Author: By Seth Boster [email protected]

This month on a mountain in Thailand, Allie McLaughlin pulled away from a pack of the planet’s best runners as a trail climbed higher and higher, meeting rocks and roots, terrain not so unlike her home stomping grounds of Colorado Springs. During the uphill test of the World Mountain Running Championships, McLaughlin felt, indeed, at…

How do we begin to express our gratitude for Colorado’s great outdoors? Perhaps by spreading the love. In this season of thanks, we asked athletes, enthusiasts and advocates from around the state to share their appreciation for certain places and the endless gifts of nature. Christel Aime, hiker, Colorado Springs Born in Haiti, land of…

Across the Pikes Peak region, we return to our favorite trails for the exercise, views and fresh air. We might not think twice about their names. A closer look reminds that this is a region as rich in history as it is nature: Aiken Canyon Trail: Renowned 19th-century ornithologist Charles Aiken first surveyed this hilly…

The sun was setting over the mountains in Colorado Springs when Nick Noland strapped into a pair of blades where his feet used to be. The local man was a runner before his highly publicized disaster three years ago on a 14,000-foot peak. Thanks to these sturdy, bouncy prosthetics, he’s a runner again. “When my…

DENVER • One recent Saturday night at My Brother’s Bar, Paula Newman flipped on a little-used light. Then she heard a complaint. “Someone was going, ‘This is a bar! Why is it so bright?” says Newman, the bar’s owner. “People are so funny. It’s things like that. They don’t want it to change.” Things like…

The sun had yet to rise when Miles Clark recently left his home in Utah to ski the backcountry’s first snow. However early, he had no illusions of first tracks. “Maybe two or three cars in the parking lot,” went his thinking. “But no,” he said. “I roll into the parking lot at 6:15 a.m.,…

Colorado’s ski season is underway, with more resorts set to open in the coming weeks. Here’s a look at some of what’s new to the scene: Arapahoe Basin: The Lenawee Lift, a fixed-grip triple chair built in 2001, has doubled the seating and upped the speed toward coveted terrain. Steilhang is a new, cozy alpine…

Five months after a rockslide closed a popular loop trail in Colorado Springs’ southwest mountains, signs continue to mark the route off limits. Officials remain uncertain of when the signs could be removed from either end of the Palmer Trail, also known as Section 16. While the city parks department manages the trail, the rockslide…

They are abandoned but not forgotten. They are the forefronts of classic Colorado images, destination reminders of the bold pioneers that built this state. One might say their spirits linger across the mountains — their shouts and cries still heard in the night between cabins and corners of revelry and tragedy. There might be no…

VICTOR • The Victorian building sat on the corner vacant for many years, like so many buildings in this ghostly quiet town in the hills like a rolling graveyard, scattered with splintered wood and rusted metal of shafts and A-frames and other mining skeletons. In 2017, that old building caught the eye of a passerby…