5280 Magazine November 2022

FROM THE EDITOR The Impact Of Dogged Reporting In journalism school, budding news-gatherers are taught how to extract the information necessary to build the who-what-when-where-why-how foundation of any article. Fact-finding is rarely an easy endeavor, but being able to talk to an actual person or access records from a database via the internet makes the pursuit much more manageable. Not every story, however, offers up its details so willingly. For two years, 5280 senior staff writer Robert Sanchez had been noodling—off and on—about digging into the backstory of a man whose headstone had caught his eye in Denver’s Riverside Cemetery. The grave is located in a section for U.S. military members, and the inscription reads: “His life an idea—his memory an inspiration.” But beyond his dates of birth and death, that was all…

Readers of Cheap Land Colorado, Conover’s new book (excerpted on page 102) about people living off the grid in the San Luis Valley, will spot a 5280 shoutout: An essay Conover wrote about his love of South Park for the magazine in 2017 helped inspire the project. ON BEING A COLORADAN IN NYC “My wife summed it up pretty well one day when explaining the time I spend out here to friends: ‘I’m Jewish. He’s from Colorado.’” HOME AWAY FROM HOME ”I’m now an off-grid landowner in the San Luis Valley myself. Its beauty and open space make the challenges (like keeping warm and staying clean) more manageable.” GOOD NEIGHBORS “They’re getting early copies. They probably won’t say that I got everything right, but I hope they’ll give me credit for trying.” ON 5280.COM ’TIS THE SKISON It’s time…

During his lifelong exploration of Indigenous identities, visual artist Jeffrey Gibson has created intricately beaded punching bags, applied modern geometric designs to rawhide canvases, and hung vibrant printed polyester from tepee poles. “The Spirits Are Laughing,” the latest work from the Colorado Springs–born member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, examines Indigenous kinship philosophy—“the idea of seeing the land as an extension of one’s own family or oneself,” Gibson says. Gibson invited 15 Native and non-Native color guard performers, all of whom identify as queer, to spin flags and “sing to the mountain and the sun” at the Aspen Institute this past August. Beginning November 4, the Aspen Art Museum will display a recording of the live performance, alongside Gibson’s flags and three busts he sculpted from natural materials,…

Scott Yates was just another person who thought switching his clocks in and out of daylight saving time (DST) was annoying—until he discovered how the twice-yearly time changes were harming our well-being. The revelation inspired the Denverite to become an advocate for the #LockTheClock movement, which helped lead to this past June’s passage of House Bill 22-1297, designating Colorado a permanent DST state (see: later sunsets year-round). At press time, Congress was debating whether to institute full-time DST for the entire country, legislation that would trump the Colorado bill. In the meantime, we asked Yates to explain why the change would be welcome news. 36,560 Tons of greenhouse gas emissions saved each day in Turkey after permanent DST was instituted in 2016, according to the Economic Research Forum. “Some researchers are still…

Novelist Kate Manning has kept a photograph of 100 men wearing funny hats in her office for years. The panorama is a group shot from the 1915 National Retail Monument Dealers convention in Marble, and Manning’s great-grandfather was among the attendees. According to family lore, pickax-wielding J.F. Manning helped quarry marble for the Lincoln Memorial. That was all the author knew about her ancestor until, shortly before her father’s death, he encouraged her to unearth the whole story. The investigation would lead to Manning’s latest novel, Gilded Mountain, out on November 1—while also forcing the writer to reckon with her family’s past. In the early 1900s, Marble, in Gunnison County, supplied some of the most pristine slabs in the country for a host of large projects, including the Equitable Building in…

TIMING Tell your friend where you want her most aggressive turn or slickest trick to be. Then access your phone’s burst mode—in which it takes a series of images until the shutter button is released. (On recent iPhones, hold down the red shutter button and pull it to the left. The process varies for Androids.) ANGLE Setting up with the sun behind you will create a well-lit subject, but the resulting photo can be boring because everything is well lit. Instead, position the sun to the side of your skier so he is partly in the light and partly in shadow, producing a more dramatic scene. ENVIRONMENT “Look for great backgrounds to put your skiers in front of. Distant peaks or a fog-filled valley can be nice,” Doran says. “On a powder day, a dark…