Buena Vista long ago became a second home to Abby Thompson, a mountain refuge her family would return to summer after summer, where the Arkansas River Valley beckoned them to its hills and rapids.

When a position teaching music at Avery-Parsons Elementary School opened up a year and a half ago, Thompson seized the rare opportunity to make her second home a more permanent one. The transition from tourist to resident has been effortless, minus one thing: Overwhelming housing costs have Thompson and her husband constantly wondering whether they’ll be able to root themselves to their newfound community.

“It felt like a dream,” Thompson, 31, said while reflecting on landing a job in a place she deeply loves. “It really felt like a dream. Now the flip side of the coin has revealed itself to, can we even stay?”

That’s the same question gnawing at many educators across Colorado as housing prices remain high above what a teacher’s salary can afford. The problem is well-established: In some Colorado districts, teachers are spending more than 40% of their salaries on housing — exceeding the threshold of affordability, which housing experts define as spending no more than 30% of pretax income on a mortgage or rent. District administrators also report that housing for teachers and school staff is often the factor that makes or breaks a highly qualified candidate’s ability to accept a job offer and stay in their role long term.

Solutions to Colorado’s lack of affordable housing for teachers and other key staff are slowly taking shape, with one new state program designed to offer an estimated 200 low-interest mortgages to rural educators and district staff. Another potential program, part of legislation that Democratic state Sen. Jeff Bridges plans to introduce this week, would allocate funds to districts to build more rental units for their employees. 

The pair of programs won’t entirely solve the deficit of affordable housing, advocates of the programs say, particularly as some parts of Colorado struggle with low housing stock. But they might crack open some new ideas that, if successful, the state could scale up so that teachers don’t have to hunt so hard for a place to live.

“We have incredible teachers who deserve better and, especially when you look at our rural resort communities in places from Steamboat to Keystone to Breckenridge, you have teachers competing with billionaires from around the world who want to have a second home in those areas and it’s just never going to be something that they’ll be able to afford without some kind of support,” said Bridges, who represents Greenwood Village and is also a member of the legislative committee that writes the state budget. “What would make a meaningful difference is housing that teachers can afford so that they can stay in the districts where they work, and you reduce teacher turnover, which improves students outcomes, which is better for everybody.”

State would send money to school districts to build rental housing

Under Bridges’ proposal, the state would create a $1.2 billion program called the Building Excellent Teacher and Employee Residences program, or BETER, that would disperse money to districts in need of rental housing for their teachers and other workers, such as bus drivers, janitors and food services staff. The program is modeled in part after the state’s Building Excellent Schools Today program, or BEST, a matching grant program that helps districts tend to critical construction projects and building renovations.

Districts could use their share of BETER dollars to build rental units on their own land, a huge cost savings for any affordable housing project.

About $40 million for the BETER program would come from interest and investment gains from the state’s permanent fund, also known as the public school fund. That pot of money, now totaling about $1.96 billion, is fed by state land trust revenue that is generated mostly by oil and gas royalties each year. The fund, written into the state constitution, is designed to hold education funds for future generations and the dollars in the fund cannot be taken out.

However, the state can tap into the permanent fund’s interest and apply those dollars toward public education. The BETER program would convert the $40 million from interest and investment returns into $500 million through the sale of certificates of participation to private investors. Districts selected for program funding would also have to contribute matching dollars. Districts would pay their share with the rent income they get from their tenants.

The BETER program, open to all districts in the state, would prioritize projects in communities where rents are significantly out of reach for educators, said Mary Wickersham, principal and cofounder of Denver-based Social Impact Solutions and one of the program’s lead architects.

The program helps chip away at two challenges across the state, said Tony Lewis, executive director of the Donnell-Kay Foundation, a nonprofit Denver foundation that funds initiatives to improve education, affordable housing and access to food. In some places, the soaring costs of housing is the central problem, he said. In other places, particularly rural parts of Colorado, there simply isn’t enough housing.

“For districts as a whole, I think it’s a powerful tool to attract new staff to their district because you’re able to actually say, ‘Come and work for us and we have a place for you to live,’” said Lewis, who has been helping craft the policy as part of a bigger effort to tackle rural housing development. “For an educator, I think it’s such a great benefit and it reduces stress so much to be able to get an offer from a school district for a job and to be able to say, ‘I know where I can live in that community.’ That’s a huge relief.”

A board of experts would devise guidelines for the program and districts would have to apply by breaking down the details of their planned development and demonstrating their urgent housing needs.

Districts would also have the flexibility to collaborate with cities, counties and local housing authorities to construct rental housing for other members of the workforce, including city and county employees, nurses, firefighters and police.

A real path to homeownership in rural Colorado

A separate pilot program, folded into a law passed last year, will invest $50 million from the state public school fund into low-interest mortgages for rural teachers and district employees, helping lower their monthly payments and giving them a real shot at homeownership.

The Rural Education Workforce Low Interest Mortgages program will work like this: The Colorado State Treasurer’s office will give a $50 million loan as an investment to Loveland-based Impact Development Fund, a nonprofit bank that hopes to serve as the lender on the project. Impact Development Fund will provide mortgages to rural educators at an interest rate around 3.5%. Educators will be able to purchase a home either on the market or under construction without a down payment. Impact Development Fund, as teachers begin to make payments on their loans, will pay back the $50 million to the state along with interest from the mortgages.

Megan Ferguson, CEO of Impact Development Fund, called the program “revolutionary,” as it carves out funding for teacher housing in a way that’s never been done before in Colorado.

“Being able to bring those resources right back to the local level rather than investing in traditional investments in Wall Street, we’re bringing it back to the community and not only to the community but to the individual’s level, to the employee level,” Ferguson said. “And that’s really impactful.”

Wickersham, who also helped develop the pilot program, hopes mortgages will be available to teachers this summer. The treasurer’s office must first approve plans for the program. 

By Wickersham’s calculations, an educator turning to the program instead of relying on current mortgage terms and rates could save about $850 per month, more than $10,000 per year and more than $300,000 over a 30-year mortgage.

She describes both housing initiatives as “a unicorn opportunity” that can usher educators into homes without cutting into the state budget or raising taxes and, consequently, stabilize entire communities.

“There’s a lot of studies that show the relationship between a stable education workforce and student success because affordability impacts teacher recruitment, teacher retention and all sorts of things,” Wickersham said. “If those people can’t afford to live where they work and there’s constant turnover, then what happens is the children’s education is impacted and ultimately we hope to be addressing that.”

“Do we really have to sacrifice all of our personal needs to make a life happen here?”

Some Colorado districts, desperate to find teachers and keep them in classrooms, have already taken housing into their own hands. Byers School District 32-J, 50 miles east of Denver, has 10 apartments and two houses for school staff. Mountain town districts like Eagle County School District and Roaring Fork School District have constructed rental units for educators and other staff and also partnered with Habitat for Humanity to open up a new path to homeownership.

Garfield School District Re-2 in Rifle on the Western Slope is tackling its staff housing challenges from another angle, exploring the idea of a housing stipend. Superintendent Kirk Banghart said the district is in the early stages of determining what that housing support would look like. 

Some of his teachers commute at least an hour from spots like Grand Junction where they land affordable housing. Others Banghart hopes to hire end up turning down open positions simply because they can’t find a place they can comfortably live. 

Banghart recently watched a new music teacher he hired walk away from the school before even starting, their search for housing leading only to dead ends. Without a qualified music teacher for middle school students, the district had to quickly figure out a new elective and relied on a current teacher to take on a forensic science class.

“I think it’s hard because we never want to have our students miss out on opportunities just due to the ZIP code that they live (in) and the cost of housing in the community that they live in,” he said.

Banghart said he supports both state programs. Housing is far from his main focus, but it’s also something he can no longer ignore.

“Unfortunately, as Colorado has expanded, it’s become something that has become critical in order for us to meet our primary mission, which is to educate students,” Banghart said.

Not everyone believes sending money to districts for rental units is the right approach.

Buena Vista School District board member Brett Mitchell, also a local real estate agent, sees firsthand the staggering gap between the cost of a house — the average home price in the area is $550,000 — and the realistic amount a teacher could set aside for a home. But even as teachers’ housing options become more limited, Mitchell said it’s unreasonable to throw housing into the mix of responsibilities school districts must carry.

“Teacher housing is a huge deal,” Mitchell said, “but we’re so underfunded in the state for our schools right now that that’s a situation that is almost impossible for me to understand how we can manage that too.”

The district, which spends 80% to 85% of its budget on staff pay and benefits, mostly relies on a word-of-mouth network to help new teachers locate an apartment or house. 

The state’s new low-interest mortgage program is the best solution Mitchell said he has come across, a viable way to unlock new housing opportunities for rural educators.

“Teachers can actually afford to get into a house and do it right away because they don’t have to save for 10 years for the down payment,” he said, calling it “a game changer.”

But Mitchell doesn’t want to see districts turn into landlords, and he argues those dollars instead should go toward more low-interest mortgages that would give teachers “an anchor” to their school and set them up to build equity.

Wickersham counters that teachers and school support staff at different points in their careers and in different parts of the state need a variety of housing options.   

A house might not be the right choice for a brand new teacher not yet ready for a mortgage or for any teacher in Aspen, where the average home price exceeds $4 million, Wickersham said. 

“The mountain communities right now are clamoring for rental housing,” she said. “Not every solution is right for every community and you’ve got to be able to have more than one tool in the toolbox.”

The financing mechanism that the BETER program would use to construct rental units can’t be applied to houses, she added.

Thompson, the elementary school music teacher in Buena Vista, and her husband, Tucker Smelley, are ready to start a family and firmly settle into the town where she said they will “do anything to stay.” The housing search, though, weighs on them at all hours, often the main conversation at the dinner table as they pore over their financial spreadsheet and frantically crunch numbers.

They don’t want anything more than the basics: a single-family home that won’t eat up so much of their income, and a yard for their dog. Together, Thompson and Smelley, a paramedic with Chaffee County, earn about $121,000 a year. They both juggle side jobs to pad their budget.

The couple lucked into a rental house where they pay $900 per month with the understanding that their landlords will come stay four to five days every month.

They keep close watch for new places that pop up on the market, but the options are scarce. One contender is a 700-square-foot house, without a yard, that needs renovations and a lot of upkeep. The home price has fallen to $425,000, which is much less than the $769,000 median home price in the county, but still would take more than 40% of their monthly income to cover the mortgage, Smelley said. Another new house on the market is listed at $525,000. It’s an older home but the kind of place they could grow into with a family — for more than half their monthly pay.

