KVNF's Local Motion

On this week’s Regional Roundup, we hear about efforts to restore beaver habitat in Rocky Mountain National Park, then we head to Western Colorado to hear how one rural community is dealing with electronic waste. After that we head to the Four Corners to the burn scar from the Ferris Fire to hear how wildfire impacts soil. We round out the show hearing about what El Niño might bring to the drought-stricken Rocky Mountain West.

• A story on the recent cowboy gathering that took place in Nucla, Colorado. (KOTO)
• An interview on the impact of last year's historically dry winter on the ski industry and what they're doing to lure people to the slopes this upcoming seasion. (RMCR)
• An interview with reporter Jamie Wanzek who has produced a three part series on the former working class neighborhoods in Durango, Colorado, and how they were impacted by Durango's toxic industrial past. (RMCR/KDUR)

On a Saturday afternoon in September, KVNF put on the first punk rock festival Montrose has maybe ever seen. Punk on the Unc, at River Bottom Park on the banks of the Uncompahgre River. The tickets were free, eight bands came from around the Mountain West, and for months nobody at the station knew if anyone would show up. A short feature from that afternoon aired last week. For the first two-thirds of this Local Motion, the people we met that day get to finish their thoughts.

"Surprised more than anything because I didn't think people like this existed out here," Angelina said. "They just came out of the woodwork."

Shane Carrick brought his whole family. "It's always like, I call it like farmer's market music," he said. "We get a lot of bluegrass and no shade on that. But it's a little bit different to get some punk energy in southwest Colorado." And why does that matter here? "Everyone kind of looks the same and acts the same, and it's good to get the weirdos out and the freaks and let the kids know that people look different and act different."

Arlo, fifteen, blue hair and a lot of piercings, was at their first punk show. "Normally when you're walking around and you kind of look like me, people like shoo their kids away from me," Arlo said. "But here no one's done that, which is nice." Ana Maria, Arlo's mom, drove them there. "That was me when I was 15," she said. "I was totally punked out." That was twenty-some years ago, "and it was not quite the same as it is now for kids in small rural towns and I would have loved something like this when I was that age."

Dennis Barker, a Marine Corps veteran, came with his daughter. "I didn't serve so that everyone could be like me," he said. "This is my kid. I tried to teach her to be different. Be yourself."

Dusty put the whole afternoon in one sentence. "You see people in the pit look nothing like each other. Didn't grow up the same, but they're all in there." And a young man at the skate park explained what a mosh pit is for: "People will pick you up if you fall down. You don't necessarily get that everywhere."

This past March was one of the warmest on record for Colorado. In Delta County, agriculture took a major blow with fruit trees and gardens going into early bloom. The early higher temperatures were followed by subsequent freezes that killed off delicate blooms resulting in massive crop failures for growers. The unusually warm weather also depleted snowpack totals statewide accelerating drought conditions. Earlier this month, KVNF's Laura Palmisano spoke to Laura Parker, the owner of High Desert Seeds + Gardens in Paonia, about the effects this unprecedented year had on her seed operation.

Palmisano: So Laura, what have been your challenges this year with such little access to water?

Parker: Well, first it was just knowing how to plan for it. So that was making some really hard decisions at the beginning of the season because we could tell it was going to be an unusual and hard season. So that was the first thing. It was just cutting back on our operation and cutting back on some of our staffing and making some really hard decisions about what we thought we could pull off with limited water.

Palmisano: Did this all start back in March when we had a [major] heat wave and then the snow melted off?

Parker: Yeah. So back in March, that was just so incredibly unusual. And when we had like 85 degrees in March, which I don't think [has] ever happened before, and we saw a lot of things start to change on the farm really quickly. Things going into bloom that we never see happening at that time of year.

Palmisano: And then there was a freeze, right?

Parker: It is typical to have like swings and false springs, but usually not that early. And so that was kind of a chain reaction and, and getting those really hard freezes again twice...I wasn't really sure what would happen with many of the seed crops and I think we had some losses from those swings

Palmisano: What were your losses?

