Author: By Seth Boster [email protected]

HUERFANO COUNTY • When Debra Malone and her husband were searching for a new home away from the city, she found herself driving through a dreamscape of southern Colorado. Hardly any other cars were on the road. They about had it all to themselves: hills of piñon and juniper; higher forests of pine and aspen;…

David Mizer isn’t much for talking. He’d rather his writing talk for him. “I actually wrote this before I left,” he says, pulling up three pages at his Colorado Springs home. He wrote this before the adventure of a lifetime. Projecting the question everyone would ask — Why leave everything behind for nine-and-a-half months of…

LYONS • A sweet smell drifts through the sweetest memories of Anthony Lehnert. He’s transported to an old home in the Wisconsin countryside, a converted school house where there always seemed to be a pie in his grandma’s oven. “You could smell that burnt apple when you woke up,” Lehnert recalls. Now, you can smell…

Another afternoon finds Colorado Springs’ leading candy family in their element. In the hilltop factory on 21st Street, machines are whirring and churning. They’re creating some of the confections that have been beloved in the Pikes Peak region for more than 100 years. But there’s also an essential, human touch — something the Niswongers know…

LYONS • It’s not often Mike Clark shows guests to the back of his shop. It is, after all, his space. His domain. A little, wooden world of fine, meticulous work. One might say magic happens here, if they are so romantically inclined to the bamboo fly rod. Clark is not all that inclined, a…

ESTES PARK • In an aspen-lined meadow crowned by the regal peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park, a bull elk raises his snout to the setting sun. It’s a tell-tale sign of the sound Coloradans long for this time of year, when one of the state’s most iconic beasts is most active in one of…

You get a few different reactions when you’re seen riding a unicycle in the mountains. “Most of the time, you get the disbelief and the person that’s totally psyched for you,” Josh Torrans says. Sometimes the person is a kid, says Walter Williams. “And the kid will stop and be like, Woooow! Look mom, a…

DENVER • On a downtown corner under the shadow of glitzy, high-rise apartments and condos, there’s a faded-brick building that looks like it doesn’t belong. There are faded murals of the faded frontier and cracked antlers and busted wagon wheels. There’s a plaque proclaiming this building’s rightful place. It’s a plaque proclaiming the Buckhorn Exchange…

As a teenager in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, Annalise Grueter could not believe the order of her cross country team coach. “We were going to be hiking/jogging a (13,000-foot mountain) for training that July day,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘What are we doing? This is a thing?’” Flash forward to today, running up mountains…

In 1992, a pair of University of Colorado at Boulder professors found themselves baffled. The armillaria bulbosa, aka “the humungous fungus,” had been declared the world’s largest organism. Michael Grant heard this over the radio. While aspens steal the show in Colorado, this native tree also delivers fall colors “I thought, No! We can’t have…