“We’re tied to this community,” Smelley, 33, said. “Do we really have to sacrifice all of our personal needs to make a life happen here? Hopefully not.”    

The low-interest mortgage program could be the answer they’ve been waiting for, the key that finally turns. 

“It’s really stressful to think, am I going to have to put my whole life on hold to build a life here?” Thompson said. “Do I have to press pause to start the rest of my life here? Or the alternative is, do we have to move somewhere else?”

As a child, Lytle Denny learned where blue grouse, ruffed grouse, sharp-tailed grouse and greater sage grouse lived. A member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, he scouted the high-desert landscape during family hunting trips on the tribes’ ancestral homelands in southeastern Idaho. His dad preferred hunting deer and elk, but Denny developed an affinity for grouse.

The family hunted together as a group. Denny moved quietly through the silver-green sagebrush, hoping to hear the sudden heavy wingbeats of a startled bird. His family watched, waiting for a flush, not just of grouse but of mammals, too. “So it worked together,” he said. “We’d get birds and big game.”

As Denny got older, though, he saw fewer sage grouse. These distinctive, chicken-sized birds with their thick white chest feathers and brown, sunbeam-shaped tail feathers are culturally significant to the Shoshone-Bannock people, a rich source of song, dance, stories and nourishment. Denny noticed that other animals, including ground squirrels and mule deer, were declining as well. More farms were replacing the sagebrush that covered the foothills near the reservation. More cattle grazed the area, too. As their numbers increased, so did drought and wildfires.

By his late teens, Denny knew he wanted to pursue a career in fish and wildlife biology. He learned about the conflicts between sage grouse and cattle. The birds return faithfully to their open mating grounds, or leks, every spring to perform one of North America’s most striking mating displays: Males gulp a gallon of air and strut, strumming their stiffened chest feathers with their wings to create two loud swishes, then inflating and contracting the two yellow air sacs on their chests with a couple of inimitable popping sounds. But livestock grazing disturbed this yearly ritual; in some areas, Denny saw ranchers drive out onto open leks in their ATVs and throw salt licks out for cows. Sharp-tailed grouse continued to perform their mating dances in the area, but sage grouse left. “I started asking questions like, ‘Why are we letting this happen?’” Denny said. “I didn’t have any stake in livestock. I had value in the land, in plants and animals.”

Sage grouse have become a rare and special sight. Denny doesn’t hunt them anymore. Whenever he sees one, he’ll stop and watch.

Today, at 46, Denny is the deputy executive director of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes’ Natural Resources Division. Both the Shoshone-Bannock and the Burns Paiute Tribe of southeastern Oregon are confronting cattle grazing’s impact on native plants and animals, including sage grouse, in the high-desert sagebrush steppe that covers much of the West. This vast landscape is the ancestral territory of the Shoshone-Bannock, a confederation of the Eastern and Western bands of the Northern Shoshone and the Bannock tribes, or Northern Paiute.

Since 1965, sage grouse populations in the West have declined by 80%, with birds in the Great Basin — which spans Nevada and parts of Idaho, Oregon and Utah — experiencing the most dramatic declines. The birds, considered a keystone species that indicate the overall health of their ecosystem, have been the subject of litigation and land-use battles for decades, and advocates have attempted, unsuccessfully, to place them on the federal endangered species list numerous times. It’s estimated that there may have been 16 million sage grouse living in 13 states and three Canadian provinces before non-Native settlers arrived in the mid-1800s. Now, about 350,000 remain, according to an estimate by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Half of the species’ original habitat is gone, replaced by farms, cow pastures, invasive grasses, mines and oil and gas fields.

The Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency responsible for overseeing the majority of sage grouse habitat, blames the decline on habitat loss and degradation from drought, wildfire and invasive grasses. But federal officials often fail to mention livestock grazing — the most widespread commercial land use in the West by acreage — as an underlying factor. Ranching interests, largely concentrated among corporations like multinational conglomerate J.R. Simplot Co., which also grows potatoes for McDonald’s, have a powerful hold on federal land-management policy — even though cattle that graze on public land account for less than 2% of the nation’s beef supply. Nearly all the remaining sage grouse habitat is open to grazing.

Some tribal members and scientists, including Denny, as well as non-Native advocacy organizations like the Western Watersheds Project, have urged a reckoning with extensive public-lands grazing, which they say threatens not just sage grouse, but the entire sagebrush steppe ecosystem and the many other significant species it supports, including sagebrush, mule deer and jackrabbits. Settler-colonial notions of the West may have framed the sagebrush steppe as cattle country, but “cows are an invasive species,” said Diane Teeman, a Burns Paiute tribal elder and former manager of the tribe’s Culture and Heritage Department. Grazing, Teeman said, is causing “permanent damage to a lot of things here.”

“Cows are an invasive species.”

The threat grazing poses to sage grouse has become even more dire under the current Trump administration. Last July, the administration rescinded a BLM policy that required prioritizing environmental reviews of grazing in areas critical for at-risk species like sage grouse, and in October, the U.S. departments of the Interior and Agriculture released a plan that called for expanding the number of acres open to grazing on BLM and Forest Service lands. In December, the BLM finalized new sage grouse management plans for several Western states, including Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming, that ease restrictions on oil, gas and mining and lift a previous requirement that ranchers in Idaho, California and Nevada keep grasses at least 7 inches tall to protect grouse nests from predators.

Both the Burns Paiute and Shoshone-Bannock tribes, meanwhile, are modeling ways to reduce grazing on the landscape. The Burns Paiute Tribe has significantly cut the number of cows that are allowed to graze on tribal lands, while the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes plan to reevaluate herd size on reservation lands. The results are promising, revealing how restricting cattle could benefit native wildlife, including sage grouse. But applying such efforts to public lands would require undoing generations of deeply ingrained beliefs about grazing’s place in the West. Cows are woven into the very fabric of Western colonial identity, Denny said. To tug at the threads in any way “is to go straight against settler-colonial values.”

“That’s the real battle,” he said, “whose values are getting precedence over whose.” 

THE SAGEBRUSH STEPPE is not a showy place with towering trees like the Pacific Northwest’s coastal forests. The landscape is often seen from behind the wheel on a two-lane highway, a pastel-green filler passing alongside blurred white road lines and fence posts. Juniper trees grow sparsely; mule deer rest in their shade. Sagebrush itself — a branching, fragrant shrub with narrow lobed leaves — rarely exceeds five feet in height. The ecosystem’s diversity flourishes closer to the ground, where the understory is colored by the blossoms of yellow hawksbeard and purple sagebrush mariposa lilies, interspersed with the black, green, gold and white flecks of biological soil crusts.

These miniscule crusts, made up of lichens, mosses, green algae and cyanobacteria, are key to the ecosystem’s health.The crustfunctions like organic armor, retaining moisture, cycling nutrients and preventing non-native plant invasions. When the crusts break apart, other plant communities fall apart. “I used the word ‘fragile’ talking about our soils,” Teeman said. “There is a delicate balance.”  

In a healthy high-desert landscape, soil crusts cover the ground in clumps. Sagebrush grows scattered and bunchgrasses fill the space between. Sage grouse rest under the modest canopy and lay speckled eggs in ground nests surrounded by tall grasses that protect the brood against predators like ravens and coyotes. Insects crawl on the abundant wildflowers, and both feed sage grouse and their chicks.

But over generations, extensive cattle grazing has transformed this vast landscape. Herds compacted the fragile soils, making the ground hard and dry. The land can no longer hold as much water, exacerbating drought and fueling the wildfire cycle. “You walk across a grazed area, and it’s like walking on a parking lot,” said Boone Kauffman, an Oregon State University ecologist. In an ungrazed area, he said, it’s like “walking on a marshmallow.”

Cattle also spread invasive cheatgrass, which chokes out native grasses and turns entire hillsides maroon in the spring. Sage grouse and most other wildlife avoid areas heavily infested with cheatgrass, which began to spread across the West in the late 1800s, in part due to livestock: Seeds stick to the animals’ hooves and hides, and when those hooves break the soil crusts in areas that are also overgrazed and depleted of native grasses, it can create openings for them to germinate.

Cows devour bunchgrasses, exposing sage grouse nests to predators. They congregate near water, trampling streambanks and chomping on wildflowers, willows and aspens. These riparian areas normally serve as critical oases in the desert, providing food and shade and supporting the region’s  plant and animal life. “Every riparian area in the West has been hammered,” said Roger Rosentreter, a retired BLM Idaho state botanist.

Water troughs built for cows create hazards where sage grouse and other birds can drown. Barbed-wire fences injure grouse by snagging their wings and sometimes severing their heads, and insecticides aimed at protecting plants for cattle kill the grasshoppers and crickets that are critical food for grouse chicks.

“Those cumulative effects of grazing,” Rosentreter said, “are sealing the coffin on so many of our native wildlife.”

Ranching’s dominion over the West began in the mid-1800s, when cattle barons — aided by the federal government’s westward-expansion policies and the forcible removal of the region’s Indigenous peoples — built vast ranching empires on tribal lands. Hundreds of thousands of cows grazed on the tall bunchgrasses of the sagebrush steppe, which the newcomers and government dubbed “the range,” a term that later morphed into “rangeland” and is now widely used to describe the sagebrush steppe. Rangeland scientists like Karen Launchbaugh, a professor at the University of Idaho, consider it an ecological term, not a commodity term. But other scholars say it is by nature colonial.“Rangelands are inescapably implicated in the conquest and settlement of North America,” wrote Nathan Sayre, a geography professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in a 2023 book about rangeland history.

Rangeland science developed hand-in-hand with the livestock industry. By the early 1900s, livestock herds had decimated native vegetation in the West, and ranchers needed help. Only 16% of public rangeland was in good condition, according to a 1934 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. USDA scientists began studying non-native grasses and forage crops that could grow in the high desert, and universities across the West developed range-management programs to help the livestock industry survive. The research, supported by the federal government, informed many of the laws and policies that still govern the Western rangelands.

A major component of the government’s early range-management programs involved seeding the depleted lands with non-native crested wheatgrass, which ranchers favored for its agreeable taste to livestock and ability to withstand heavy grazing. The federal government also killed sagebrush on several million acres in Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Colorado, Nevada, California, Utah and Wyoming, spraying the shrubs with herbicide and then seeding the ground with crested wheatgrass and turning the silver-green landscape gold. As a result, grazing capacity skyrocketed across the region — by 800% in Elko, Nevada, alone, according to a 1954 USDA report.