Parker: So because things were starting to bloom early because of that warmth in March and then with the swinging temperatures, a lot of things kind of need more of a stable, kind of cool, but stable climate to really set good seed and pollinate. The thing that we saw it in the most dramatically was our winter radish seed. You can tell there were stems that set good seed, but there were sections that definitely like just aborted their seeds and they're totally empty inside. It's still a little unclear where we are with all of that. Definitely, we saw a lot of stress in our pea seed crops. Just to give some background, I'm primarily a seed grower and it was an opportunity year as well for us because we focus on drought-tolerant short season crops. And so some of the hard decisions we were making were was also trying to take advantage of a potential selection event.

Palmisano: How did those drought-tolerant crops do this year?

Parker: So along with all of this chaos, we had chaos that we couldn't predict. We've seen widespread, many different, actually new diseases to us. But one of the most damaging that many, many growers and gardeners across the state are experiencing, and I believe across the Southwest, is curly top virus. There was really widespread beet leafhoppers, which are a tiny little insect that kind of looks like fluff flying around your feet. They come in from the deserts and have different migrations and different life cycles and they spread. They're the vector for the curly top virus. I've seen a lot of curly top virus over the years, but it's never been super damaging. We did, I think in, in 2018 or so we had a really bad time with it and it probably affected like two crop types, mainly tomatoes and beets. But this year we're seeing it across seven different crop types.

Palmisano: And were those your drought-resistant crops?

Parker: [Yes], some of the ones we were pushing for drought resistance. So yeah, like beans and squash, is another drought-tolerant one and orach is actually quite drought-tolerant. It's a green.

Palmisano : And, those got attacked?

Parker: Yeah. And people are seeing it in amaranth ,also drought tolerant thing. Our later plantings don't have the curly top virus. So that was a learning. It's like we're seeing that we can plant later and maybe miss the cycles

Palmisano: What have been some of your successes during this strange year?

Parker: Well, we have a really beautiful corn crop and some of our melons for some reason aren't getting the Curly Top Virus. I know some growers are experiencing that. Even though our water got turned off, basically [the melons] are really sustaining. We've gotten a few like very tiny misting kind of rains and I think that's kept those vine crops happy, and then we're seeing some varieties of our tomatoes surviving somewhat. So we might be selecting for some resistance. And also some of the beans aren't affected as much as others. So I think, there's actually some potential for breeding for resistance to the curly top in those crops if like this continues to be quite a problem.

Palmisano: When did your water get turned off and how is that impacting your growing?

Parker: Our water got turned off in like mid-August, which was actually way better than we had predicted. Some of the old timers that are on our ditch were saying we might get cut off July 1st. So that was excellent. But you know, for us when we do biennial seed crops it's really problematic because we need that fall water to establish those crops. And an important part of our produce operation is growing for fall production. So basically, we had to cut those pieces out of our plan for this season.

The KVNF News team recapped our recent coverage and late breaking news on the Montrose City Council in this week's Local Motion.

Kurt Gray puts the outdoor industry plainly: "North Face doesn't make anything. They don't even own a sewing machine."

That isn't an accusation. It's how the business works — big brands design gear, factories overseas build it. Jagged Edge Mountain Gear went the other way.

It began in Telluride in the early 1990s, when twin sisters sewed fleece headbands and sold them from a pushcart on Main Street. It grew into regional stores and a national catalog business, then came apart in the early 2000s. The trademark was sold, and the brand was, in owner-operator Erik Dalton's words, "shuttered and put on a shelf." Dalton took over the Telluride store in 2003; getting the name back took about ten years.

The sewing happens in Montrose, slowly and on purpose. "We hand cut everything that we make," Dalton says — roughly fifty steps per pack, and the first is a person with a pattern and a blade.

