The Outsider | Rivers, mountains and wildlife star in The Outsider 2023 highlight reel

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The best of The Outsider in 2023

A Leadville 100 runners cross a creek on the return trip to Leadville during the Aug. 19 race near Twin Lakes. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

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It’s the annual Outsider highlight reel! Thanks again for supporting The Colorado Sun and subscribing to The Outsider. We are acutely aware of the different forces tugging on purse strings these days and work hard every week to make sure you value your investment in our newsletters. Here’s a list of the stories featured in The Outsider that generated the most reader responses in 2023. Thank you! And, as always, holler anytime.

Yurt operator at State Forest State Park skates off with reservation money

Never Summer Nordic owns and operates 10 yurts and cabins in State Forest State Park. (Kevin Kopischke, Special to The Colorado Sun)

The owners of the Never Summer Nordic yurts in State Forest State Park outside Gould accepted dozens of paid reservations last winter and all those guests were left in the cold.

The owners went AWOL with everyone’s money. People showed up ready for winter fun in the easily accessible assortment of 10 backcountry yurts and rustic cabins in the state park and there was no one there. The owners got in trouble with Colorado Parks and Wildlife last year for not paying fees and they lost their concession contract in December 2022.

“They didn’t have the courtesy to reach out and say, ‘Hey, we’ve gone bankrupt,’ or whatever. Just no communication at all,” said Ryan McSparren, a Littleton father who reserved a yurt for his family in February 2023 and February 2024 and lost about $800.

The backcountry yurts and decks were removed from the park earlier this year. Colorado Parks and Wildlife sent out a request for potential concessionaires to operate the park’s soon-to-be-remodeled cabins this fall. >> STORY

Recreational access and landowner liability

Hikers on the Decalibron loop pass through private property on the way to three 14er summits. A deal with a landowner has transferred 289 acres of private land on Mount Democrat to the Pike National Forest. (Courtesy The Conservation Fund)

Outsider readers got a library of words on landowner liability, recreational access and a state law that many argue is due for an update. The Outsider was like a dog on a bone, gnawing on the nuanced issue of landowner liability in 2023.

We noted proposed legislation last session seeking to revamp the Colorado Recreational Use Statute. >> STORY A mine landowner closing access to two 14ers after that legislation failed. >> STORY QR codes for Leadville100 racers and spectators. >> STORY And QR codes for 14ers hikers. >> STORY The sale of a 14er for federal protection and improved access. >> STORY Big changes in ownership for the Ouray Ice Park. >> STORY, STORY

To bolt or not to bolt? The thorny question for wilderness.

Madaleine Sorkin, one of the world’s top big wall climbers, climbed the Hallucinogen Wall in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in a single day in April 2022 after replacing old bolts on one of the nation’s most celebrated big wall routes. (Henna Taylor, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Climbers rallied this spring when federal land managers revived policies that would prohibit fixed anchors in wilderness areas. About 90% of all climbing routes in wilderness areas use fixed bolts and climbers fear that access could disappear if new policies deem the chains and bolted hangers “permanent installations,” which are prohibited in the 1964 Wilderness Act.

Climbers have long been sensitive to wilderness protections. They use hand-cranked drills and largely agree with strict management of new bolts in wilderness areas.

“The climbers are stewards of the routes in the Black and to take that away from us is really a lost opportunity,” said climbing legend Madaleine Sorkin, who replaced old bolts on the daunting Hallucinogen Wall in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park last year. “We are sensitive to using as few bolts as reasonable. As a collective body we are very discerning about where and when to place bolts in the Black. We do it in ways that respect the route and the rock.”

Climbers called the possible bolt bans “a war on wilderness climbing” while wilderness advocates called anchors “the defacement and degradation of wilderness.”

In November, the National Park Service and Forest Service issued draft policies that tried to find a middle ground. The agencies acknowledged climbing a “legitimate use” of wilderness and anchors allowing “primitive and unconfined recreation” in the wild areas. But the policies also kept the definition of bolts as “permanent installations” and directed local managers to make site-specific calls on bolts.

The public comment period for the new policies ends early next year and expect some fireworks in the increasingly common clash between recreational access and resource protection. >> STORY and STORY

Boaters or bots are flooding the river permit system?

Rafters navigate Winnies rapid in the Gates of Lodore stretch of the Green River on Aug 18, 2021. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)

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Colorado Sun reporter Tracy Ross explored the seemingly broken river permit system, talking with more than a dozen river rafters who for the last decade were consistently getting skunked on float permits for rivers like the Green, the San Juan, the Middle Fork of the Salmon or the Yampa.

“Is there a possibility the system’s been hacked?” asked one rafter.

The number of lottery applications flowing into the U.S. Forest Service for float permits on Idaho’s most popular rivers grew from 20,000 to 40,000 between 2010 and 2020 and then 40,000 to almost 60,000 from 2020 to 2021.

