News

As things warm up across the Valley, Carbondale is looking to attract tourists and locals alike with two days of events and a new printed pocket guide to the area’s local food locations. 

This week, a group of middle and high school students from the Roaring Fork Valley compete virtually in Aspen Words’s Youth Poetry Slam. The event is the culmination of Aspen Words’s Poetry Project programming in local schools, and marks the end of National Poetry Month.

It’s no secret that the Roaring Fork Valley’s three counties are interconnected and frequented by seasonal visitors, and those factors show up in the latest COVID-19 vaccine data. In the four months since vaccine rollout began in the area, more than 40% of all doses administered in Pitkin County went to people who reside outside of the County – and health officials say that is by design.

Every year Aspen Music Festival and School partners with the AmeriCorps program “ArtistYear” to bring a handful of recent higher-education graduates from across the country to the Roaring Fork Valley. The Aspen area is one of only four locations — with Philadelphia, Queens and the Carolina Sandhills — that are part of the national program.

The artist fellows who are assigned to the Valley spend the year teaching music and visual arts to students in the Roaring Fork School District. 

Breckenridge-based photographer Scott Brockmeier has spent his career snapping images of ski racers, mountain search and rescue teams and ski patrollers. But there’s one subject that’s continued to capture his interest — and lens — over the years: avalanche rescue dogs. 

Colorado lawmakers have passed a bill requiring gun owners to call police within five days of noticing a firearm has been lost or stolen.

If they do not, they would face a $25 fine.

Many oil, gas and coal-dependent communities around the Mountain West are concerned about the Biden administration's aggressive stance on climate change. But a recent survey of hundreds of economists around the world suggests that reducing emissions now will save us financially in the long run. 

Not enough jurors showed up for a trial last week in a case that could have implications for avalanche safety in the Mountain West.

Pitkin County’s COVID-19 incidence rate is the highest in Colorado by a wide margin. As a result, businesses are operating under “orange” level restrictions – a more stringent set of rules than anywhere else in the state.

The 10-hour debates and lobbyist-filled hallways are signs things are returning to normal at the state Capitol. And that has some lawmakers reviving bills they shelved because of the pandemic.

One such bill aims to lower costs for those who buy insurance on the individual market because they cannot get it through an employer.

Women filmmakers are getting attention at this year’s Aspen Film Shortsfest, which also happens to be the organization’s 30th annual short film festival. Nearly 3,000 films were submitted for this year’s Shortsfest—80 were chosen for this year’s virtual event, and 55 of those selections were directed or co-directed by women. That’s over two-thirds of this year’s featured Shortsfest films. 

Yesterday’s mass shooting was personal for many of Colorado’s elected officials, including Gov. Jared Polis, a longtime resident of the city. Polis said he has shopped at King Soopers on Table Mesa frequently.

Latinos in Pitkin, Eagle and Garfield counties have been especially hard hit by the pandemic. While they’ve made up a disproportionate number of COVID-19 cases over the past year, efforts are underway to make sure they have equitable access to vaccines.

Glenwood Springs resident Matt Nuñez snapped a photo of southwest Colorado’s Mount Sneffels, one of the state’s 58 peaks over 14,000 feet, with its lower slopes blanketed in fall colors on a road trip back in 2017. When the Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles announced its Iconic Colorado contest this summer to redesign the state’s driver licenses, 400 photos, including Nunez’s shot of Sneffels, poured in from photographers around the state for consideration. This month, Nuñez received word from the state’s Department of Revenue and Gov. Jared Polis’s office that his photo of Mount Sneffels was picked to grace the front of the new IDs. 

A Senate committee vote Thursday brought Deb Haaland one step closer to becoming the nation's next Interior secretary. If she's confirmed she'll face myriad big decisions, including whether to move the Bureau of Land Management headquarters from Colorado back to Washington, D.C.

Colorado is making it easier for residents to see what their government is spending their tax dollars on, down to every last paperclip and coffee order in the governor’s office.

Late last year, the state quietly turbocharged its clunky and neglected online checkbook by migrating millions of lines of financial data to a new software system.

Avalanche conditions have been historically dangerous and deadly across Colorado this winter, prompting regional avalanche education and forecasting groups to rethink their social media strategy. The Colorado Avalanche Information Center, and its partner nonprofit Friends of CAIC, have been promoting the social media hashtag #LowAngleFTW, which encourages skiers, snowmobilers and others to share photos of themselves making conservative decisions away from avalanche-prone terrain while they’re recreating in the backcountry. (“FTW” refers to the acronym “for the win.”)