Gray, who spent years designing outerwear and visiting Asian factories, says the economics there run backward: cloth is the expensive input and labor is cheap, so the system is built to save fabric. That has a consequence most buyers never see — the factory often picks the materials, so the lining that failed in your pack may not have been chosen by the brand on the label.

The hardest constraint is people. Finding someone locally who can sew, Dalton says, is "like finding literally a needle in a haystack." Gray says. The shop runs with about four people.

One machine on their floor tells the region's story. Their die-cutting press came from SOM Footwear, which handmade Vibram-soled shoes in Montrose for over a decade before Softstar Shoes of Philomath, Oregon bought it in 2025. The shoemaking moved north. The press stayed, and now cuts backpack straps.

In the second half, KVNF freelance reporter Lisa Young visits Geyser Systems, a Montrose manufacturer that gave up a product line and its entire production crew, then rebuilt around 3D-printed portable shower systems — the Geyser Clean Kit, and the Geyser Field Shower Kit developed for military use.

Founder Jonathan Ballesteros describes what a military stock number would demand: more sewing machines, more table space, more 3D printers, more people.

Days ago, it was the Ouray County Fairgrounds. Now it's a small city.

Nearly a thousand people are working the Gold Mountain Fire, which grew to almost 28,000 acres over the holiday weekend near Ouray and stood at 3% contained as of July 6th. To feed, house and support them, an entire town has sprung up almost overnight in Ridgway — hundreds of tents, streets of office trailers, showers, laundry, a medical unit and its own security.

"We really kind of set up a little mini town," says Tyler Nathe, one of the Operations Section chiefs with the incident management team.

The scale is hard to picture until you stand in it. In the mess hall, head cook Shamarie Bailey serves 900 breakfasts nearly every morning. Each firefighter on the line can burn through 5,000 calories a day, and refrigerated semi-trailers hold days of meals in reserve.

"I do it because someone has to," Bailey says. "People are out there fighting the fires for us, and we've got to serve them. They have to eat."

There are no volunteers in this camp. Every cook, driver and firefighter is a trained, paid professional, drawn from more than 30 states — among them a tribal fire crew from California, the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians. Even the small things reveal the discipline: crews walk single file everywhere, even to breakfast, because on the fire line that's how a crew keeps count of every member.

Reuben Farnsworth, a paramedic from Delta County, has worked fire camps for a decade. "It's a mobile camp, kind of like the camps they set up for military personnel overseas," he says. "Kind of like a little city."

The fire is burning in places locals love — the West, Middle, and East forks of the Cimarron, where families have camped for generations. Nathie, who grew up in Grand Junction, has camped there too.

Near the mess hall stands an information board with the morning's maps. One corner is saved for thank-you notes and was a little sparse on Monday morning. If you want to drop thank you notes for the fire crews call the hotline at 970-355-3286 to learn how to deliver them.

If you want to donate to those effected by the fire visit the Ouray County Community Foundation at wc-cf.org.

Wildfires have held the attention of Coloradans through a brutal season fueled by drought. But despite our fixation on the flames, few of us see the complex network of people working behind the scenes to fight them.

If you picture wildfire crews as helicopter pilots and firefighters working in the woods, you’re missing a big part of the picture.

At the Incident Command Post, dozens of people perform jobs that are essential to the response, but rarely get much public attention.

“And so our job here, you can kind of think of it like Amazon,” said Julia Pappas, an administrative specialist with the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri. “We get to post up maps, closures, detailed information of the incident,” said Matthew Gilatti, who works in public information. Brandon Hogeland, a lieutenant with South Metro Fire Rescue outside Denver, is training as a heavy equipment boss.

Those three individuals represent three very different roles. Pappas keeps the command post stocked; Gilatti keeps the public informed; and Hogeland operates heavy equipment used to repair areas disturbed by firefighting operations.

But this work is not solitary. The teams and individuals working on the fire hail from all over the country, but that doesn’t mean they operate as isolated cells. At the Incident Command Post, many roles become intertwined.

