5280 Magazine April 2022

THE DENVER MAGAZINE

COLORADO’S

BEST WATERFALL HIKES 27 Spectacular Cascades To Visit This Spring PAGE 84

APRIL 2022 |

5280.com

MAGIC MUSHROOMS MAY BE THE NEXT FRONTIER IN MENTAL HEALTH CARE

PAGE 94

THE PROBLEM, POWER, AND PRACTICALITY OF LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BY KATE SIBER

CAN OUTSIDE INC. SAVE OUTDOOR RECREATION JOURNALISM? PAGE 38

Gabe Vigil Burn Survivor With his body consumed in flames after an on-the-job electrical accident, Gabe Vigil wanted to give up. But he pushed through and went home from the hospital after 77 days—becoming that unit’s fastest-healing patient. He had a million reasons to fight, but the most important one was his family.

Read Gabe’s story at: uchealth.org/stories.

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DINE OUT. GIVE Visit these businesses for breakfast, lunch, happy hour, dinner, or takeout on Thursday, April 28, and 25% of your bill will benefit Project Angel Heart.

ALL COLORADO LOCATIONS AURORA Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta Iliff & Buckley Sam’s No. 3 Diner - Aurora BOULDER AREA Avery Brewing Restaurant & Tap Room Beau Jo’s Colorado Style Pizza Longmont Blackbelly Santo The Post Chicken & Beer - Boulder CAPITOL HILL/CENTRAL Angelo’s Taverna - Denver Bang Up to the Elephant!

City, O’ City Cuba Cuba Cafe & Bar DiFranco’s Fruition Restaurant Little India Restaurant & Bar 6th & Grant Logan Street Restaurant & Bar Prohibition Ritual Social House Shells and Sauce Table 6 Uno Mas Taqueria - 6th Ave Wild Corgi Pub

Donating $1 for every Tito’s Handmade Vodka cocktail sold on April 28

CENTRAL PARK Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta Central Park Cheluna Brewing Company Cuba Cuba Sandwicheria Northfield Little India Restaurant & Bar Central Park Rosenberg’s Bagels & Delicatessen Stanley Marketplace Stanley Beer Hall CHERRY CREEK/GLENDALE Barolo Grill Bull & Bush Brewery Cuba Cuba Sandwicheria - Glendale Hapa Sushi Grill and Sake Bar Cherry Creek Jax Fish House - Glendale Machete Tequila + Tacos Cherry Creek Sam’s No. 3 Diner - Glendale The Cherry Cricket - Cherry Creek COLORADO SPRINGS 3.14 Pi Bar 503W Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta Colorado Springs Bingo Burger - Colorado Springs & Pueblo locations The Carter Payne DOWNTOWN Biker Jim’s Gourmet Dogs Bistro Vendôme Carmine’s on McGregor Square

Citizen Rail Jax Fish House - LoDo Kachina Cantina Machete Tequila + Tacos Union Station Mercantile dining & provision Red Square Bistro + Vodka Bar Rhein Haus Denver Rioja Sam’s No. 3 Diner - Downtown Stoic & Genuine Tamayo The Cherry Cricket - Ballpark The Nickel The Pig & The Sprout Ultreia Wally’s Wisconsin Tavern EAST COLFAX Annie’s Café & Bar Bastien’s Restaurant Machete Tequila + Tacos - Colfax Steve’s Snappin’ Dogs Trattoria Stella - Colfax EAST DENVER Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta 7th & Colorado Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta Dartmouth Cake Crumbs Bakery & Cafe Copper Kettle Brewing Company India’s Restaurant Inga’s Alpine Tavern La Fogata Mexican Restaurant Evans Lowry Beer Garden

One lucky diner will win a $2,500 gift card from King Soopers

Monaco Inn Restaurant Oblio’s Pizzeria Tables Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta Gateway Park NORTH METRO Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta - Brighton Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta - Windsor Beau Jo’s Colorado Style Pizza Ft Collins Great Scott’s Eatery - Broomfield Great Scott’s Eatery - Denver Hana Matsuri Sushi The Post Chicken & Beer Fort Collins NORTHWEST DENVER/ HIGHLANDS Bamboo Sushi Bar Dough BriDer Rotisserie and Kitchen Café Brazil Cart-Driver - LoHi duo Restaurant Gaetano’s Highland Tap & Burger Hops & Pie Little India Restaurant & Bar Highlands Ohana Island Kitchen PARISI pizzeria.trattoria.vino Señor Bear The Family Jones Spirit House The Post Chicken & Beer - LoHi Trattoria Stella - Highlands Uncle - Highlands

APRIL 28,2022 DiningOutForLifeCO.org

B ACK .