In Colorado in 2022, federal river managers fielded 12,000 applications for 430 permits on the san Juan River. There were 18,325 applications for 300 permits on the Yampa River. And 11,405 applications for 674 permits on the Green River stretch between Desolation and Gray canyons in Utah.

“There’s no way that many more people are applying for the hellish-work-nonstop-non vacation [of river trips] as their data suggests. Has to be bots. Go back to the mail-in system until the government can figure out how to eliminate the bot,” Crested Butte river runner Chad “Radtree” Crabtree said.

The emails from boaters following Tracy’s story mirrored the laments of Taylor Swift fans who were e-elbowed out of tickets by scalping bots. >> STORY

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Training the next generation of mountain town workers

Fourteen first-year lift mechanics from 10 Alterra Mountain Co. ski areas participated in a four-week training program in June 2023 at Steamboat ski area designed to fast-track lift mechanics into lift maintenance. The students helped Steamboat’s lift crew dismantle the 1972 Priest Creek chairlift. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)

The Sun spent a day in June doing college-level trigonometry with lift mechanics at Steamboat in June as they threaded a cable through a network of pulleys to release tension on the 1972 Priest Creek chairlift.

The dismantling project included 14 lift mechanics from 10 ski areas as part of a pilot program between Steamboat owner Alterra Mountain Co. and Colorado Mountain College. As the resort industry faces a crushing labor crisis, resort operators are scrambling to get qualified mechanics turning wrenches on chairlifts.

There’s a lot more news that’s about to come out of Colorado Mountain College as the mountain-town campuses prepare the next generation of workers for the evolving needs of the Western Slope. >> STORY

Is it worth undoing decades of environmental work to reduce emissions from leaky mines?

Delta Brick and Climate Company’s Christopher Caskey places a methane detector above the former Mid-Continent Coal and Coke Co. mine, Aug. 23, near Redstone. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

Is a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions worth backtracking on 30 years of environmental remediation? Yeah, it’s as complicated as it sounds.

What if a methane flaring tower atop a long-dormant coal mine above the Crystal River could remove the same amount of greenhouse gas emitted by all the buildings, cars and resorts in Pitkin County?

Before you answer that, what if the road and operation around the methane capture project required undoing more than 30 years of careful rehabilitation around the mine in the bucolic Crystal River Valley?

That’s the intractable question simmering in the valley as gas-sniffing gizmos around the long-closed but leaky Mid-Continent Coal and Coke Co. mine measure massive amounts of methane. Flares would reduce that methane to much-less damaging carbon dioxide. But that would require backtracking on 30 years of work to erase the creek-fouling, forest-training centurion of coal mining in the region.

As one resident said, “it’s really a double-edged sword.” >> STORY

Tracking a rowdy river season

A group of rafts sit along the Dolores River near Bedrock on April 24. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

The Colorado Sun kicked off an all-time boating season in late April with a float down the Dolores River with advocates hoping for increased protection for the River of Sorrows. As the remote river boasted record-flows this spring, Colorado’s D.C. lawmakers pushed legislation for a 68,000-acre conservation area and river advocates called on President Biden to go bigger with a nearly 500,000-acre Dolores River Canyon Country National Monument. >> STORY

There were 23 drowning deaths in Colorado rivers and creeks in 2023. Sadly we were witness to the first, on May 10 on the Dolores River. With a banner snow season swelling rivers and creeks across the state, The Colorado Sun wrote about increased stress on swiftwater search and rescue teams and built a map of the season’s fatalities. The numbers are different from those collected by Colorado Parks and Wildlife, which includes drownings in lakes and ponds. Ten of the swift water drownings were on the Colorado River and four were on the Arkansas River. >> STORY

The Outsider featured a story on the Scout Wave in Salida’s whitewater park that veered from a perfect surf wave to sketchy raft-flipper and back to glassy surf as flows spiked. And we had a story on Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Chaffee County commissioners dismantling the low-head dam “drowning machine” above Salida, where there have been dozens of rescues and four deaths. STORY, STORY

Wolves, lions, moose, crayfish and bighorn. The intersection of Coloradans and wildlife is busy.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife released five gray wolves onto public land in Grand County on Dec. 18. (Jerry Neal, Colorado Parks and Wildlife)

And finally, wildlife.

A team effort at The Sun delivered stories on all sorts of Colorado critters, culminating in an invite to see Oregon wolves released in Grand County a couple weeks ago. Starting with Tracy Ross’s story on a mountain lion killing dogs near her home in Nederland, reporters studied how Coloradans interact with wolves, moose, invasive mussels and crayfish, snowed-in pronghorn, deer and elk herds in northwest Colorado and bighorn sheep.

Most of these stories were highlighted in The Outsider, which lands every Thursday with peeks at the next week’s lineup of stories from the Western Slope.

Our appreciation of you runs deep. All these stories came from your support. Stay tuned for more in 2024. Happy New Year.

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