Hogeland’s team works closely with resource advisors, specialists who guide suppression efforts to protect natural, cultural and heritage assets. Those specialists, who usually have backgrounds in biology or environmental science, guide operators like Hogeland on repairing burn scars and minimizing impacts.

“This is on Forest Service land, so we work with the resource advisors as far as what they want it to look like and the specs,” Hogeland said. “So the guidance we got was to come in, smooth out or kind of roughen up where the bulldozer put in containment line and then to pull the brush back over it to help control erosion.”

He said resource advisors provide guidance on what the landscape should look like when the work is complete.

Pappas is working at the Gold Mountain Fire as a receiving and distributing manager trainee. Her role is crucial for managing the logistical supply chain supporting firefighting efforts.

“So we take in the materials that are needed out on the line and here in camp, and then as people need something, we, you know, package it up, and we deliver it to them, or sometimes, like, they'll come pick it up,” Pappas said.

She works closely with ground support, which provides drivers to transport supplies into the field. A camp crew from Oregon also helps package, consolidate and unpack materials.

“So kind of just to give you, like, an idea of what a typical day might be, so we have to keep track of what's in our yard,” Pappas said.And the collaboration doesn't stop at the command post. Gilatti says every person working on the fire has another network of people supporting them back home.

“And not just my wife, Olivia, or my kiddo Penelope, but my family, my, you know, my mom, sister, siblings, all my family, they jump in to help support her,” Gilatti said. “And then on top of that, you know, my home unit, too, they're taking care of staffing my position too.”

He said that while one person may leave their community to work on a fire, many more people are supporting that person behind the scenes.

“So huge, huge shout out to the families out there for everybody from the firefighters online to, you know, the incident commander, logistics, radio comps, everybody that does stuff here, they got somebody else back home helping take care of,” Gilatti said.

From the people repairing containment lines to those keeping the command post stocked — and the families supporting them back home — wildfire response depends on far more people than those we see on the fireline.

It’s a vast network of people with different skills, backgrounds and responsibilities, all working together to keep each other safe and protect communities.A team beyond the fireline: The hidden workforce of wildfire response

San Juan Avenue. They held American flags in their hands or draped them across their cars. The crowd was solemn as a line of emergency vehicles passed. The procession was escorting the body of Nicholas Dale, a helicopter pilot who died while fighting the Gold Mountain Fire.

The first responders stoically kept their eyes on the road ahead of them. But there was palpable emotion among the residents watching.

The Montrose Board of Commissioners delayed their meeting yesterday morning in order to attend the procession. Commissioner Hansen told us, “When you have people that are brave enough to risk their lives to help us and make life better for us, you can't help but be on this lineup with all these flags and get teary eyed because a young man gave his life in order to protect us, and so it's meaningful.”

Dale, the pilot, was a 56 year old man from Sooke, British Columbia. He was the sole occupant of the helicopter, which was engaged in suppression efforts for the Gold Mountain Fire. The aircraft went down around 5:17pm Sunday evening, and crashed into the Silver Jack Reservoir. The Montrose County Sheriff’s Office dive team were called out to the scene, and assisted the Gunnison County Sheriff’s Office with the recovery.

Commissioner Kirsten Copeland said the procession’s attendance “reflects the Montrose community, how much our first responders mean to all of us. … All of those folks put themselves at risk every day to protect us, and I think this community recognizes that and shows up.”

The crash is being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration.

This summer's vast wildfires have left many Coloradans wary. And that fear shows up not just in how we react to wildfires—but in the words we use to describe them.

Kevin Sweeney, a Public Information Officer working on the Gold Mountain Fire, told us, “When we speak about fire, we use negative language. We use scar, we use scorched, we use words that have high emotional value typically negatively.”

While showing KVNF around the edge of the fire, he stops us before we get too close to a blackened tree. He points out a flag that says “killer tree,” indicating that it could easily fall. In these situations, harsh language can be useful. A negative term, like “burn scar,” helps people understand that the area is dangerous.