While rangeland science has shifted in recent years to become more attuned to ecological needs, the work remains rooted in livestock economics. Oregon State University’s rangeland science extension center in Burns, for example, “helps maintain a robust and sustainable cattle industry in Oregon,” according to its university web page. Both Rosentreter and Kauffman said that it’s difficult to find funding for studies that investigate grazing’s ecological impacts. In 2022, after Kauffman published two studies that found that grazing degraded public land, local cattle industry leaders called for his removal from Oregon State University, he said. “There’s a real pressure, and probably unprecedented pressure at the moment, on state and federally funded scientists to not go against the cattle industry.”

The livestock industry has also funded rangeland science.A June 2025 report by the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Idaho’s Rangeland Center found that livestock grazing on federal land in Idaho did not negatively impact sage grouse nesting success. Among the report’s biggest funders were two ranching advocacy groups, the Public Lands Council and Idaho Cattle Association, which provided in-kind donations of trucks, ATVs, camper trailers, laptops and other equipment, according to an email from Courtney Conway, a USGS wildlife biologist and a co-author of the report.

In March 2024, well before the report was published, the Public Lands Council and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association released a statement urging the BLM to incorporate its findings in its sage grouse management plans, which the agency did, in plans finalized in December. In an emailed statement, BLM press secretary Brian Hires wrote that the agency “does not rely solely on any single publication” for habitat management decisions, though he declined to say whether or not pressure from industry groups factored into the BLM’s inclusion of the report.

In an interview on the rural community network RFD-TV, Kaitlynn Glover, an executive director of government affairs for both industry groups, said that the report confirms what ranchers have known for generations: Grazing has made landscapes healthier and sustained sage grouse populations. “But we needed the science to prove it,” she said.

TODAY, MORE THAN 200 MILLION acres — 85% — of Western public lands are grazed by livestock, mainly beef cows. Livestock industry leaders have long argued that ranchers are key to sage grouse conservation, since cows need open land to forage, just like sage grouse do. Prominent Oregon rancher Tom Sharp coined a popular tagline, “What’s good for the bird is good for the herd,” and some scientists agree. “Generally, we think of livestock grazing as being very compatible with sage grouse conservation,” said Skyler Vold, sage grouse biologist at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Some rangeland scientists and the BLM say that modern grazing practices have improved to the point that they no longer degrade the landscape. “Well-managed livestock grazing is not considered a threat to greater sage-grouse habitat or survival,” Hires, the BLM’s press secretary, wrote in an emailed statement.

But the definition of “well-managed” grazing depends on who you ask. “There is so little well-managed livestock grazing in the American West, I don’t even know why we’re talking about it,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit that focuses on grazing’s ecological impact on public lands.

Land managers and scientists classify grazing levels as light, moderate or heavy, depending on the amount of vegetation that livestock eat each year on a BLM grazing allotment. But this is hard to measure at large scales; some federal allotments can span 250,000 acres or more. To measure plant consumption, the BLM typically conducts “ocular assessments,” Molvar said — basically, eyeballing the landscape. “In science, we call that a wild guess.” (The BLM wrote that the agency “employs multiple data collection and assessment methods” to measure livestock plant consumption. The method used depends on several factors, including “the resources available to collect the information.”)

“There is so little well-managed livestock grazing in the American West, I don’t even know why we’re talking about it.”

The BLM permits cows to eat 50% of native plants annually on the majority of federal allotments and 60% of non-native plants like crested wheatgrass. An oft-cited 1999 paper, which scientists like Rosentreter say is still relevant, concluded that a 50% utilization rate may classify as “moderate,” meaning it maintains landscape conditions, for areas that see more precipitation, like the Southern pine forests of Georgia. But in semi-arid ecosystems like the sagebrush steppe, this level of consumption degrades the land. The study defined moderate grazing in dry areas as being 35% to 45% of the vegetation. To improve rangeland conditions in these environments, cows would have to eat even less — 30% to 35% — of the vegetation, or about 40% less than the BLM currently permits. In the recent University of Idaho study that concluded that grazing did not harm sage grouse — the report ranching interests supported — cows ate on average just 22% of plants, a level that’s considered light grazing and is practiced by few ranchers on public land.

Congress made it easier to ignore grazing’s harm to public lands

Research from Oregon State University’s extension center in Burns has found that targeted grazing can reduce invasive grasses. This kind of grazing, however, requires ranchers to isolate cows in small fenced pastures and move them frequently, a practice common on private land but difficult to execute on large public allotments. “Sometimes the research is pointing to or identifying tools that are, under our current system, almost impossible to implement,” said Mark Salvo, program director for the Oregon Natural Desert Association, a conservation nonprofit.

For grazing to reduce invasive grasses, it has to be carefully managed, said Austin Smith, natural resources director and a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs in central Oregon. The tribe leases some of its land to local ranchers in the John Day Valley, allowing cows to eat invasive grasses as they grow in the early spring. “But then you get them off the landscape and with enough time for these other plants to come in and grow,” he said. On BLM lands, he added, “they just hammer the heck out of it.”

Science has found that grazing can both harm and help sage grouse habitat, but “it’s a question of how it’s managed,” said Nada Wolff Culver, the BLM’s former principal deputy director during the Biden administration. But for decades, the BLM has lacked the staffing to adequately manage its grazing allotments. BLM data obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) showed that 56.7 million acres — about 37% — of federal grazing allotments failed to meet BLM land-health standards from 1997 through 2023, primarily because of livestock grazing. In a 2023 federal lawsuit against the BLM, PEER and the Western Watersheds Project alleged that the agency had not conducted environmental reviews for nearly two-thirds of its grazing permits.

“I think it’s a failed system,” said Teeman, the Burns Paiute tribal elder.

COLLIN WILLIAMS STEPPED OUT of his white truck in camouflage rubber boots, surprised by the dry ground. “It’s been just like mud-bogging up here every time because of all the snowmelt,” said Williams, a non-Native wildlife biologist who works for the Burns Paiute Tribe.

It was dawn in April on BLM land east of the small town of Burns, in southeastern Oregon. Water had been so abundant recently that in late March, snowmelt from the Strawberry Mountains inundated the tribe’s reservation north of Burns, flooding and damaging homes. But the above-average snowpack was welcome news for sage grouse. Good water years in the arid high desert bring more wildflowers and insects for grouse and their chicks to eat.

With a clipboard in hand, Williams and his colleague, Matthew Hanneman, the tribe’s wildlife program manager, who is also non-Native, walked quietly to a vantage point where they could tally sage grouse. The first hint of sunrise burned the horizon orange as Williams and Hanneman scanned the area’s several leks with binoculars. About 60 males were performing their signature mating dance. They appeared spherical from afar as they strutted in the near-freezing air, their white and brown feathers prominent against the beige bunchgrasses.

Biologists working for the Burns Paiute Tribe have counted sage grouse in the area since the early 2000s as part of a collaborative effort to track the populations with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The leks are roughly five miles away from a tribally owned property known as Jonesboro, a former ranch where some sage grouse spend their summer. In 2000, the tribe reacquired these 6,385 acres of unceded ancestral lands along with a 1,760-acre property called Logan Valley. Tribal officials have worked to restore both properties for wildlife such as grouse, mule deer and elk, giving tribal members access for hunting and gathering.

“We don’t just consider the management of things in terms of their value to us,” Teeman said, speaking of the Paiute approach to ecosystem stewardship. “The management is really about how to give everything its due rights and personhood,” she continued, “as opposed to how BLM or any of the other Western-oriented management systems work where everything is a resource.”

“…management is really about how to give everything its due rights and personhood.”

Before the tribe purchased the Jonesboro site, livestock had grazed it for decades. Weeds choked out native vegetation. Federal fire-suppression policies and overgrazing led to an expansion of juniper trees.

Since reacquiring the property, the tribe has worked to undo this colonial legacy in ways that could also be applied to federal lands.

In the early 2000s, the tribe removed some fencing at Jonesboro. Tribal staff, like Williams and Hanneman, have overseen projects to cut junipers to clear space for grouse, which avoid forested areas. They’ve planted sagebrush, yarrow, rabbitbrush and buckwheat. But weed removal has required the most intensive work: To remove cheatgrass and medusahead, the tribe mows, burns, sprays herbicide — and grazes.

The Jonesboro site came with 21,242 acres of BLM allotments as well as 4,154 acres of state grazing allotments overseen by the Oregon Department of State Lands. The tribe subleases these grazing permits to local ranchers for some income, but its priority is not beef production. “Our focus is definitely wildlife and wildlife conservation,” Williams said. Grazing is used to target weeds and clear thatch when native grasses are dormant, but the tribe allows just one-third of the cattle that it could graze under its BLM permit. Only so many acres are good for grazing, Williams said, typically places near streams or springs that are critical habitat for sage grouse and other wildlife. With fewer cows, the native animals have more plants to eat.

The tribe also gives the Jonesboro pastures regular rest from cattle. Cows spend 10 days grazing in small, 40- to 60-acre fenced pastures on tribal land and are then typically removed. On larger, 3,000- to 13,000-acre federal pastures subleased to local ranchers, the tribe requires ranchers remove the animals after one to two months.

These efforts are slowly transforming the property. Photographs taken by tribal biologists from 2007 until 2018 to track restoration progress show a greener landscape. Riparian vegetation is taking over an abandoned road; more bunchgrasses are growing.

In southeastern Idaho, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes are also evaluating ways to reduce grazing’s impact. Led by Denny, the tribes’Natural Resources Division is studying 320,000 acres of rangeland on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation to reassess the number of cows allowed. Much of the reservation is grazed by cattle, though only a third of the animals are owned by tribal members, some of whom grew up in ranching families. About 20,500 acres of the reservation’s rangelands are off-limits to grazing. The tribes also own another 33,000 acres of conservation land where grazing is prohibited, said Preston Buckskin, the tribes’ land-use director and a tribal member. They have also considered barring cattle from some sage grouse mating sites.

The West is losing 1.3 million acres of sagebrush steppe each year

Buckskin has struggled over the years to find a compromise between traditional tribal values that prioritize conservation and the business of ranching, which keeps some families afloat. Tribal cattlemen have influenced land-management decisions on the reservation for generations. The tribes’ Office of Public Affairs said in a written statement that, while it’s important to not minimize grazing’s impact on sage grouse habitat, “effective conservation outcomes depend on collaboration among producers, land managers, and tribes rather than placing responsibility on any single group.”

