What does Colorado smell like? Perfumer Dawn Spencer Hurwitz is figuring that out. “I was really trying to evoke the entirety of walking through a Colorado meadow into the forest. Because there are grasses and fresh air and other deciduous trees,” Hurwitz said. “I really focused on the contrast and complement of those elements next to the Colorado blue spruce that I used and other pine kind of notes.” There’s Ponderosa pine bark, lemon essential oil and leaf alcohol, the smell you pick up when your lawn is freshly mown.
The annual Deer Trail Rodeo marked 150 years when it got underway Friday evening July 5, 2019. The town, about an hour east of Denver on the Plains, claims to be the first site of a rodeo anywhere in the United States.
Kalindi DeFrancis is hanging what look like large slabs of meat in a large storefront window on 17th Avenue. With the door propped open to let a breeze into the tiny space — as much for her snoozing, wolf-life dog Malachi as it is for her — she’s preparing for an opening two days away. “I have a lot of sausages I’ll be bringing later,” DeFrancis says. The sausages and the slabs hanging in the window aren’t meat. It’s a little more plain to see when you get closer that they’re driftwood, painted red for her installation, “Meat Amigo (a butcher shop),” at The Storeroom.
A select group of state prison system inmates are producing a podcast called With(In) through a program with the University of Denver. They interviewed Dean Williams, executive director of the Department of Corrections, on Tuesday July 9 2019. We'll have a story soon from arts reporter Stephanie Wolf.
CPR Western Slope reporter Stina Sieg writes, "I finally found the rough dirt road that leads to this skeleton of a weather-beaten chapel off I-70, just outside Palisade. After months of wondering, I've now heard it's a paintball range. So yes, sometimes the mystery is tastier than the truth." You can see more of Stina's photos here.
Despite its big-city trappings, Denver is, without a doubt, a wild ecosystem. And there’s an entire infrastructure of human activity to manage it all. Most of the time, animals enter these human networks when they’re injured. While some species have thrived in the urban environment, many cannot avoid contact with cars, windows or pets. Those who do end up in one or all three stages of Denver’s wildlife management: rescue, rehabilitation and afterlife in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Kevin's here to report on how it all goes down.
The city of Denver was a lot smaller when Rufus E. Cable photographed it around 1860. His image of Larimer Street, likely taken at what is now Larimer Square, depicts a classic vision of an old west town: squat buildings with square facades and covered wagons surrounded by flat dirt. The shot is complete with edges blurred by his imprecise lens that likely transcribed the scene onto a metal plate negative. Brian Trembath, a librarian at the central library’s Western History Collection, did some archival gumshoeing to confirm that it is, probably, the earliest known photo of the city.
Our website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds go beyond the radio to show you what Colorado looks like, as well as what it sounds like. This weekly feature is curated by CPR visuals editor Hart Van Denburg and Denverite photojournalist Kevin J. Beaty.