But outside those immediate safety warnings, Sweeney says that same language can shape how people think about every kind of fire, including the prescribed burns that help reduce future wildfire risk. “One of the hurdles we have to get over with getting more prescribed fire, more beneficial fire on the landscape is reducing the fear of fire in our communities,” he told us.

Sweeney feels a special connection to this land, as he once lived on the Western Slope and got married in Ouray. He says, “We need more fire in the West, and that's a really hard thing to say when you're driving through a 40,000-acre fire that almost burned down a town, a town that I got married in.”

Instinct tells us that fires need to be put out–immediately. But when it comes to wildfires, the answer isn’t that simple. Sweeney says that when European settlers came to North America, they had really only experienced fires that burned entire towns down. The Ute people and other native groups “would come up into these lands and hunt and then migrate down into lower valleys, but they would light fires behind them when they left so that they could have good hunting grounds.” Sweeney says the current mindset of “put every fire out” has resulted in disasters like the Gold Mountain Fire.

Sweeney recognizes that changing the way people think, or speak, about fire isn't easy, especially after a summer like this. He says it’s important to be sensitive about the tremendous impact they can have, but also says, “I come from a place of knowing that the only way we're going to fix this is by having more fire.”

For Sweeney, changing how we manage fire starts with changing how we talk about it. Because if every fire is seen only as destruction, he says it becomes much harder to use carefully planned fires that can help prevent the next disaster.

To sell kiln-dried lumber legally, Kevin Sweeney says, it has to test at 12% moisture or lower. "So that's two by fours that have been cut up, sent to the kiln, dried out, and now they're ready to get bought at your favorite lumber store." Some living trees in the Uncompahgre were testing at 9% — drier than the lumber at the yard.

Sweeney is a public information officer (PIO) on the Gold Mountain Fire, and in late July he drove the KVNF news team up Owl Creek Pass and into the burned perimeter. Most of us spent this summer watching smoke roll through the valley's southeast corner worrying for some of our favorite mountain areas.

If you are expecting the worst, you may be surprised, One hillside is black, the next one over is green, and that holds for miles. "Because you see red [on the map] doesn't mean it's black, right?" Sweeney says. "Like the red is just that area within the fire." Inside that line, he points out, there are "perfectly green trees that have no impact to them."

Where the fire did run, it ran hard, driven by wind. So why is anything still standing? That 9% figure came from a fire behavior analyst, and the analyst on this fire, Glen Lewis, made a video for the incident's own YouTube channel explaining how it burned. His answer is the aspen. "our firefighter's friend," Lewis says.

He gives three reasons. Aspens "shed these lower branches as they grow and get taller." That leaves no ladder carrying fire from the ground into the crown. Their fallen leaves form a mat that traps moisture and feeds a green understory, which "holds a lot of moisture in it, and it's very inhibitive to fire spread." And the leaves themselves lack "the volatile oils within the needles or within the leaves that even the oak trees have that makes them want to burn more intensely."

Of those oils, Lewis says: "It's kind of like pouring gasoline on fire." Aspen leaves do the opposite, absorbing heat rather than feeding it. In aerial photographs of the burn, he points at green patches standing inside it: "But the aspen kind of held it."

Sweeney says the burned ground should come back next summer with wildflowers, because fire returns nitrogen to the soil. This "is not a good fire by any means," he says, "but there's patches of good within the fire."

We drove past the draw where my (Brody Wilson's) family cuts a Christmas tree most years. Some of it had burned. Sweeney said: "There's going to be some of that grieving for the what's lost while with you guys and your community." He went on: "You're going to that fishing spot that your grandpa took you to. And now it looks different."

