In The NOCO

Director and longtime Estes Park resident Nick Mollé spent decades making documentaries . His subjects include Rocky Mountain National Park, birds of Costa Rica and Australia’s wild animals. And a few years ago, he turned his attention to one of the most prominent environmental crises in the U.S. – the drought-stricken Colorado River.   But midway through the project, Mollé faced a major setback:...

Capt. Frank Keesling runs a busy operation each summer on Dillon Reservoir in Summit County. Keesling owns the Dillon Water Taxi , which for the past decade has ferried passengers on a scenic journey across the reservoir and back – including people going to concerts at Dillon Amphitheater.   But this summer, things changed. Drought, low snowpack, and little rainfall have pulled the reservoir’s wat...

That heat wave that broiled Colorado and the U.S. this summer? Scientists are fairly certain it was made worse by climate change.  But with disasters like tornadoes or wildfires, drawing a clear connection to climate change is trickier.   Connecting those dots is part of a scientific field called extreme event attribution . And it matters because it influences how leaders, and the public, might ta...

In 2026, artificial intelligence can draw a picture for you. Or write you a song. Or a whole novel.   And a lot of people have strong feelings about that. Many artists and audiences find it uncomfortable when artificial intelligence replaces human creativity.  So, it may be surprising to meet a poet who has embraced writing AI poetry – and more recently, has begun teaching AI to write its own poem...

Doctors who practice at Children's Hospital Colorado find themselves in court as part of a case focused on one of the most divisive issues in the U.S.  Attorneys for hundreds of younger patients seeking gender-affirming care say doctors at the hospital are refusing to provide treatment like puberty blockers or hormone therapy. That’s in spite of a Colorado Supreme Court order instructing the hospi...

Using bees to gauge the health of an ecosystem.  Scientists in Boulder are testing out an unusual plan to use bees to gauge how  plants and other species in the city are thriving.   It works like this: A neighborhood group hosts a few hives on their property. Thousands of bees fly around the neighborhood collecting pollen and returning it to the hive.  Then, researchers can test the different type...

In recent weeks, Colorado has seen record-high numbers of bears roaming in places where they clash with humans: neighborhood streets, trash bins, cars – even people’s homes.   Severe drought conditions across the state, along with a late-spring freeze, have decimated the supply of berries and fruit that bears rely on. So, the animals head into town looking for other food .  And it turns out these...

This summer left yards across the Front Range devastated. Brown, dry patches of grass are everywhere – and so are yards that have been taken over by bindweed, thistles, and spurge.   Experts at Colorado State University Extension say they've been getting lots of calls from anxious homeowners with similar problems. And they say fall can be a great time for some lawn rescue projects to help get the...

A new lawsuit takes aim at the business model of some major Colorado ski resorts.   For years, skiers and snowboarders have watched the price of a one-day lift ticket climb by hundreds of dollars, while more expensive season passes have become the industry’s central product.  Now, a group of skiers has filed a lawsuit in Colorado’s federal court , arguing that the country’s largest ski resort comp...

It's one of the more unusual exhibits on display at the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster.  Stroll past the colorful butterflies and other insects, and you'll find a 250-gallon saltwater tank. It houses part of a nationwide collaboration to save a badly damaged coral reef found off the coast of Florida.  The rescue project began in 2020 after a coalition of zoos and aquariums teamed up to house an...

A small nuclear reactor proposed by the Pentagon may be a reality soon in Aurora.   The proposed microreactor would power Buckley Space Force Base and give the site a steady source of electricity.    But it would look different – and operate at a smaller scale – than the nuclear reactors built a few decades ago. Rather than a large energy plant with cooling towers that jut into the sky, this small...

E-bikes and e-scooters are having a moment right now. Battery-powered, motorized transportation is becoming more common on streets and bike paths.   E-bikes and e-scooters are considered green transportation, since they don’t emit the exhaust that cars produce. And some cities, including Denver, offer rebates for e-bikes to encourage more people to buy them.  But today we’re digging into some pret...