As one potential compromise, the tribal land-use department is considering a program that would pay landowners to quit grazing. Non-Native conservation organizations like the Western Watersheds Projecthave pushed a similar approach on federal lands for years. Most recently, in October, Democratic Reps. Adam Smith, Jared Huffman and Eleanor Holmes Norton reintroduced legislation that would allow ranchers to relinquish their grazing privileges in exchange for buyouts by private individuals or groups.

Additionally, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes are working on a land-use plan that would reclassify some areas zoned as “rangelands” on the reservation as “wildlands” instead, ensuring that the land is valued for wildlife and tribal hunting. “Words shape expectations,” Denny said. “‘Rangeland’” implies that the land is for livestock. “It carries a meaning imposed by a different way of thinking,” he said. “I prefer the term ‘sagebrush steppe.’”  

IN THE EARLY 1990S, HART Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southern Oregon was severely overgrazed. When then-manager Barry Reiswig made the controversial decision to prohibit cattle on the property, he was characterized by some locals as the “epitome of evil,” according to Rewilding a Mountain, a 2019 documentary about the project. “We were under a lot of pressure to compromise, to kind of look the other way,” Reiswig said, speaking of grazing’s impact on the refuge, in the film.

But it didn’t take long for a landscape that had been grazed for 120 years to repair itself. In 12 years, aspen increased by 64% and wildflowers multiplied by 68%. In 23 years, bare soil decreased by 90%. Rushes and willows quadrupled, a 2015 study by Forest Service and Oregon State University researchers found.

Today, the refuge is one of the largest ungrazed areas in the Great Basin and one of the largest sage grouse breeding grounds in the West. Female grouse are commonly seen with chicks in tow, scurrying across gravel roads and foraging in wet meadows. “Simply removing cattle from areas may be all that is required to restore many degraded riparian areas in the American West,” the 2015 study concluded.

Grazing’s highly politicized nature makes it difficult for scientists and state and federal agency officials to even broach the subject, Denny said. “We’ve got to get uncomfortable talking about the truth.” Tribes, he said, can lead the conversation, as well as show the way. “We can use our homelands as, like, ‘This is the model for how you navigate this.’”

But progress ultimately relies on the federal government’s willingness to reform its policies, as a spring day on Burns Paiute land demonstrated.

Just north of the headwaters of the Malheur River, in a forest clearing below the snowy Strawberry Mountains, a few sage grouse have found an unexpected summer home in a portion of Logan Valley that once again belongs to the tribe. The birds’ preferred species of sage, mountain big sage, grows on a gentle slope that rises above a nearby creek. Last year, by mid-May, bluebells and yellow groundsels — wildflowers favored by grouse — were starting to bloom in the mountain meadow.

It’s a mystery where the grouse come from, Hanneman said. The open valley is surrounded by lodgepole and ponderosa pines. “It’s pretty dangerous for a sage grouse to be moving through a forest with Cooper’s hawks and goshawks and everything else.” The closest known lek is 10 miles away.

To understand the birds’ movements, the tribe received a grant from the Oregon Wildlife Foundation to purchase transmitters to place on grouse this summer. The data will help tribal biologists understand where the birds travel, informing efforts to conserve their migration corridor. Since cultural burning was prohibited by the federal government more than a century ago, trees have encroached on the area. The tribe has hand-cut 60 acres of pines to keep the sagebrush open for grouse and other wildlife. They also hope to return fire to the meadows.

Most of the 1,760-acre Logan Valley property has been ungrazed since the tribe reacquired it in 2000. Officials permit cattle only on a 300-acre meadow to control a non-native grass that settlers introduced as a source of hay and forage for cows.

Where horses roam, sage grouse struggle

But the tribe’s propertyborders federal land: It forms a “Y” shape, following creeks that merge to form the Malheur River, and the Forest Service, which owns the land in between the water, allows cows to graze from June to October.

Trespassing cattle have been an issue for years. The fencing is old, and cows get through. The tribe puts up a temporary fence at the end of May to keep the cattle off its land once the animals return to the neighboring federal property in June.

On a site visit in mid-May, Hanneman drove a dirt road that cuts through the property. He slowed down. “I did not know they put cattle out already,” he said. A dozen black cows stared at him.

It was two weeks early, and the temporary fence had yet to be erected. Despite the tribe’s best efforts, cows had gotten in.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the February 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The bird and the herd.”

The post What’s needed to protect sage grouse? Less grazing. appeared first on High Country News.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife is cautioning the public against misinterpreting the number of wolf deaths since the state’s reintroduction program began, “especially over such a short time period and with such a small sample size,” the agency said. 

This comes after an 11th gray wolf of the initial 25 brought to Colorado died, bringing the total number of collared wolves in the state to 19, following the May killing of one wolf born to the Copper Creek pack and the presence of two that were in the state prior to relocation starting. The current tally of wolves in Colorado does not include any uncollared wolves that might have wandered into the state, CPW said, nor pups from four litters that have been born since spring, which have not yet been counted.

Luke Perkins, CPW spokesperson, said information in the Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management Plan regarding survival rates can be confusing – particularly language citing a 70% survival rate as threshold for success. 

Some people are missing that the 70% figure applied “only to the first six months after wolves are translocated,” Perkins said. 

The plan also states that if the survival rate does go below 70% during the first six months, it would “initiate a protocol review.” But that language “was intended to address circumstances similar to what we observed when Canada lynx were reintroduced,” Perkins said, and to ensure that wolves are responding well to hard releases. 

A “hard release” refers to the type of capture and amount of time an animal spends in captivity. 

Colorado’s initial hard release of lynx in the late 1990s failed due to high starvation rates, before CPW changed course and moved the cats into a pen, fed them and trained them to hunt. By 2003, the lynx had successfully reproduced, and by 2010 the project was deemed a success.  

With the 11th wolf’s death last week, the survival rate of reintroduced wolves is 56%. 

“But by looking back at wolf mortalities, we can see … that no wolf mortalities are a direct result of capture, transport or release protocols and only one is a result of management action by CPW,” Perkins said.

• One wolf died as a result of conflict with another wolf (collar number 2303).
• Two died as a result of conflict with mountain lions (2307 and 2514).
• Three died in Wyoming (2505, 2513 and 2304).
• One died due to secondary trauma from entrapment by a lawfully set snare (2512).
• One from blunt force trauma from being hit by a vehicle (2507).
• One was lethally removed by CPW and its agents (2405).
• And three mortalities are still under investigation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (2309, 2506, and 2504).

Those equal 11 relocated wolves and one born in Colorado. CPW also evaluated the capture, transport and release protocols used for wolf reintroduction and found that there is no need to modify any of them since none of the deaths were attributable to the reintroduction protocols.

And while mortality among reintroduced wolves has seemed high, it has not been unexpectedly high, said Perkins.  

Across western North America, wolf life expectancy is much lower than many anticipate. Though variable in the Rocky Mountains outside of highly protected areas (like large national parks), the adult survival rate can be 75% per year or lower with an expected lifespan of 2 1/2 years. And when wolves do not live in a pack (i.e., while dispersing), some research shows that they are at an even higher risk of death, and survival per year can be closer to 67%. 

So “since the translocated wolves are essentially ‘dispersers,’ we can see that the amount of mortality we are observing in Colorado is not surprising,” Perkins said. “And with the current small wolf population, each mortality event has a large effect on overall survival rates.”  

But now some people are hoping there are no more mortalities, because CPW on Wednesday announced there will be no capture operations in 2026. 

The announcement follows an October directive from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ordering Colorado to stop importing wolves from Canada, which stalled the state’s plan to relocate 10 to 15 wolves from British Columbia. 

“It is not possible to predict the impact of foregoing a third year of translocations without knowing what may occur in the coming year,” Eric Odell, CPW’s wolf program manager, said in a statement. 

But ‘if mortality remains high, as observed in 2025, the risk of failing to achieve a self-sustaining wolf population in Colorado increases, potentially requiring additional resources to address,” Odell said.

Coloradans who want to report claims of federal agent misconduct can do so through a new complaint filing system with the state’s Department of Law, officials announced Wednesday.

Details in the complaint will help the state department in “ensuring federal accountability, documenting concerns and identifying potential patterns of misconduct by federal agencies,” according to Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who oversees the department.

The new complaint form comes as Denver leaders look to ban law enforcement officers — including U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents — from covering their faces during arrests and other detention operations.

Aggressive tactics and arrests conducted by ICE and Border Patrol agents, many captured on video and going viral on social media, have intensified the frustration and fear of residents in Colorado and across the country. White House officials have repeatedly justified the federal agents’ actions.

“Nobody is above the rule of law, including federal agents such as ICE or border patrol,” Weiser said in a statement Wednesday morning. “This new reporting form is about keeping our communities safe and reminding them that we have their back. If you see misconduct from a federal agent, we want to hear about it. Please document it and report it to our office.”

People can submit basic information, details or images of an incident and answer questions as to whether other law enforcement was at the scene. Reports will be reviewed and may be shared with the Colorado congressional delegation and local district attorney offices.

The filing system is part of the state’s effort to protect residents against “ongoing harmful and illegal actions” of the federal government, the attorney general said. Weiser has filed more than 50 lawsuits against the Trump administration since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025.

HUDSON

It’s Dave Martin’s last day cutting the meat. Martin has owned the Pepper Pod restaurant in Hudson since he was 21. He is now 70. He has a hard time holding a knife, and his fingers curl and tense as he washes off the juices from a batch of chicken-fried steaks. He shuffles around the kitchen, where he still arrives around 5 a.m. each day, with a slight limp. Around him everything spins. 

It’s Jan. 10, the last Saturday of service in the Pepper Pod’s 113-year history — it’s also the last day of service ever, but Martin and the staff don’t know this yet. A line has been forming at the door since 6:30 a.m.

The crowds haven’t stopped coming since the restaurant announced its imminent closure about a week prior. Staff shifted opening hours and ditched the reservation system to serve everyone. There are a few more servers running around than usual, and certainly more tears and hugs. 

Waitresses slip through a side door, give Martin a smile and a wave, and head straight for the kitchen. Dozens of plastic butter cups are arranged in neat rows, ready to be shuttled on plates with flapjacks and French toast. The grills are hot, the coffee dispensers are full. The doors unlock at 7 a.m. and the place whirs nonstop until close at 9 p.m., when the staff finally gets a chance to sit down for dinner. 

“When we close the doors, we all sit together as a family and eat,” one waitress, Renee McClure, said. “It has always been that way.”