Watch the full fuels video from the Gold Mountain and Elk Fires incident, in which fire behavior analyst Glen Lewis explains the fuel types on this fire and why aspen stands slowed it: https://youtu.be/cmXRtv9F01M

The Gold Mountain Fire is 90 percent contained and has grown by about an acre in ten days. Evacuation zones in Montrose and Gunnison counties are standing down. But 229 people are still assigned — and much of their work now is undoing what firefighters did in June and July. (Figures as of Aug. 6.)"Long after the smoke column is gone, there's still a lot of work being done," said Brenden Hoglund, a lieutenant with South Metro Fire Rescue outside Denver, working this fire as a heavy equipment boss trainee.

He stood at a stretch of line above Owl Creek Pass — "about 1,000 feet of control line that was put in," a strip wider than a two-lane road, bladed to bare dirt so the fire would starve when it reached it. It worked, and then the line itself became the problem. Abandon firelines cause erosion, become unwanted ATV trails or ad hoc roads.

Undoing it is its own assignment, called suppression repair: smooth or roughen the bared ground, then pull the brush back over to slow erosion. That isn't the operator's call. Resource advisors write the specs — specialists who, Hoglund said, "usually have some kind of a background in biology or environmental sciences," and who decide what keeps the ground "from being a scar, minimizing the impact as much as possible."

The same obligation follows onto private land, where landowners who hosted crews get their torn-up roads regraded before the fire crews leaves.

None of that, though, makes the country safe to walk.

"A recently burned area is a dangerous place," said Kevin Sweeney, the information officer with the complex incident management team on the Gold Mountain Fire. Flash flooding is one reason. Hazard trees are another, and the dangerous ones don't always look it: soil burned near a trunk, then soaked by monsoon rain, can leave a tree green on top and failing underneath. "The tree might look healthy, but its root system might be damaged," Sweeney said.

The Forest Service will clear hazard trees along roads before reopening them, but "they won't get to all of the hazard trees for the whole forest. They'll focus on the roads, then they'll focus on trails."

At an overlook halfway up the pass, Sweeney stopped this reporter from walking to the edge of a burn for a photo. A snag overhead was flagged, and the flagging, he noted, "literally says killer tree." He wouldn't walk under it either: "I don't want to walk up in there. I got kids."

His advice for hunters, hikers and Christmas-tree cutters this fall: on a windy day in a burned area, watch for that "hairs on the back of your neck" feeling — and leave.

Closures remain in effect, and Sweeney asked for patience with them — catching himself mid-sentence as he did. "Those closures aren't in place because we want to keep folks out of here. Well, they are in place because we want to keep folks out of here." It isn't that people shouldn't enjoy their land, he said: "there's some pretty serious hazards back here, and there's a reason that that area is closed."

As Hoglund put it: "The folks are still here working, even though there's not a lot of smoke in the air." ...at least from the Gold Mountain Fire.

Jenny Williams lived in Ridgway for years, and her parents are there still. These days she writes from Aotearoa, New Zealand. In between she spent about eight and a half years inside big tech, at Google and then Microsoft, including a couple of years on an AI ethics team. It is not the résumé you expect on the back of a novel, and it runs straight through her new one.

House of Liars is what Williams calls a "slow burn literary psychological thriller." Six writers are brought to a remote island to compete for a million-dollar publishing prize. One of the writers is an AI. On the first day, the residency hands each writer an AI-generated version of the novel they came to write, to read or throw away. Williams calls it "this kind of tempting object."

Williams and KVNF's Brody Wilson discussed the temptations of AI in their discussion. Williams is clear that the anger toward AI in the creative world is earned. Her own first novel, The Atlas of Forgotten Places, turned up in the training data of large language models, unpaid. "Whether or not it was legal, whether or not it's termed legal, it's clearly unethical," she told KVNF. "These companies were taking lifetimes of labor from writers and artists without compensation." But she thinks the conversation leaves something out. "One thing that is not acknowledged enough," she said, "is really how tempting and seductive these technologies are."

Asked what is actually wrong, Williams gave four problems, not one: how the models were trained, those same models now competing with the writers whose work trained them, a near-total absence of disclosure to readers, and whether readers care. Amazon's self-publishing platform asks authors to declare whether they used AI, she noted, but does not pass that answer to buyers, and it is a single yes-or-no box. As she put it, "it's a binary that contains an enormous spectrum."

