- Trail Ridge Road was open for the season before winter had other plans. But workers were able to clear snow and reopen Independence Pass on Thursday.
- The job of spreading wildfire awareness across the state continues to largely fall to homeowners and community volunteers.
- More than 5,000 wildfires start each year in Colorado. The cause of most of the state’s large, human-started fires is unknown.
- Most of Colorado's counties, which are responsible for investigating wildfires, do not have a trained wildfire investigator on staff.
- Investigators are actively focused on three explanations: downed power lines, human activity, and underground coal fires.
- Though the booster dose is considered the most effective defense against the omicron variant, Coloradans are not yet embracing it at the same pace they took to initial doses of the vaccine.
- After you get past the goats, donkeys, roosters and cattle, you will see the music room at Harvest Farm, a substance abuse support center.
- Some of the biggest wildfires in Colorado have cost lives and caused millions of dollars in damage. But without knowing how they started exactly, Coloradans can’t change policies to try to prevent new ones. And no one gets held accountable.
- A CPR News investigation found that state, local and federal authorities in Colorado could pinpoint the ignition source for fewer than half of the human-started wildfires in the state since 2000.
- One in 23 Colorado workers left their jobs during September.
- John Hinman, a pastry chef, spent a summer perfecting his recipes until he "started making pies as good as grandma's."
- Data showed that fewer fires are solved in Colorado than neighboring states, so reporters then set out to try and learn why.
- A CPR News investigation found that Colorado has the worst rate of any state in the West for finding the origins of human-caused wildfires.
- Colorado wildfire investigators found the exact origins of just 43 percent of human-caused fires from 2000 to 2018 — the worst rate of any state in the West. As a result, policy makers are left without key data that could explain what people who cause fires are doing wrong.
- The number of days with smoky skies has grown over the last decade, the data show, blanketing Colorado from the Eastern Plains to the Western Slope
- The Census data confirms the population growth evidenced by a decade of increased traffic and home prices on the Front Range.