RINO/FIVE POINTS Cart-Driver - RiNo Hop Alley Osaka Ramen Rosenberg’s Bagels & Delicatessen Five Points Stowaway Kitchen The Woods SOUTH BROADWAY Blue Bonnet Restaurant Colore Italian Restaurant & Pizzeria Imperial Chinese Restaurant Punch Bowl Social - S Broadway Sweet Action Ice Cream Taste of Thailand Turtle Boat SOUTH METRO/DTC Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta - Castle Rock Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta - DTC Cranelli’s Italian Restaurant Cuba Cuba - Castle Rock Cuba Cuba Sandwicheria - DTC La Fogata Mexican Restaurant - DTC Sahara Restaurant SOUTHEAST METRO Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta - Parker Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta - Smoky Hill LuBo’s NY Pizza SOUTHWEST METRO Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta Highlands Ranch Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta - Littleton Cuba Cuba Sandwicheria Highlands Ranch Land of Sushi Palenque Cocina y Agaveria Piccino Wood Oven Pizza Romano’s Italian Restaurant The South Restaurant

Dining Out For Life® is back for its 28th year, and we’ve extended to Colorado Springs!

Donate online to provide nutritious meals for neighbors in need, then enjoy your own delicious meal from a participating restaurant or brewery.

UPTOWN Ace Eat Serve Hamburger Mary’s Denver Steuben’s - Uptown Watercourse Foods WASH PARK/DU Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta - DU Bonnie Brae Tavern, Inc. Carmine’s on Penn Kaos Pizzeria Little India Restaurant & Bar South Downing Uncle - West Wash Park Uno Mas Taqueria - S Pearl Wash Park Grille WEST METRO/MOUNTAINS 240 Union Restaurant A Creative Grille Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta Alameda & Simms Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta Evergreen Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta - Golden Beau Jo’s Colorado Style Pizza Arvada Beau Jo’s Colorado Style Pizza Evergreen Beau Jo’s Colorado Style Pizza Idaho Springs Beau Jo’s Colorado Style Pizza Steamboat Springs Moose Hill Cantina School House Kitchen & Libations =

In 2022, Project Angel Heart will prepare and home-deliver 620,000 delicious, medically tailored meals to 4,250 Coloradans living with HIV/AIDS, cancer, kidney disease, and other severe illnesses. The meals are specially created to support their health and improve their quality of life.

Donating 25% of food and bar sales!

List as of March 1 Visit DiningOutForLifeCO.org for the most up-to-date list.

KNAUF INSULATION

#DOFLCO

projectangelheart @proj_angelheart

FEATURES

A P R I L 2022

84

Chasing Waterfalls Fueled by melting snow, Colorado’s cascades are never better than in late spring and early summer.

We found 27 spindly trickles, misty plunges, and bona fide gushers worth the hike.

BY JESSICA LARUSSO

94

The Fungus Among Us Nearly three years ago, Denver became the first U.S. city to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms. Since then, an ecosystem of proponents has sprouted in an effort to deliver the magic of psilocybin to those who might benefit.

BY LINDSEY B. KING

106

Is This Land Your Land?

The terrain now known as Colorado is etched with the trauma of its original inhabitants’ violent colonization.

The contemporary practice of land acknowledgment aims to reckon with this past and atone for historical harms—but does it work?

Treasure Falls near Pagosa Springs

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Eric Schuette

BY KATE SIBER

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B E H I N D T H E S T O R I ES 16

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D I N I N G G U I D E 118

COMPASS 19 ENVIRONMENT

Glenwood Canyon finally looks like its old self again—but appearances can be deceiving.

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20 HISTORY

In recent years, History Colorado Center has accepted 1,201 donations to expand its permanent collection. We highlight some remarkable additions.

EAT & DRINK

22 BOOKS

29 WHAT’S HOT

Exquisitely plated dishes and a convivial ambience courtesy of Michael Diaz de Leon draw diners to Brutø’s 16-seat chef’s counter.

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24 Q&A

30 CHANGE MAKERS

A Littleton woman is helping a new wave of Christians convert their elders into climate change believers.