The episode also takes up what is changing. Article 50 of the European Union's AI Act took effect on August 2, requiring providers of generative AI systems to mark their output in a machine-readable format. Systems already on the market have until December 2 to comply. Anthropic, which makes Claude, has signed the associated European code of practice and published its approach: which is an invisible watermark in generated text, and a signed record on generated files. By Anthropic's own account, finding such a mark is "not fully conclusive." It says content may have been processed by Claude, not that Claude wrote it. Someone who used the tool to proofread carries the same mark as someone who had it write the whole book from a single prompt.

Williams is not persuaded there is much there. "I don't think there's a there there," she said of AI writing. "There's no sentience behind it. There's no lived experience." What she wants readers to trust is the opposite: "I write not because I have answers, but because I have questions."

Full disclosure: an AI assistant was used in the production of this piece. I (Brody Wilson) used AI to transcribe my conversation with Jenny Williams, as a thought partner in outlining the flow of the whole piece, to find tape segments within our conversation, even to draft some narration, but every word you hear in the radio piece, and written here in the webpost, came through me.... before it went on the air, and I'm the one answerable for it. As is the case with everything you see and hear from KVNF News.

The largest reservoir in Colorado, Blue Mesa, is holding just over 240,000 acre-feet — "roughly about a third of the volume that we would typically expect to see in the reservoir in this time of year," says Caleb Foy, senior water resources engineer at the Colorado River District. April-through-July inflow, 151,000 acre-feet, is the lowest unregulated inflow on record.

This time of year, Blue Mesa is operated to maintain a minimum flow at the Whitewater gauge, far downstream, just above where the Gunnison joins the Colorado. A 2012 federal record of decision sets base-flow targets there — as low as 750 cubic feet per second, though June and July normally call for "upwards of just over 1,000 CFS at 1,050 CFS," Foy says. Those flows exist to protect biology and recreation in the lower Gunnison, and endangered fish in the 18-mile reach of the Colorado below the confluence.

This summer the Bureau of Reclamation, in consultation with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, other Gunnison Basin water users and the State of Colorado, "decided and agreed to lower the whitewater target down to 500 CFS." It "isn't certainly done lightly" Foy says: the cut preserves "nearly 500 acre-feet of storage per day" buying time against a Bureau forecast that Blue Mesa could drop below minimum power pool as early as October. Below that elevation the dam's 86.4-megawatt plant (enough energy to supply at least 34,000 homes at full pool) — stops generating, and Foy says electrical output is already falling. Unlike Glen Canyon Dam, he is "not aware of any concerns" about operating below power pool.

Between the reservoir and those fish sits the Gunnison Tunnel. The Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association (UVWUA) "holds a very senior water right" to divert there, to irrigate over 80,000 acres, and provide drinking water to ~60,000 people. Despite their very senior right, UVWUA has not been spared. They opened the season at a 50% allocation their water users "just seeing the writing on the wall". They have seen very little direct flow water from the Uncompahgre basin, normally a significant contributor for them. The River District reports large farms in the valley have fallowed 30 to 60 percent of their land.

Farther downstream, the Redlands Water and Power Company holds "a 670 CFS senior water right" junior to the tunnel. At the new minimum flow of 500 cfs its hydropower plant no longer makes enough electricity to pump 50 cfs of irrigation water to Redlands Mesa, so the company buys the additional electricity necessary to make-up the difference. Only three of its five lift stations are running, and Foy says water "may not make it to the end of every single lateral."

Finally, the Aspinall Unit was built as an original Colorado River Storage Project (or CRSP) unit, to let the Upper Basin develop its compact entitlement — and at these levels, Foy says, it can't serve that purpose. Flaming Gorge, not Blue Mesa, carried this year's drought-response release. Locally, Blue Mesa's low water has "impacts to flatwater recreation, which in turn has impacts to the local economy."