Pull up a seat

To call the Pepper Pod a family business is an understatement. The place stayed in the extended Peppers family from its founding in 1913 until 1977, when it sold to Dave and Beth Martin, whose daughter, Amy Jackson, joined as head chef and general manager after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 2004. 

But that’s just the leadership team. The kitchen is full of aunts, sisters and sons, multiple generations from multiple families, squeezing by one another carrying platters of salads and pitchers of iced tea. 

“On Mother’s Day they’d make sure to schedule all the McClures during the day shift,” said Renee McClure, whose youngest son and two daughters work, or have worked, at the restaurant. The same went for Father’s Day and Easter. 

The McClure family had been eating at the Pepper Pod since they moved to Hudson in 2004 from Arvada. At that time, the restaurant served a “feast for four” that offered an affordable selection of entrees and unlimited access to a salad bar. They visited weekly to take advantage of the town’s best deal for feeding four young kids. Their youngest, Michael, was 3 years old when they started eating there.

On the final Wednesday night of service, Michael sat surrounded by family at a 12-person table for his 25th birthday dinner. He bounced his 13-month-old daughter on his knee. He feigned triumph for landing the last celebration that they’d all gather for at the Pepper Pod.

He handed his daughter across the table to Renee, who discreetly handed her over to Michael’s sister, Jessica, who was waitressing that night. Jessica roamed back and forth between the kitchen and her batch of tables, order pad in one hand, baby girl on her hip. 

Going out to eat as a family has become increasingly rare across the U.S. In 2025, 22% of consumers said they dined out less than the year before, while 18% said they dined out less often with groups of friends or family, according to an annual survey by the food and beverage research firm Datassential. Nearly 30% of those surveyed said they cooked at home more often.

While the restaurant platform Toast found a slight uptick in reservations nationally between 2024 and 2025, it found that Denver — the only Colorado city it analyzed — bucked that trend, with a 4% decline overall.

The reasons are multifaceted. Operators are feeling the squeeze across almost all menu items while consumers are becoming more selective about spending money. Many restaurants didn’t bounce back from pandemic closures, while people simultaneously got used to eating at home. Then there is the swift rise of delivery apps and fast-casual chains like Chipotle, which cater to to-go customers.

The effect is an atomization that goes beyond restaurant economics. Much of what defines identity and social interaction occurs not at home, but at the places we shop, eat and voluntarily spend time, according to a 2025 research paper that analyzed class segregation in daily activities. The authors looked at a massive cache of mobile geolocation data to figure out what businesses, organizations and institutions attracted the widest range of people from different class backgrounds.

What they found was that the most socioeconomically diverse places in America are not public institutions, like schools, parks or libraries, but affordable chain restaurants, like Applebee’s and Olive Garden. 

Whether people dining in those restaurants actually interacted with one another, though, was not measured. The results only showed that these were the places they’d be the most likely to mingle, not that they did.

At the Pepper Pod, it wouldn’t take a scientific study to observe the cross-table pollination. People stopped by a table to greet friends as they were being seated, they waved at one another from across the dining room, occasionally they pulled up a chair.

“You come in and you know someone, every time. You see someone, you talk to them for five minutes or so, it makes being here that much better,” Michael said. “And it’s always like that. It’s always been like that.”

Not a rookie’s restaurant

The Pepper Pod was opened by Roy Peppers, who moved to Colorado from Iowa in 1902 by way of a homestead east of Yuma. After working at a mercantile in Brighton for a couple of years, he set up the Pepper Pod near the center of Hudson.

The restaurant closed for a few years during World War II, then opened back up in 1946 and quickly became a community hub, hosting wedding dinners and ag-industry banquets, and making a name for itself outside of town with an unusual menu offering: buffalo, a way to both skirt the beef shortage after the war and offer novelty. 

In 1956, the Pepper Pod moved to a large lot near the newly constructed Interstate 80 (now known as I-76), a savvy move that would pay off decades later. 

When the Martins took over the lease in 1977, there was still a major market for small-town restaurants offering regionally specific dishes. In Hudson, that meant beef and buffalo. 

While the Martins’ first decade of ownership coincided with a boom in chain restaurants around America, which lined the highways and outcompeted in-town cafés for middle-class money, the Pepper Pod had already secured its spot right there at the edge of Hudson, visible from the I-76 exit ramp. 

Despite the location, those first few years were tough. The Martins, still in their 20s, had to come up with a $2,200 monthly payment made up of $1.40 breakfast plates, Martin said. They also had trouble keeping staff. It took about 10 years for Martin to notice a shift in the business.

Staff started to hang on longer and a loyal customer base formed. Martin hired kids from town as a way for the kids’ parents — who also worked at the Pepper Pod — to keep them busy. 

“They’d say ‘if you think they’re worth something then pay ’em, if not, at least we’ll know where they’re at,” Martin said. 

The Martin family hadn’t been secretive about their desire to sell. Martin’s health has been declining. He can’t work the hours he used to. His roughly eight-hour shifts these days feel to him like “part-time,” he said. And he’d rather spend that time with his wife, “drinking coffee and looking out the window,” and taking road trips to the national parks in Utah. 

“It’s a tough business to stay married in,” Martin said. But it helped that for nearly three decades, his wife, Beth, co-owned the restaurant with him. “She gets it.”

The Pepper Pod building and lot have been listed for sale for $4.5 million since last April, but the right buyer hasn’t come along. None of the big hospitality groups want in once they look at the area’s demographics, Martin said. And he wasn’t willing to hand the place over to someone trying to break into the business. “It’s not a rookie’s restaurant.”

Making ends meet

Maybe because of or maybe despite its rural location in southern Weld County, between Brighton and Keenesburg, the Pepper Pod remained relatively insulated from the woes of metro-area dining, where well-loved restaurants haven’t been able to keep up with operating costs, and the Colorado Restaurant Association has become a regular presence at the statehouse, looking for pressure valves via policy. 

In Denver, there were 506 fewer licensed retail food establishments in November 2025 than there were in July 2023. Statewide, 498 restaurants closed between 2024 and 2025, a 3.7% decline, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. 

“A lot of places do it backwards,” Martin said. “They cut quantity and quality and think, ‘There, we’ve got our food costs under control,’ but then customer counts start to go down, three, four months later,” he said. “Customers notice.”

Buying the restaurant’s beef in huge slabs and cutting it himself helped save on food and labor costs.

It also helped that he had the same Sysco rep for about 25 years, someone who lived in the area and understood “we can’t charge $65 for a ribeye or $44 for eggs Benedict,” he said. The Pepper Pod’s supply contract was unchanged for decades.

That doesn’t mean they’ve been untouchable. Last year’s property taxes cost them nearly $60,000, “that’s $60,000 people don’t see on their plates,” Martin said. Credit card fees gobbled up more than $70,000, Martin pointed to the table, “right off the plates.”

“Legacy businesses like these are more than just places to eat,” said Denise Mickelsen, spokesperson for the Colorado Restaurant Association. “They’re job creators, dedicated employers, community hubs, cultural centers and cornerstones for every district in the state. These businesses are also particularly hard hit by current economic conditions because they were established long before the skyrocketing costs and burdensome regulations operators have had to contend with in recent years.”

But while operating costs escalated, longtime workers maintained that they’d always been paid fairly. Downright “spoiled,” McClure said. Server Brianna Pierce nodded in agreement.

“They’ve bailed us out of some hard times, even personally,” Pierce said. “Amy (Jackson) has loaned me money when I’ve hit tough spots. My husband got hurt right before I had my first kid, and (the owners) took such good care of us, made sure we had everything we needed.”

Pierce, who is 34, had spent half her life as a server at the Pepper Pod. During her last shift she zoomed through the kitchen, not wanting to stop for an interview because of the tears streaming down her face. 

“I did really good today!” she said, wiping her eyes. She had one hour left. “But then stupid Brian was out there and it made me cry.” Brian was a cook when Pierce started in 2007. 

The things they’ll miss the most are the good pay and the bonds with their coworkers, Pierce and McClure agreed. “You can try to stay in touch, but it’ll just be different,” Pierce said. 

The things they won’t miss: refilling the salt and pepper shakers, changing the beer kegs and vacuuming.

The last shift

The charged sense of endings intensified over the course of the week. The lines got longer. Staff picked up extra hours. Customers added waiters on Facebook and insisted on keeping in touch. Where would they work next? Most customers wanted to know. There’s a café in Keenesburg that might have a few open spots, one waitress relayed — but not nearly enough for the roughly 35 restaurant workers who, as of last week, are out of a job.

“If you work at Texas Roadhouse and you leave, I don’t know that any of the customers would care,” McClure said. “I don’t think they’d even notice.”

Though the restaurant had announced its final day would be Jan. 12, by the weekend it seemed increasingly possible they’d run out of food before then. The bar was drying up, the cakes were disappearing, Martin wasn’t cutting any more meat. 

By the end of the shift Saturday, it was clear they wouldn’t have enough to open the next two days. So they shut the doors for good. They emptied the salt shakers and vacuumed the floor. 

The following Monday, instead of opening for one more tearful and chaotic shift, the only people in the Pepper Pod were its staff from across the years, who gathered at the restaurant for a party, a final paycheck, and one more family meal.

The drive into Boulder County along Colorado 93 in the winter sometimes has a cinematic quality. The Flatirons are draped in snow, clouds weave in and out of trees, and brisk morning air quickly softens in the midday sun.

But for people who live farther to the west, the mountainous charm can quickly give way to conditions that are unforgiving, shifting from routine to emergency within minutes. Communities behind the Flatirons, like Gold Hill, find themselves at the mercy of severe weather and failing emergency communication systems. 

This fragility was on display last month, when hurricane-force winds battered western Boulder County. From midmorning on Dec. 17 through late Dec. 21, the power had been shut off by Xcel Energy in response to warnings of critical fire danger. That risk quickly shifted from precaution to reality: When power was restored, two fires ignited in the area, prompting the need for emergency response. While the fires were extinguished quickly, it was another scary moment for people living in an area increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather. 

Worried about the incoming wind storm, disaster managers in Boulder County had asked Lumen Technologies, which provides 911 access in the western half of the county, to prepare for what was forecast and replace the battery backup systems that keep phone service running during power outages — but the company committed no resources. 

For Gold Hill, this was not a new problem.

Help was not on the way

Late one night last winter, after a four-day snowstorm, Michael Wollard trudged out of his house in Gold Hill to check on his car. As he pushed through chest-deep snow, cold seeping through the seams of his clothing, he heard a faint meowing — a cat, he thought to himself, was stuck in the street.