Tajahi Cooke wants to create a more diverse and stable restaurant industry—starting with the launch of Arvada’s Chef Kitchen this month.

26 ART

BY DALIAH SINGER

The largest collection of work by street artist Banksy arrives in Denver this month—even though he’s condemned private exhibits that profit from his pieces. Should you go?

COLUMN 38 BUSINESS

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It’s been a little more than a year since a Boulder media outlet purchased Outside magazine and transformed the outdoor journalism landscape. But is Outside Inc.’s bold new business plan good for its audience?

BY ROBERT SANCHEZ

BACKSTORY

ON THE COVER

Photograph by Eric Schuette

144 DREAM READER

A local expert explains what your cryptic sleepytime scenes really mean.

North Clear Creek Falls near Lake City

144 5280 (ISSN 10826815) is published monthly by 5280 Publishing, Inc., 1675 Larimer St., Suite 675, Denver, CO 80202. Subscriptions are $16 for one year (12 issues). Back issues are available for $5.99 plus tax and shipping by visiting shop.5280.com. Periodical postage paid at Denver, CO, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see DMM 707.4.12.5). NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address corrections to 5280 Publishing, Inc., P.O. Box 37270, Boone, IA 50037-4270. Canadian Post Publications Mail Agreement No. #40065056 Canadian Return Address: DP Global Mail, 4960-2 Walker Road, Windsor, ON N9A 6J3. 5280® is a federally registered trademark owned by 5280 Publishing, Inc. 5280 also owns trademark registrations for TOP OF THE TOWN, DENVER’S TOP DOCTORS, DENVER MAGAZINE, COLORADO PARENT, and COUTURE COLORADO. © 2022 5280 Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

Clockwise from top left: Sarah Banks; Courtesy of History Colorado, Denver; Flor Blake; Mary Haasdyk; Sarah Banks

Speaking out against racist rhetoric got Colorado author Courtney Milan banned from Romance Writers of America. Their loss.

We CU as our #1 priority.

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10 graduate programs that fit your life.

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Get started today. msudenver.edu/master-your-future

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR & DINING GUIDE Letters to the Editor must include your name, address (both of which can be withheld upon request), and a daytime phone number. Letters may be submitted via regular mail or email (letters@5280.com).

To have a restaurant considered for our Dining Guide, contact us by phone or email (dining@5280.com) to receive a submission form. We also encourage you to contact us if your experience at a restaurant differs significantly from our listing. Information for these sections should be sub­mitted at least six weeks before the issue’s cover date.

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The City Different.

BEHIND THE STORIES SPOTLIGHT FROM THE EDITOR

Everyone who picks up a magazine reads it differently.

Some people flip right to the back page, a piece of real estate publications often reserve for satire or a personal essay or a crossword puzzle. Others thumb directly to the food section, should there be one.

Still others find the features and eschew the rest of the stories writers and designers and photo editors have labored over. I’ve learned this, no lie, by watching the people ahead of me in grocery store checkout lines. Each time I see someone pick up a copy of 5280, I try to guess which kind of reader that person might be—but I also always hope for one thing. I want both the twentysomething with the frozen pizzas and the grandma clutching Grape-Nuts to start at the beginning.

Magazine-makers call the first grouping of stories the “front of book,” or FOB. Despite its unimaginative moniker, the FOB is to a magazine what appetizers are to a dinner out: the varied, creative, tasty snacks that whet the appetite. Each month, features editor Spencer Campbell cooks up a roster of bite-size stories for 5280’s FOB, called Compass, that are meant to delight, entertain, inform, provoke, and, above all, encourage readers to keep on reading. Campbell makes it look effortless, but combining newsy bits (see “After The Flood,” page 19) with clever arts coverage (like “To See Or Not To See,” page 26) and insightful Q&As (“Tree Huggers For Christ,” page 24) in a way that flows seamlessly is more challenging than it appears. He does, of course, have equally adept collaborators in deputy art director Sean Parsons and photo editors Charli Ornett and Sarah Banks, all of whom, as Campbell puts it, “continually amaze me with their ability to turn any story we throw at them into, well, art.”

All of that is to say: After you’ve impulse-purchased Tic Tacs and hopefully a copy of 5280—I’m watching you, Guy Who Loves Steak—try reading the magazine in the way we’ve coursed it out. I think you’ll like it. But if I’m wrong, it’s OK to turn to the last page and eat dessert first.

