Posts Tagged 5280

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February 16, 2022 by Michael Behar

5280 | February 2022

Family Time, Reinvented Download PDF

Schools closed for COVID-19 on Friday, March 13, 2020. “Enjoy an extended spring break,” the official district email communiqué advised us. With the weekend upon us, my wife, an attorney, and I didn’t grasp the implications until Monday. I had two impending writing deadlines, and she was steeped in litigation matters. What at first had seemed like a rare gift—bonus hours with our kids—quickly morphed into what felt like a theft of time. How could we possibly work a normal day with our kids at home? Because COVID-19 had vaporized our childcare, we resorted to iPads as babysitters. While the kids binged on ninja anime and Dude Perfect, I slammed through my assignments. A week later, I got COVID-19. Continue reading →

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September 26, 2020 by Michael Behar

5280 | September 2020

Operation Dust Bowl Download PDF

How Hugh Bennett saved Colorado—and the nation—from one of the worst environmental disasters in human history.

 

On Friday, April 19, 1935, Hugh Bennett entered Room 333 in a U.S. Senate office building in Washington, D.C., and seated himself at a conference table alongside members of the congressional subcommittee for public lands and surveys. Bennett, 54, directed the Soil Erosion Service, a division established by the U.S. Department of the Interior two years earlier, and he’d been invited to testify about the erosion problem on American farms. While the senators present knew about the dust raking the High Plains—including all of southeastern Colorado—they considered the issue a localized nuisance. Congress had been deliberating House Resolution 7054, which would fund a national soil conservation service, managed under the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Bennett was there to tell the senators why the resolution needed to pass immediately. Continue reading →

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May 2, 2019 by Michael Behar

5280 | May 2018

The New New New Journalism Download PDF

Can a few small Denver-based digital media organizations remake local news? 

On a blustery morning in January, I arrive at 10:30 for an interview with Susan Greene, editor of the Colorado Independent. The digital-only nonprofit news outlet is based in the Denver Open Media center, an unremarkable two-story building not far from the Art District on Santa Fe. A few desks are tucked into a cramped space on the second floor; Greene occupies an adjacent glass-front office, which, at the moment, is empty. Continue reading →

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December 5, 2017 by Michael Behar

5280 | DECEMBER 2017

Wingin’ It Download PDF

A Carbondale-based paraglider attempts to soar the length of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains—capricious alpine weather be damned.

On September 12, 2017, at exactly 9:32 a.m., a sunburned man with shoulder-length sandy brown hair fell from the sky in Lake City.

He appeared through broken clouds above the mining turned tourist town wedged into a narrow river valley in the San Juan Mountains. Locals who glanced up that morning witnessed his tiny figure soaring silently toward them from the west. His semitranslucent paraglider wing hung above him, the blazing late-summer sun illuminating it as if it were a shining angel descending from the heavens. Continue reading →

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December 5, 2017 by Michael Behar

5280 | DECEMBER 2017

Mountain Time Download PDF

They say time flies when you’re having fun, and science seems to support that maxim. So why does it feel like the minutes and hours expand when we’re immersed in nature? 

On a sunny morning in early July, I set off on a solo hike to Sky Pond, a timberline lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. The trail ascends moderately, climbing 1,677 feet over 4.5 miles. Although the route isn’t terribly steep—a handful of switchbacks and long draws—it’s still demanding. As I climb, my breathing settles into a deep rhythm, coercing oxygen from the thin, high-elevation air. The steady, perpetual motion is strangely hypnotic, like aerobic meditation. Continue reading →

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February 27, 2017 by Michael Behar

5280 | MARCH 2017

Can I-70’s Mountain Corridor Ever Be Fixed? Download PDF 

With CDOT’s dreadfully inadequate coffers and Colorado’s soaring population, our state’s most critical east-to-west highway is on a serious collision course.

Shailen Bhatt is hungry. The executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation is at the wheel of a white Dodge Durango SUV—an official CDOT vehicle, retrofitted with flashing amber emergency lights—when he exits Interstate 70 in Idaho Springs, swoops into a McDonald’s drive-thru, and orders an Egg McMuffin. I’m sitting in the passenger seat. “Do you want anything?” he asks. Bhatt clean-shaves his scalp and is a snappy dresser—he’s wearing a pinstripe oxford, a linen sport jacket, blue jeans, and square-toe leather loafers. At 41, Bhatt is the youngest (and undeniably the most fashionable) director to lead the transportation agency. He is also the kind of man who listens to his wife. Continue reading →