The noise quickly shifted from a cat’s meow to a clear human cry: “Help.” In the middle of Main Street, he saw his 85-year-old neighbor trying to navigate the deep snow. The phones were out and her husband was critically ill, so she was left to shuffle through the streets at midnight, relying on her voice to call for help.

At the time, the power was out in Gold Hill. An outdated battery backup system that is supposed to keep residents connected during events like this had failed. Gold Hill was buried, frozen, and cut off from the outside world.

The Finn family are legacy residents of Gold Hill and were volunteer firefighters.

Wollard rushed to the Finn’s house to get help for their neighbors. Unable to move the fire trucks, Leslie Finn and her husband brought out a truck they keep tire chains on at all times. They put the man, who was bleeding internally, in the back of the truck and crept toward Sunshine Canyon, where an ambulance was waiting to take him to the hospital in Boulder.

“It was until 3 a.m. dealing with the craziness,” Finn said. “The whole thing started because we couldn’t call 911.”

In cases of internal bleeding, minutes can mean the difference between life and death. Medical care in these situations is critical, with severe cases leading to death within 5 to 30 minutes on average. The risks are even higher for people in rural communities because of the distance to hospitals.

Residents of Gold Hill are already at a disadvantage in emergency situations — without reliable internet service to begin with, inclement weather such as high winds, fires or floods that result in power outages leave Gold Hill cut off from calling for help or receiving emergency notifications, such as orders to evacuate.

In the event of a power outage, the batteries are supposed to kick on, keeping Gold Hill connected for about two hours. Connecting to cellular service is nearly impossible in the town, so landlines and Wi-Fi are the only option. But the batteries have not been replaced for more than 20 years, meaning that they have significantly reduced capacity, according to Gold Hill Fire Protection District Chief Rich Caudill. In the event of a power outage, they fail to keep the communication networks up for more than a few seconds. Gold Hill has no way to contact emergency responders in times of crisis. The blame falls on Lumen, Caudill says.

Lumen Technologies is the sole telecommunications provider in western Boulder County. Formerly known as CenturyLink, the company bought Level 3 Communications in 2017, expanding its network and shifting its focus to wholesale and commercial consumers. Shortly after, the company rebranded as Lumen.

In cars, phones and computers, a two-decade old battery would warrant replacement.

The lifecycle of lithium-ion batteries, like the ones in Gold Hill, has been top of mind in recent years, primarily because discussions of range decrease in electric vehicles. Studies show that modern, highly efficient batteries will decline by 18% by 450 cycles.

While scholarship on older batteries is limited, Gold Hill has proved in nonlaboratory conditions, and over the course of thousands of battery cycles, that Lumen’s batteries are mostly useless holding a connection for maybe 20 seconds after the power goes out, Finn said.

Caudill has been taking Lumen to task for years, urging them to upgrade the batteries, the mounting frustrations of his neighbors and friends fueling his fight to hold the corporation accountable for providing crucial service.

“Over the last six months, I have tried reaching them over 15 separate times, with almost no response,” Caudill said in October.

“The town’s interactions with Lumen are minimal,” Caudill said, in most cases met with lukewarm responses like, “We are not able to commit resources at this time,” or are ignored altogether. When the town requests access to the infrastructure to install new batteries using its own tax dollars, that access is denied, he said.

Lumen declined to comment for this story. 

However, in documents including communications between Lumen reps and stakeholders, the company has said it would not approve requests for access claiming that using outside equipment or generators could present safety risks. The battery boxes are built only for Lumen’s use, and union workers are the only personnel authorized to handle them.

“They don’t think about the population of Gold Hill … I don’t know … deserves it. This community is not just 100 people, it’s several hundred people, and we all deserve access to 911,” said Maggie Simms, lifelong Gold Hill resident.

Most of Gold Hill’s residents are 60 and older, including most members of the volunteer fire department. There are at least seven original founding families still in Gold Hill, according to Boyd Brown, volunteer historian for the Gold Hill Museum and a sixth-generation Gold Hill resident. 

“Residents feel responsible for maintaining the town’s history and mining identity and thus want to stay in the homes that have often belonged to their families for generations,” Brown said. Despite that, they want to be able to rely on the systems in place without putting themselves in danger.

Residents agree that the situation is dangerous, but many are torn on what to do about it. Starlink, the satellite communications system, presents a reasonable alternative, but one that many residents struggle with because of Elon Musk’s work for the Trump administration. Some see it as a necessity in order to remain connected in a potentially dangerous situation, others are unwilling to make the political compromise.

Starlink may end up being the broadband service Gold Hill and other rural Colorado communities get.

In 2021, Colorado was awarded $826.5 million by the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program in the federal infrastructure bill to help make sure every unserved or underserved household in the state has access to fast internet. This fall, the that sum was cut in half and the state was forced to reapply for funding intended to reach more than 96,000 residents in rural areas. Most of the funding was awarded to satellite broadband proposals, including Starlink and the still unlaunched Amazon Leo, previously known as Project Kuiper. 

Most Gold Hill residents don’t expect excellent internet service. Being a bit disconnected, they say, is part of the charm of mountain living, “Our needs are few and simple,” longtime resident Robert Mason said, “Certainly runs everything we need to run, video and blah blah blah.” Mason’s daughter Rebecca Gretz confirmed the feeling, saying that they never had any major problems with their internet.

Emergency communication service is a different matter and it’s hard to argue that the failing battery backups are not an enormous risk to Gold Hill and several other rural mountain communities in Boulder County.

“We’re fighting the law of averages,” said Caudill, the Gold Hill fire chief.

It’s not just a Gold Hill problem

Officials in Gold Hill and neighboring towns are losing patience. The mayor of Jamestown has signed on to partner with Gold Hill’s fire department to pressure Lumen to resolve the battery problem.

Jamestown faces almost identical issues during extreme weather events. In 2013, a flood ripped through the valley, destroying parks, town buildings, including the fire department and 10% of homes in the community. The damage not only prevented residents from physically leaving, but also from getting access to emergency services.

There are day-to-day threats as well. Planned power outages for maintenance or as a precaution during high winds, are common in the region.

In the Fourmile Canyon community, where one of the worst wildfires on record occurred in 2010, Lefthand Fire Protection District Chief Chris O’Brien has been working with county commissioner Steve Silbermann to pressure Lumen to replace the failing backup batteries in all of western Boulder County.

“Although we are making a valiant effort to convince CenturyLink to replace their battery backup power, we don’t have any regulatory backing,” Silbermann said, referring to the company by its former name.

The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office and Boulder County Communications work closely with Lumen, the state-designated Basic Emergency Service Provider, in order to improve 911 reliability. After multiple incidents and discussions, the county requested permission for public safety staff to deploy generators, detailed remote-terminal mapping, critical battery replacements and a battery maintenance plan. Lumen approved only the mapping and battery replacements in crisis situations, according to documents obtained by CU News Corps.

O’Brien said Lumen “has a monopoly” on western Boulder County. “Once they were deregulated it gave them the ability to act with impunity.”

The deregulation O’Brien is referencing is a set of five Colorado laws approved in 2014 that intended to encourage higher broadband internet speeds. At the time of introduction, the bills received criticism from the AARP, who said that the deregulation would hurt landline users. In 2025, it has.

The acquisition of Level 3 Communications that expanded CenturyLink also made Lumen slower to respond, O’Brien said. “When it was CenturyLink, conditions were better … the service technicians really knew the area. It’s hard for us, because we don’t have that, we don’t have a head technician that we can reach out to in case of emergency.”

Allenspark and Raymond on the northern edge of Boulder County have also confirmed that the area is facing similar problems because of Lumen’s failing backups.

“It’s life or death. If we have a retiree, or even a healthy young person, take a fall, have a cardiac event … and they’re not able to reach 911 for emergency services, we don’t know that they need help,” Jamestown Fire Chief Seth Strickland said.

Until the infrastructure improves, residents are left to their own devices. When outages occur in Gold Hill, this often means driving to the far eastern corner of town for spotty cellphone coverage at best. In some cases, the town congregates around the schoolhouse to use its backup resources — it’s one of the only buildings in town with a built-in generator. The town relies upon methods like this to support itself. In theory, they shouldn’t have to.

“What we’re looking for is safety, we want the best standard of living for our town residents, we are not going to stop working on it until we have the issue solved,” Jamestown Mayor Michael Box said.

Lumen is expected to sell the entirety of its mass-market business to AT&T this year. This means that customers in Boulder County mountain towns may have a fresh chance at connectivity under new management. But Gold Hill and the rest of western Boulder County want the systems already in place must be maintained.

“If I were able to snap my fingers today? I would love to have those batteries replaced and maintained,” Caudill said.

Colorado will receive a little more than $200 million in federal funding next year to improve health care in rural areas, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Monday.

The money comes from a fund created in this year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the spending and tax bill supported by Republicans and signed by President Donald Trump. The bill set up a competition among states for a share of $50 billion to be distributed over five years to boost rural health care.

“This new funding will help us strengthen our rural health care system by supporting providers and increasing access to care for everyone in our rural communities,” Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement.

Added Kim Bimestefer, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing: “Our shared efforts will drive game-changing improvements across rural care access, innovation, affordability and health outcomes across rural Colorado for generations to come.”

The money announced Monday is just for 2026, and Colorado expects to receive additional funding through 2030.Colorado’s award for 2026 places it middle of the pack nationally, but it is also higher than what Colorado officials had been daring to hope for.

“That would be — wow,” Bimestefer said in a webinar this month, talking about the possibility of Colorado receiving $200 million from the fund. “We should all do cartwheels.”

Wide range of projects to be funded

The state plans to use the money for a wide range of projects, including bolstering the rural health care workforce, helping rural health providers with technology upgrades, tackling chronic disease and other initiatives. Information on how rural health care providers can apply for the funding will be rolled out next year.

While the money will help, it is not expected to outweigh the negative impact of Medicaid cuts that were also part of the GOP bill.

All 50 states will receive money from the program next year, HHS announced Monday. But how much money each state will receive was determined partly by a competitive process that has been half-jokingly described as the rural health “Hunger Games.”

These are the rules of the game: Half the money each year — so, $5 billion — is distributed evenly across all states with a qualifying application. Every state applied, and all those applications met minimum standards, so this means Colorado was guaranteed at least $100 million per year.

The second half of the money is distributed based on a competition among states in two areas: first, how much of a rural health crisis the state is facing and, second, how innovative the state’s proposals are to address it.