LINDSEY B. KING Email: lindsey@5280.com Twitter: @linzbking

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Mer Young

Multidisciplinary Artist Young, an Indigenous muralist and painter, centered two of the illustrations she created for “Is This Land Your Land?” (page 106), an examination of land acknowledgments, on photographs of a Comanche woman and a Ute man, both from Colorado.

MEANINGFUL MOTIVATION

”I hope to encourage those that see the artwork and read the story to educate themselves about what land they are on and to acknowledge and respect our Earth.”

ON INSPIRATION

”My ancestry informs the kin that are a focal point in my work, but so does land and water. From charcoal to pencil to paint—even this keyboard I use to type—these mediums all derive from the land.”

ON 5280.COM

Magic Moment On April 9, Denverite Scotty Wiese will become the first magician to headline Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Think you can’t be fooled? Head to 5280.com to learn what to expect during his performance, then keep your eyes peeled as Wiese performs a few tricks for our camera.

Clockwise from top left: Sarah Banks; Courtesy of Mer Young; Courtesy of Scotty Wiese; Getty Images

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HISTORY BOOKS Q&A ART

Brad McGinley Photography/Getty Images

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After The Flood Glenwood Canyon finally looks like its old self again—but looks can be deceiving.

CoMPASS

Since November, motorists passing through Glenwood Canyon have been greeted by a jarring scene: backhoes and excavators toiling in the Colorado River. The heavy machinery is there to remove 240,000 tons of debris left when flash flooding in July 2021 caused a rock flow to rush down the canyon’s walls, which had been burned bare by the Grizzly Creek fire a year earlier. The flood wrecked portions of I-70 and blocked the river with mud, sediment, and rock. The cost of mitigation will total $24.2 million, but the Colorado Department of Transportation predicts the road and the waterway will be cleared by early this month—just in time for the next flash flood season. With more impermeable soil and less vegetation because of the fire, even modest amounts of rain could lead to further damage in the canyon. “This summer,” says Paul Santi, a professor at Colorado School of Mines who has been studying debris flows since the 1980s, “I think there’s a chance we’re in for more of the same.” The good news? Mother Nature always renews herself. The bad news? In the interim, the view of heavy machinery working in the river could become an all too familiar sight. —SPENCER CAMPBELL APRIL 2022

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HISTORY

PIECES OF THE PAST

It’s been a decade since the Colorado History Museum, the state’s preeminent repository of the past, became the History Colorado Center, a rebranding officially capped off with the opening of the nonprofit’s giant, $111 million center on Broadway in Denver. Another significant part of the organization’s transformation was a renewed focus on fleshing out its permanent collection to better reflect the state’s diversity. To that end, History Colorado has accepted some 1,201 donations since April 2012. Here are some of the most remarkable additions. —NICHOLAS HUNT 1

4

1 ON THE BLINK Blinky the Clown—aka Russell Scott—entertained and educated on the local Blinky’s Fun Club show wearing his trademark tartan blazer for more than 40 years, making him TV’s longest-running clown.

first urged “all Coloradans to wear masks when outside of home.”

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5 BLUEPRINTS FOR CHANGE History Colorado owns blueprints drafted by Colorado’s first licensed Black architect, John Henderson, who designed Denver’s Byron Rogers Federal Building and his own midcentury modern home in Skyland, which was designated a local historical landmark in 2018.

2 SCENES FROM A PROTEST Along with used tear gas grenades, rubber bullets, and spray paint canisters, History Colorado staff collected posters after the first Denver demonstration against the murder of George Floyd.

6 THE HATE YOU TAKE AWAY

3 TIP OF THE HAT

6

2

7 SMOKE SHOW

4 THE MASKED GOVERNOR It’s likely most Coloradans have already seen this artifact: Governor Jared Polis wore it often during the early days of the pandemic, including at the April 2020 press conference where he

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7

3

This water bong was one of only 30 made by now-defunct Heady Glass Studios to commemorate the 2014 Denver County Fair’s Pot Pavilion, erected less than a month after the state legalized the sale of recreational cannabis.

Courtesy of History Colorado, Denver (7)

Pink beanies became a symbol of 2017’s Women’s March on Denver after thousands of people wore handmade versions as part of a protest against the presidential election of Donald Trump, who infamously used the term “pussy” in an offensive manner during an Access Hollywood taping in 2005. The nationwide demonstrations were some of the largest in the country’s history.