TikTok has become a go-to source for news, especially for younger audiences .   But short-form videos on the social network don’t look or sound much like traditional journalism. Users see a stream of bite-size videos that favor strong opinions and controversy over nuance and depth.  So, how does consuming political content on TikTok actually affect young people ?  Michaelangelo Landgrave is a poli...

Melissa Strong didn't set out to be a writer. In her twenties she was an accomplished rock climber. In her early forties, she was working on a new chapter in her life: opening and running her own restaurant in Estes Park, called Bird & Jim.   But in 2017, a devastating accident threw all of her plans into chaos.   Melissa details her experience in a new memoir is called Climbing Through: A Cou...

Colorado voters have a right that many Americans don’t. Colorado, and 25 other states , allow residents to collect signatures and put questions on the ballot, rather than relying solely on lawmakers to decide whether an initiative goes before voters. And Colorado has been putting that tool to use. Only Oregon and California use the referendum process more. But in recent years, some unusual proposa...

An ancient collection of dice discovered by archaeologists might rewrite the history of how humans have understood mathematical concepts like probability.   A new Colorado State University study examined the earliest known dice in human history.  Native American hunter-gatherers across the western U.S. first used the dice as early as 12,000 years ago.   Robert Madden , the CSU researcher behind th...

Renewable energy is becoming cheaper and more common. Just a few months ago, Colorado generated the majority of its electricity from renewable sources for the first time.  And that raises questions about which sources do the most good. Wind or solar? Hydroelectric or geothermal?  A researcher at the University of Colorado set out to find answers about what forms of renewable energy are most effect...

Recent storms have given the Front Range relief after an unusually hot and dry start to the season.  Lawns look a little greener – and Denver Water, one of the state's largest providers, says customers' usage actually dropped because of the rain.   So, you might think that all these afternoon showers surely mean reservoirs are filling back up, and we can relax a bit on conserving water. But the re...

Could planting aspen groves slow the spread of wildfires in Colorado’s forests?  It’s an idea that could help some mountain communities seeing increased threats from wildfires. And it’s backed up by several recent studies , including one that looked at 20 years of data from more than 300 wildfires in Western states. It found that large aspen groves often slowed the spread of forest fires. That’s p...

Colorado's business climate is hurting.   Over the past 18 months, the state lost more than 6,000 jobs.  A CNBC ranking of top states for business saw Colorado slide from a top-10 position four years ago to 25th this year. And a coalition of tech and other business leaders recently issued a letter warning that Colorado’s high cost of living and excessive regulations are bad for business.   Gov. Ja...

On Nov. 7, 1893, men in Colorado did something extraordinary for the time: They granted women the right to vote – which made Colorado the first state to do that not by legislative action or executive order, but by a vote of the people .   It was a moment of triumph for activists who fought for women's suffrage for decades . It meant women in Colorado could vote 27 years before that right was grant...

For decades, Warren Miller was synonymous with a very Colorado genre of film.  In Miller’s films, skiers glide across pristine winter terrain and hurtle down near-vertical slopes. Over the decades, Miller and his film crews turned those images into dozens of feature-length documentaries that celebrated the thrill of a day on the mountain – and also captured the poetry of skiing.   Miller died in 2...

Every summer in Colorado’s high country, yellow-bellied marmots race to gain enough weight to make it through months of hibernation. But this year’s meager snowpack and early spring have put that survival strategy under new pressure.   Scientists with the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Crested Butte have studied individual marmots in the wild for more than six decades. And they say that...

If you read the Colorado Sun, you might be familiar with the comic strip called ‘ What’d I Miss? ’ It follows conversations between Ossie, a young Black man, and Myra, an older white woman who has awakened from a long coma.    Together they struggle to understand modern day politics and culture. Ossie and Myra talk about issues like artificial intelligence, disinformation on social media and more...

Railroads transformed the American West – and immigrant labor made the railroads possible. But many of those immigrants’ stories haven’t been well documented - including those of the Mexican railroad workers known as traqueros .  Beginning in the late 1800s, railroad companies recruited thousands of Mexican and Mexican-American workers to build and maintain the tracks.  At one time, Mexican worker...