Colorado Sunday .. Crime on the range ...Middle East

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I suppose we’re a few days early, but happy New Year to you all, Colorado Sunday friends!

We’ve been a lot of places in this newsletter in 2024, each of them a glimpse into the way life is lived and business is done in homeplaces that are not our own. I hope we’ve helped you better understand your far-flung neighbors as we’ve told their stories.

That’s how it has worked for me, right up to this week’s cover story, by Olivia Prentzel.

The last few times I’ve gone knocking around in northern Colorado, I’ve driven through places posted with “open range” notices. I suppose this is intended to remind me to slow down and not crash into cows moving to the greener side of the road. But every time I see a random group of cattle lounging under a lone pine tree, or see a few loping alongside the car, I just wonder who they belong to and who looks after them. When Olivia went to report on cattle gone missing on the Western Slope this fall, she brought back a compelling tale of the actual people who watch over animals grazing vast and rugged leases on public lands and the painful affront the lost calves are to the ranchers and their livelihoods.

Dana Coffield

Editor

The Cover Story

When the cows don’t come home

For as long as she can remember, Gayle Ware has been running cattle along the remote, hilly pastures west of Hotchkiss. In 1881, her family homesteaded the land on the Western Slope where she now looks after more than 2,450 cattle owned by 10 ranchers, she told me during a recent interview. Each June to October, she rides horseback across 30,000 acres to keep an eye on the cattle. After the sun sets, she sleeps in a rugged cabin lit by propane lights.

To say she knows the land well would be an understatement. The land is her home and like many Western Slope ranchers, she considers ranching a way of life. So when she noticed 23 cattle missing from her pool this fall, it felt like an attack on her livelihood.

But unfortunately, Ware is not the only one who realized their cattle counts had dropped as they took the cows off their summer pastures. Fears of cattle rustling grew as the missing cows reports flowed in. As of Dec. 19, at least 187 head — mostly calves — have been reported to the state’s brand inspection division as missing or stolen in the area.

Now, a multiagency task force is vetting all leads — from toxic weeds to wolves to cattle rustlers — to figure out who or what could be the culprit behind the cows’ mysterious disappearance.

For this story, I had so much to learn from Ware, other ranchers and Colorado’s state brand commissioner about a way of life that is commonplace for so many Coloradans, yet so new to me as a Front Range resident. I hope you enjoy reading this story as much as I enjoyed reporting it.

READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE

Olivia Prentzel | Reporter

The Colorado Lens

How do we get where we need to be going? In Colorado, there are many ways to travel. Here are a few of our favorite recent images.

Eric Lubbers | CTO & Newsletter Wrangler

Flavor of the Week

AI in, garbage out

Are you terrified by artificial intelligence? So are our state legislators, who passed Senate Bill 205, the nation’s first attempt to regulate robo brains. They enacted AI controls in employment, lending, financial and legal services, insurance, health, housing and — redundancy alert! — in government.

Feel better now? Don’t!

Note that Google, IBM, and Microsoft visited our statehouse to support the bill. How good could it possibly be? Even our high-tech gov, who made his second and third fortunes selling greeting cards and flowers online, signed Senate Bill 205 only reluctantly, because he thought the law needed serious tweaking. The problem: The data sets that AI depends on are corrupted by human foibles, which AI algorithms then concentrate and amplify. Be very afraid! And the law doesn’t even take effect until 2026! If we survive that long!

Until then we’ll all need to be on cyber alert as AI infiltrates our lives …

If you buy a house.

SEE MORE OF PETER’S AI NIGHTMARES

Peter Moore | Illustrator

SunLit: Sneak Peek

“Minimum Safe Distance” explores an expanded definition of sentience

“After a lifetime of seeking refuge from being forsaken, misjudged, underestimated, and abandoned, after a lifetime spent learning how to manage its former brain’s particular brand of autism and to live amongst and work alongside neurotypicals, it clearly understood that because of its Transformation it would be a refugee forevermore.”

— From “Minimum Safe Distance”

EXCERPT: Author X. Ho Yen puts a very personal spin on science fiction. And in his first novel, “Minimum Safe Distance,” the reader immediately senses the connection between the “transbiological” refugee beings that drive his story and his own experience dealing with autism and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. The book was a finalist for the Colorado Authors League award for science fiction.

READ THE SUNLIT EXCERPT

THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: X. Ho Yen shares the story behind his shift from more than two decades as an aerospace engineer to writing science fiction. Here’s a portion of his Q&A:

SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory. What inspired you to write it? Where did the story/theme originate?

X. Ho Yen: “Minimum Safe Distance” is my first novel. All first novels are autobiographical, some are therapeutic, and MSD is both. In short, MSD is about transformation and what it means to be a person. The idea behind it came to me around the time I was beginning to break my lifelong complex PTSD, around age 40.

READ THE INTERVIEW WITH X. HO YEN

Kevin Simpson | Writer

Sunday Reading List

As we look toward the new year, here’s a peek at some of our favorite Colorado Sunday stories published in 2024.

? Do fences really make good neighbors? Jennifer Brown went to the southern San Luis Valley to learn about the 150-year-long battle over access to a massive ranch that includes the culturally significant mountain known as La Sierra and the high fence at the center of the latest dispute.

?Rain gauges provide data crucial to assessing climate conditions and paying out on crop insurance policies. Michael Booth followed the bizarre story of eastern Colorado farmers who tampered with gauges in two states, spoiling important historical data sets and setting in motion a criminal case that included the discovery of a mummified body in an Otero County attic.

? It’s 0 dark 30. Do you know what’s going on at your favorite ski area? Tracy Ross and Hugh Carey posted up with middle-of-the-night workers at Winter Park to find out what it takes to get the mountain ready.

?Restaurants in metro Denver are busy. But they’re not necessarily profitable. Tamara Chuang unpacked the economics of dining out in a story that foreshadowed the shuttering of beloved restaurants a few weeks later.

?We’re used to worrying about wildfire chewing through forests and destroying homes. But federal land managers also are concerned about the threat to fragile cultural resources. Tyler Hickman, Devin Farmiloe and Samantha Tindall tagged along with firefighting archaeologists to learn what they’re looking for and how they protect the artifacts they find.

?Avalanche season is afoot. This time last year Mark Jaffe checked in with four southwestern Colorado towns installing microgrids to keep the lights on when walls of snow roll off the mountains and knock out the power.

? Each spring and fall, when sandhill cranes make their commute between winter habitat in the Southwest to breeding grounds to the north, they make crucial stops in the San Luis Valley to refuel and rest. Jerd Smith ...

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