outdoor economies of the Roaring Fork and Crystal River valleys.
The bridge to Redstone closed over the summer and caused local businesses to buy less ads in The Echo — driving the paper’s ad revenue down, according to Farris.
So far, Farris said The Echo hasn’t been profitable under his tenure. But he’s determined to keep going.
It’s his priority to showcase the community that he’s been a part of his entire life — and now has a responsibility to cover as the owner of a newspaper.
“What became important for me was basically what's in our original mission statement is elevating the voices and stories of the Crystal River Valley,” he said.
“That has been part of the Echo's 23-year history and has a really dedicated readership up and down the Crystal River,” he said.
Farris said he can’t self-fund the paper in the future, but he knows the community will unite around The Echo to stop it from closing — or being bought out.