Federal authorities did not release a breakdown of how they arrived at each state’s funding amount.

Colorado’s award of $200,105,604 for the 2026 fiscal year ranks 26th nationally. Texas is set to receive the most funding, more than $280 million, followed by Alaska and California. New Jersey will receive the lowest amount, about $147 million, just below Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Concerns from hospitals

HHS notes that Colorado’s application focused on “overcoming geographic and systematic barriers to rural health care.”

But, after the application was submitted, the Colorado Hospital Association wrote a letter to state lawmakers expressing concerns about how the state plans to tackle those issues.

“Not only were Colorado’s rural hospitals’ recommendations disregarded, but proposals were advanced that they actively oppose and believe will harm the communities they serve,” Jeff Tieman, the association’s president and CEO, wrote in the letter, dated Dec. 16.

Tieman specifically cited plans to promote regional collaboratives among rural hospitals to create greater efficiency and sustainability. Tieman said that could require some rural hospitals “to discontinue key service lines and direct patients to a single designated facility within the region.”

Colorado’s application also ties into an existing initiative called the Colorado Hospital Transformation Program that seeks to pay hospitals more for providing higher-quality care. Tieman called the program flawed.

Tieman told lawmakers they must intervene “to restore transparency, uphold accountability, and ensure that rural stakeholders have a formal and substantive role in shaping how these significant public dollars are deployed.”

Other health care providers expressed more support for the state’s approach. A news release from the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing included a statement from Kay Whitley, the president and CEO of Spanish Peaks Regional Health Center in Walsenburg, alongside comments from Polis and Bimestefer.

“These funds will allow us to strengthen the care we provide to our rural community by sustaining essential services and expanding access where it’s needed most,” Whitley said. “This investment helps us continue to meet the evolving needs of our neighbors and improve health outcomes for the communities we serve.”

More than 200,000 Coloradans on Thursday moved a step closer to seeing their health insurance costs skyrocket for next year, after the U.S. Senate failed to agree on a deal to extend expiring subsidies that make the coverage more affordable.

The Senate deadlocked on two proposals — one backed by Democrats that would have extended the subsidies for three years, the other backed by Republicans that would not have extended the subsidies but instead would have created government-funded health savings accounts. Both proposals received 51 votes, short of the 60 needed to advance the plans.

Colorado’s senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, who are both Democrats, voted in favor of Democrats’ plan and against Republicans’ plan.

The deadlock means the subsidies — which go to people who buy health insurance solo, without help from an employer — will almost certainly expire at the end of the year. Folks have until Monday to buy plans that kick in Jan. 1. Open enrollment for 2026 plans continues through Jan. 15.

225,000 impacted

The expiration of the subsidies will impact roughly 225,000 people in Colorado.

The state Division of Insurance earlier this year estimated that as many as 75,000 may drop coverage due to rising costs related to the subsidy expiration, but so far enrollment on the state’s health insurance exchange is down about 5% from the same period in 2024. A record 282,000 people enrolled through the exchange last year.

The subsidies — also known as enhanced premium tax credits — were first put in place during the COVID pandemic. They work in conjunction with the original Affordable Care Act subsidies to lower what people pay in premiums, the monthly costs that people pay just to purchase an insurance plan.

Over time, as inflation pushed health care costs higher and higher, the enhanced subsidies helped keep coverage within reach.

People who don’t receive any subsidies will still see their prices for 2026 increase significantly — about 23% on average. Others who are eligible to continue receiving the original Affordable Care Act subsidies will see bigger increases. Those who were only receiving the enhanced subsidies will see the biggest increase of all because they will now have to shoulder the full price of their coverage.

The state estimates that, on average, people shopping on their own for insurance will see a 101% increase in what they pay just to buy insurance. But, because of the way the subsidies are calculated combined with high underlying costs for insurance, people in rural Colorado will see even bigger average increases.

Bennet, Hickenlooper blast vote

Both of Colorado’s U.S. senators criticized Republicans for not supporting a subsidy extension.

“What most Coloradans want, they’re trying to find a way to lower the costs, and yet this is just the opposite,” Hickenlooper said in an interview Wednesday, looking ahead to the vote. “This is going to dramatically increase the cost for a large percentage of Coloradans.”

Congress could still extend the subsidies for 2026 — in fact, it could even do so after the start of the new year. But Bennet said Republicans have not presented a united plan, and he criticized President Donald Trump and Republican leaders for not addressing the issue sooner.

“This is insane,” Bennet said Thursday on a call with reporters. “People were supposed to be making their decisions a month ago about what insurance they were going to buy. So every day that goes by, it just becomes harder and harder and harder to address.”

In remarks prior to Thursday’s vote, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, criticized Democrats for wanting to extend the subsidies without tying it to deeper reforms to the health care system.

“I hope that after today, they’ll feel like they’ve checked the messaging box and will get serious about actually doing something about the spiraling health care costs under Obamacare,” Thune said.

Hickenlooper and Bennet bristled at that idea — both said they think the current system is broken and needs to be fixed, with each saying they believe health care is a right and the United States should have a system that ensures universal coverage.

Bennet accused Trump and other Republicans of indifference to the hardship that not extending the subsidies will cause.

“They think they’re going to get away with blaming other people for the problems that he (Trump) is now creating,” Bennet said.

Hickenlooper said the subsidy expiration will also impact small businesses. The availability of the subsidies caused many small employers to forgo offering insurance and to instead allow their workers to shop for coverage on the open market, where they could often find a better deal. Roughly half of the people shopping for coverage on their own either work for a small business or are unemployed.

“It creates a level of anxiety for your workers,” Hickenlooper said of the rising insurance costs. “How your employees feel about their lives has a lot to do with your success.”

Was the shutdown worth it?

The expiring subsidies were at the center of the fight that shut down the federal government for a record 43 days in October and November.

Democrats in the Senate had refused to support a measure to keep the government funded unless it contained a provision to extend the enhanced insurance subsidies. The shutdown ended when a handful of Democrats, not including Bennet or Hickenlooper, agreed to a deal to reopen the government in conjunction with a promise for a vote on subsidy extension — the vote that failed Thursday.

Despite that meek ending, Hickenlooper said the shutdown fight was worth it, even though he also said, “I hate shutdowns, and I am distressed that it was necessary.”

He cited the increased awareness around the issue. A poll released last week found that more than 80% of people who buy health insurance on their own wanted to see the subsidies extended, and this included more than 70% of conservatives who identified as MAGA supporters.

If the subsidies do expire, 76% of people buying coverage on their own said they would blame Trump or Congressional Republicans — though 58% of Republicans in that group said they would blame Democrats.

“That kind of awareness is what moves a democracy to make good decisions that benefit everybody,” Hickenlooper said.

He also pointed to new discussions among Republicans about reforms to the health care system. This includes the idea for federally funded health savings accounts, as well as other reforms.

“None of that would have been happening if we hadn’t locked down and said we’re not going to vote for this, we’re willing to let the government shut down,” Hickenlooper said. “None of that would have ever happened.”

Editor’s note: Due to the sensitivity of this article, student sources were kept anonymous. 

Latino and white communities are intertwined in the Roaring Fork Valley, yet young immigrants, or children thereof, have felt threatened under President Donald Trump’s administration in the wake of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity across the country.

Though Mexican restaurants are local favorites and the Día De Los Muertos procession is a popular tradition in Carbondale, members of the immigrant community are facing a daunting reality. The Roaring Fork School District was 56.6% Latino during the 2024-2025 school year, according to the Colorado Department of Education’s demographic data. To be exact, 3,311 of the 5,842 students identified as Latino.

Interviews with local Latino students revealed the underlying fear surrounding ICE operations and other multi-cultural challenges that immigrants and first-generation Americans face.

“I consider myself American,” an 18 year old from Roaring Fork High School said. “But it can be hard to be prideful in that.”

She said her dual identity — a balance between her Mexican heritage and American citizenship — is beautiful, but can also be challenging. She is the first person in her family to be born in the United States and have experienced growing up here. She’s grateful to have access to so many new opportunities, yet humbled by some of her family members’ comparable disadvantages.

She not only has to guide her younger siblings, but her parents as well. She said that she has had to navigate school events, federal student aid and college applications alone.

“As the oldest, I’ve been forced to grow up faster than everyone else,” she said.

Growing up in the Valley, she often felt left out. She, along with other interviewees, described a social divide between Anglo and Latino students that can exist, and that friend groups are often composed of either or.

On a national scale, she feels like she has fallen victim to generalizations. “They [immigrants] are being categorized as criminals, but we’re not. It’s such a small group of people who are,” she stated.

She felt like Carbondale had always been safe, but under the Trump administration, she and her family have been afraid to travel, or even at times leave the house. Her parents, who have lived and worked in the Valley for over 20 years, began the process of switching bank accounts into her name due to the looming threat of deportation. She sometimes fears “the worst case scenarios.”

“What if they are not at my graduation?” she wondered.

Another student at Roaring Fork, 17, described how she often doesn’t feel like she is considered American, despite being born here. She feels like some only consider Americans as “white,” and, because that does not apply to her, she feels foreign.

She described the fear that surrounded Trump’s first election and the possibility of her parents being deported. In his second term, those fears have felt even more real as she’s watched the impact ICE has had on immigrant communities.

She’s also experienced an increase in discrimination directed towards her and other Latinos. She wondered if it was still there when she was little, but naivety blinded her. In January 2025, she visited North Carolina where a man yelled at her and her family, “Go back to your country.”

“We can’t even travel out of the fear of ICE,” she said.

Although she is a citizen, she said she felt relief when the school district enacted a policy promising that ICE would be unable to enter the schools without a warrant.

Voces Unidas de las Montañas, an organization based in Glenwood Springs that advocates for Latinos’ rights and well-being regionally, is helping pave a path through the uncertainty.

“Our larger mission is to make the Western Slope, and therefore Colorado, more equitable for all,” said Alex Sánchez, the president and CEO of Voces Unidas.

The organization has a 24/7 emergency hotline that acts as a tool to report and/or request information regarding missing family members, or to report ICE or supposed ICE activity. Voces Unidas investigates and verifies such reports.

“It’s critical for the times we live in. It’s important that we also confirm when it isn’t ICE, when it isn’t immigration control,” Sánchez said. “Because the people impacted by ICE are traumatized by any rumor, any insinuation that ICE is in their communities. We don’t want schools half empty, and we don’t want people to stop being able to go to work or use public transportation. We don’t want people to stop enjoying their lives out of fear.”

