Xcel’s expensive wildfire plan

Plus: A monolith appears on a dairy farm, “rewilding” the community in Nederland, antitrust issues at Arapahoe Basin and more Colorado news

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Jun 28, 2024 - 08:59
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Xcel’s expensive wildfire plan
A drone view of a neighborhood destroyed by the Marshall fire, which was attributed to an unmoored Xcel Energy power line
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This job can be pretty awesome some days. Yesterday was one of those days. I spent all of Thursday camped out beneath a mysteriously placed monolith that appeared one night in Bellvue earlier this week. The monolith was cool — “kind of pretty,” the landowner whose parcel it appeared on said, and I have to agree — but talking to dozens of people who drove over from Fort Collins on lunch breaks, or took a day trip up from Boulder, or just wanted something to do with their kids on a summer day, was undeniably the best part.

Everyone seemed in good spirits — it helped that there was coffee and ice cream for sale nearby — and wanted to talk about “aliens” in quotation marks. As in, the “aliens” forgot to ditch their pallets, and the “aliens” must have the recipe for concrete. It was a strange day, for sure, but full of brief and interesting encounters. Unfortunately, none of them of the third kind. As far as I know.

On to other earthly matters.

The neighborhood south of Harper Lake in Louisville on Jan. 9, 2022. Nearly every home in the development was destroyed in the Marshall fire. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Utility-sparked wildfires are becoming more common throughout the West, and utility companies are taking unprecedented steps to get in front of them. Facing more than 300 lawsuits from the Marshall fire and fresh off Texas’ largest wildfire ever recorded, Xcel energy filed a $1.9 billion, six-step plan to prevent future disasters. Mark Jaffe has the details.

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A steady stream of people marched up a small hill off County Road 25 to visit and photograph the mysterious monolith. (Parker Yamasaki, The Colorado Sun)

S-Class

“Significant monoliths, well made, with zero explanations of appearance,” according to a six-part classification system

In 2020 a three-sided, mirrored prism was discovered by government workers deep in the Utah backcountry, captivating thousands of pandemic-isolated internet sleuths. The monolith, as it was called, sparked a movement to find and record these alien-adjacent structures all around the world. The hype died around 2022, but was reinvigorated this month when a strange structure appeared first in the desert outside of Las Vegas, and then on top of a hill on a dairy farm in northern Colorado. We visited Colorado’s newest monolith.

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The new Wild Bear Nature Center, pictured in progress Wednesday in Nederland, sits on 5 acres that open up to almost 3,000 acres of land encompassing Mud Lake open space and Caribou Ranch open space. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

Jill Dreves was frustrated by the way public school forced kids to sit at desks and take spelling tests, rather than roam free outside. Since the mid-’90s, when she left her public school teaching job, Dreves has been helping kids and community members break out of their day-to-day lives and ease into nature, a process that she calls “rewilding.” Now, her vision is getting a permanent home in Nederland on the site of a former wasteland. Erica Breunlin has the story.

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Drew Litton hears that the Denver Nuggets are looking for the next Rocky, the iconic mascot position that requires a special set of skills.

CARTOON

In “What’d I Miss?” Ossie’s friend explains his struggles to communicate with automated and AI voices that seem to have a narrow understanding of language.

CARTOON

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As the aliens drawn on a chalkboard in Bellvue say, “boop boop beep boop.”

— Parker & the whole staff of The Sun

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