Absent "any dramatic shift in hydrology," Foy expects the lower flow targets to hold "for the foreseeable future." He won't call it safe — only "a less risky neighborhood than we would have otherwise been in."

On this week’s Regional Roundup, we head to the alpine tundra of Rocky Mountain National Park with naturalists searching for ptarmigan. We also learn about efforts to restore beaver habitat in other parts of the park.

Then, we travel to the small Western Colorado town of Lake City, where three newly trained EMTs are stepping up to help provide medical services to the community. In Wyoming, we visit Grand Teton National Park and meet a former National Park Service ranger who’s on an anti-censorship tour, raising awareness about signs and exhibits that have been removed from national parks following a federal order targeting what the administration calls “negative” content. We round out the show in Utah, where communities are taking on the problem of billboard blight.

• An audio postcard about ptarmigan in the Rocky Mountain National Park. (KGNU)
• An interview on efforts to restore beaver habitat in Rocky Mountain National Park. (KFFR)
• A story about the recent graduation of three people who have recently become certified EMTs in a small mountain community. (KVNF)
• A discussion on billboard blight in Utah and the public safety concerns around digital billboards. (KRCL)

On this week's Regional Roundup, we'll hear about some of the fires burning in the region, we'll hear from evacuees from the Aspen Acres fire, we pay a visit to the incident command post for the Gold Mountain Fire in Western Colorado to hear what it takes to support the hundreds of firefighters battling the blaze, and we'll hear about the ecological impact of the Ferris Fire in southwest Colorado. Then, we hear about concerns over efforts to open up the Roan Plateau to oil and gas drilling, and we visit a boxing class for people living with Parkinson's. We round out the show with a visit to Wyoming, where a new nonprofit hopes to provide afterhours emergency veterinarian care for local pets.

• A report on the monsoons which are forecast for the region later in July. (RMCR)
• A report on the Renaissance Weekend gathering at Jackson Lake Lodge in Grant Teton, Wyoming. (KHOL)
• A report on evacuees from the Aspen Acres Fire. (KLZR)
• A feature on the Gold Mountain Fire Incident Command Post. (KVNF)
• A feature on the ecological impacts of the Ferris Fire in southwest Colorado. (KSJD)
• A feature on the Roan Plateau and opposition to proposals to open it to drilling. (KDNK)
•  A feature on a boxing class for people living with Parkinson's. (RMCR)
• A feature on a new nonprofit in Jackson, Wyoming, to offer afterhours emergency veterinarian care to local pets. (KHOL)

On this week's Regional Roundup, we'll hear about some of the fires burning in the region, we'll hear from evacuees from the Aspen Acres fire, we pay a visit to the incident command post for the Gold Mountain Fire in Western Colorado to hear what it takes to support the hundreds of firefighters battling the blaze, and we'll hear about the ecological impact of the Ferris Fire in southwest Colorado. Then, we hear about concerns over efforts to open up the Roan Plateau to oil and gas drilling, and we visit a boxing class for people living with Parkinson's. We round out the show with a visit to Wyoming, where a new nonprofit hopes to provide afterhours emergency veterinarian care for local pets.

• A report on the monsoons which are forecast for the region later in July. (RMCR)
• A report on the Renaissance Weekend gathering at Jackson Lake Lodge in Grant Teton, Wyoming. (KHOL)
• A report on evacuees from the Aspen Acres Fire. (KLZR)
• A feature on the Gold Mountain Fire Incident Command Post. (KVNF)
• A feature on the ecological impacts of the Ferris Fire in southwest Colorado. (KSJD)
• A feature on the Roan Plateau and opposition to proposals to open it to drilling. (KDNK)
•  A feature on a boxing class for people living with Parkinson's. (RMCR)
• A feature on a new nonprofit in Jackson, Wyoming, to offer afterhours emergency veterinarian care to local pets. (KHOL)