“It’s also critical, obviously, to confirm and report when there is, in fact, ICE activity, and when there is an operation in our community,” he continued. “Because people are literally being picked up off the streets and families are being separated.”

A third high school senior said that her parents, and most immigrants, come to the United States to try and create a better life for their family and themselves. She said that the same people who fly Trump flags may be kind to her face, but ultimately supported a government that wished her family had not come to the United States.

She described how scared she was before her mother had officially attained citizenship.

“I was terrified. ‘What if my mom doesn’t come home? What if my dad isn’t there?’” she said. “No child should have to experience that.”

“ICE is tearing families apart. What we need is to bring people together,” she added.

The post Balancing fear with the American Dream appeared first on The Sopris Sun.

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VALLECITO — Jim Patton walked across sand, gravel and splintered limbs in his backyard in southwestern Colorado. Four weeks prior, it was a lush grassland with a beach along a creek. Then the floods came.

“It’s like ground zero,” said Patton, who lives part time in a house in La Plata County north of Vallecito Reservoir. “This is where the majority of the water came across.”

The water was the remnants of Hurricane Priscilla and tropical storm Raymond, which dropped 10 to 12 inches of rain on parts of southwestern Colorado. The storms saturated dry soils, sending water into high-country creeks from Vallecito to Pagosa Springs and South Fork and turning them into raging rivers. 

Across southwestern Colorado, the floods caused $13.8 million in damage to public bridges, riverwalks, water systems and roads. In La Plata County, the damage totaled over $7.5 million for residential and public property.

Vallecito was one of the most impacted communities in the area, officials said. First responders did 11 high-water rescues and evacuated about 390 houses — some primary dwellings, some vacation homes or cabins — from Oct. 11 to Oct. 16. 

One month after the floods, emergency responders were going house to house to assess damage or talking with residents about resources. Vallecito community members said they were frustrated, overwhelmed, still in shock. Many were battling insurance companies and bureaucratic rules, while a few, whose properties were heavily damaged, weren’t even back in their homes.

As residents rush to clear debris and prepare for the coming winter snowfall, one question still looms: What will happen in the spring when all that snow would melt and rush down the creek again — this time toward homes sitting in a drastically changed, much more shallow flood plain?

“If you talk to most people, I think they’re worried about the future. They’re worried about spring runoff,” Kelly Patton, Jim’s wife, said. “Now the level of the base of the river is so high; it’s 2 feet higher.”

The flooding was severe enough to warrant multiple emergency declarations as officials rushed to get more boots on the ground. 

La Plata County issued its first emergency declaration for a flood to call in state resources. It was also the first since the 416 fire in 2018. Colorado issued its own verbal declaration Oct. 12, allocating up to $1 million for the emergency response and recovery effort. The state increased its funding maximum to $6 million Monday.

Colorado is calling for help from the federal level — but those resources might be slow to come.

Gov. Jared Polis requested a major disaster declaration Wednesday from President Donald Trump. It would unlock funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for work like removing debris, repairing public roads and bridges, and helping communities protect against future events.

The White House will decide whether to approve the request based on the level of damage, but the timeline is unknown, and some requests take years to approve. The state is also looking at other federal aid programs, said Micki Trost, spokesperson for the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

If the state’s request is approved, the relief could be small: Those without flood insurance receive about $3,000 on average in federal assistance. 

The long road to recovery is just getting started. Trost expects state staff to be working on flood recovery for at least six months. Some projects end 10 years after the incident, she said.

“There’s going to be a lot of work that’s going to have to be done in the spring,” Trost said.

The first 24 hours in one community: Vallecito

Rain was falling in spurts Oct. 11 as Vallecito residents trickled through the Red Cross shelter at Bayfield High School to check in with emergency managers. Volunteers prepped cots and food, but only a few evacuees decided to stay the night. 

Warnings started to come in earlier that week as the National Weather Service told La Plata County staff that churning Pacific storms were heading their way.

Early in the morning Oct. 11, the Upper Pine River Fire Protection District Fire Chief Bruce Evans heard an alert go off on his phone: Creeks upstream of Vallecito were rising, quickly. 

Within hours, the fire district told the county that nearly 400 houses needed to be evacuated. 

The county’s year-round emergency team has two workers and a budget of less than $300,000.  But during an emergency, the pair calls in reinforcements. Within an hour, the county launched its incident management team. At its peak in the first week, the responders totaled over 135 people from nearly 40 local, state and federal agencies. 

The responders turned on Zoom and radios. They headed to the emergency operations center to plan for immediate needs: Where did evacuees need to go? For how long? And what can they do with their pets? 

It’s something the team trains for during the year, even doing annual mock-emergency training, Legarza said.

“We’re a lean, mean fighting machine,” Legarza said.

One homeowner, Barney Miller, said the water on his road seemed to jump 8 inches in about 10 minutes. His friend came over and had to carry Miller’s mother, who is 91, out of the house.

“Water was getting into my boots. I’m in water halfway up to my knee,” he said. “I’m now starting to realize that this is much more than I’ve seen in the river before.”

The Pattons were at their home in Arizona getting videos and photos of the floodwaters from Vallecito friends. The dirt road on either side of a concrete bridge — the only way to their vacation home in Vallecito — was eroded. The water also carved a deep rut in the main drive up to their house, which they co-maintain with neighbors. 

Chuck Freeman, who lives in Vallecito all year, was at his house, watching Grimes Creek rise and start to cut into his lawn before flooding a lower level of his neighborhood. Rick McCune, another year-round resident, was away from home when he got the notice to evacuate. He rushed home to gather some belongings — and roust his neighbor, who was sitting in bed playing Wordle and didn’t realize it was raining, he said.

Leaving, he said, “turned into a whole other nightmare.” His home was almost destroyed — it is right next to two others that were torn down — and he had not been able to return as of early November because of the damage.

His advice to future evacuees? 

“Bring more underwear,” McCune said — plus the basics, like important paperwork, medicine, devices and chargers.

The first weeks

In the first week, officials were focused on gathering information and assessing damage to try to make the area safe and secure.

Officials launched daily meetings at 10 a.m and 4 p.m., which Legarza called their “battle rhythm” as they worked 80 to 120 hours in a week. They organized guided tours for residents to check out their properties or gather important items, and by Oct. 16, they lifted evacuations. 

Other agencies started arriving in the first days after the flood: Staff arrived from the state public health and homeland security. Staffers from Mile High United Way’s 211 help line arrived to assist with coordinating volunteers, assessing community needs and connecting people with resources. Volunteers with Samaritan’s Purse, an international Christian disaster relief organization, landed and started removing debris. 

There are 15 emergency support functions for how disasters are organized, each with its own area of focus, Legarza said.

“Each agency can do a few different things that maybe the other agencies can’t do,” she said. 

Residents were staying with friends or family, in hotels or at shelters. Some decided to stay in Vallecito to try to help. Many were anxious to get back to see if their homes were damaged and how badly. Some were frustrated by changing meeting, check-in and shelter locations. 

People in the nearby town of Bayfield helped pack sandbags to build flood barriers. Churches and nonprofits dropped off firewood for houses warmed solely by wood-burning stoves.

About 20 volunteers with Samaritan’s Purse spent two days cleaning up the Patton’s property. They brought in 48 truckloads of gravel to repair the roads up to their house, the Pattons said.

“We cleaned mud out of houses. … Anything in the homes that was contaminated, we drug out of there,” said Charlie Downs, a local resident and volunteer with the nonprofit.

The beginning of recovery

About three weeks after the floods, officials and community members gathered at the Weminuche Woodfire Grill in Vallecito for the first long-term recovery meeting. Residents listened to updates from emergency managers and rotated through question-and-answer stations with different agencies. 

The most popular station featured a huge map, spread over a billiards table under the glow of a Pabst Blue Ribbon lamp, showing the post-flood landscape. Residents peppered staff from the Natural Resources Conservation Service about their plans to remove debris from Vallecito Creek — and concerns about letting nature run its course.

The floodwaters completely reshaped the creek’s channel, making it more shallow and broad — a possible risk to homes during future storms or high spring runoff. Some residents wanted the sand, rocks, trees and boulders removed to protect their properties. Others worried nothing would be done.

Vallecito Creek reached around 7,000 cubic feet per second at its peak, fell and then started to rise again as the second storm hit. Already the change in the channel was clear, Miller said.

“At 900 (cfs), it was already running back here,” he said, pointing to part of his creek-side yard. “That gives you a gauge of how much material got into the riverbed.”

The don’t-do-anything option is not on the table, said Todd Boldt, assistant state conservationist for water resources for the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The federal agency and Upper Pine River fire district will work on the river channel to reduce the threat of future flooding. 

That could mean debris removal or helping to stabilize streambanks to protect homes, life and other infrastructure. They’re still weighing their options, he said.

If anybody goes out and works in a stream they will need a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a county floodplain permit, Boldt said. Those are required so they don’t make a change to the flow of water that will impact their neighbor or somebody downstream.

Evans was especially worried about a massive logjam upstream on the Vallecito Creek, particularly because it can ice over during the winter, he said.

“If we don’t get rid of that logjam now, in the next month, while the water is low … it’s going to be much more difficult and much more risky,” he said.

Residents are battling other complicated costs, jurisdictions, insurance policies and regulations. Homes are supposed to be 50 feet from a stream’s high-water mark in La Plata County, but the floodwaters eroded banks and ate into people’s yards. 

Freeman lost 10 to 15 feet of his lawn when water surged through Grimes Creek in Valleicto.

“That was the irrigation system for the yard,” he said, pointing at pipes sticking out of the torn up bank.

One person said her insurance provider never informed her that the policy lapsed. Flood insurance is often separate from homeowners insurance. Nationally, about 4% of homeowners have flood insurance, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The neighborhood also features a small, winding maze of dirt roads, most privately owned. If residents pay county tax dollars, some wonder, why can’t the county help take care of the roads? 

“We have about just over 650 miles of county-owned roads, and we can only spend county money on county roads,” Legarza said. “That’s just the law.”

On their property in November, Jim Patton climbed onto a wall of rocks and other debris deposited by an excavator to build a flood barrier. Before October, it was a peaceful spot for him to write, listening to the river and the birds with the smell of ponderosa pines in the air and a view of the Weminuche wilderness in his view, Patton said.

But the chairs washed away and many of the beautiful trees had fallen. The area was covered by sand and boulders.

“Those trees embedded there might help turn the water one day if it gets high,” he said. “Basically the water comes in and undermines these rocks, and it’ll all give up again.”