The papers of Linda Fowler, a champion of women’s and LGBTQ rights and one of the plaintiffs in Romer v. Evans, reside in History Colorado’s collection. The lawsuit challenged Amendment 2, a 1992 voter initiative that banned anti-discrimination laws for gay people and earned Colorado the moniker “the hate state.”

The U.S. Supreme Court struck the amendment down as unconstitutional.

Betrayal Of The Bodice Rippers Speaking out against racist rhetoric got Colorado author Courtney Milan banned from Romance Writers of America. Their loss.

In July 2019, while serving on the board of Romance Writers of America (RWA), Heidi Bond—who prefers to go by her pen name, Courtney Milan—won an award for promoting diversity within the trade association. Several months later, however, the organization suspended the Front Range author and barred her from holding future RWA leadership positions. Her crime? Calling out another member’s depiction of a half-Chinese character as a “racist mess” on Twitter.

That wasn’t the first time Milan called out a bad actor. Although she grew up in Southern California dreaming of becoming a writer, she went to law school instead, perusing romance novels as a release from academic pressure. In 2007, during a clerkship for Alex Kozinski, Milan says the prominent federal appeals judge subjected her to abusive behavior, such as calling her into his office and asking her opinion about pornographic images on his computer. Milan moved on to clerk for U.S. Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor (after her retirement), but in 2017, Milan and more than a dozen other women publicly accused Kozinski of sexual misconduct, forcing the judge’s resignation. While pursuing a career as a law professor, Milan started penning her own romance fiction. “It felt like so much was taken from me,” Milan says. “Writing romance was a way for me to map out a way to return to myself.”

Reaching her destination has proved successful. Publisher’s Weekly praised Milan’s first novel, 2010’s Proof by Seduction, as a “powerhouse debut.” Nearly 30 more have followed, including the first of Milan’s self-published Wedgeford Trials series, The Duke Who Didn’t, one of the very few romance novels to earn a spot on the New York Times’ prestigious 100 Notable Books of 2020 list. Sarah Wendell, who runs Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, a romance book review website, says her team fights over who gets to write about Milan’s

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work: “She’s really good at creating new stories out of familiar tropes.” The second book in the Wedgeford Trials saga—set in an English village populated by immigrants and informed by the experiences of the author’s grandmother, a member of a Chinese ethnic group called the Hakka—is due to be published this summer.

Milan uses her notoriety to support other writers of color. Alyssa Cole, an author of romance novels and thrillers, remembers sending Milan an email in 2014. Milan took time to read Cole’s books and then recommended them to others in the industry. Now a New York Times–bestselling author, Cole worked with Milan on Romancing the Runoff, a fundraising effort for fellow romance writer Stacey Abrams’ campaign for governor in Georgia. “[Milan] is a kind nerd who uses her kind nerdiness to change the world,” Cole says.

No wonder, then, that so many people in the romance universe came to Milan’s defense after the RWA clash: Every woman of color on the board quit, and many writers and publishers boycotted the organization.

The RWA later reversed its sanctions, but Milan decided not to return. (Both the author and the organization declined to comment about the dispute.) “The fact that she gave up that much time and energy and put up with so much crap,” Wendell says, “is indicative of how much she wanted to make the genre more inclusive.” The obstacles Milan encountered, however, show just how much further her industry has to go before it reaches its happy ever after.

—ANGELA UFHEIL

P H O T O G R A P H BY S A R A H B A N K S

Courtesy of Courtney Milan (cover); Getty Images (book)

BOOKS

Q&A climate change is happening at all?

The most powerful conversations evolve from shared values.

For example, any person who values economic growth and well-paying jobs should value the climate provisions and clean energy initiatives in legislation such as the Build Back Better plan. We just have to find an “in” when talking about climate action and environmental work.

So you talk politics without calling it politics?

Right. I think some people think that caring about climate change means they have to become vegan or liberal. That’s not true.

Religious conservatives can still be who they are and care about the way climate change affects so many areas of our lives.

Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA) is preaching a new gospel to the masses: Thou shalt not harm the Earth. Founded in 2012, the national nonprofit has mobilized 25,000 Gen Z Christians to spread a “What Would Jesus Do” message to members of their faith who don’t believe in climate change. (In 2015, 37 percent of white evangelical Protestants said there was no solid evidence of climate change, according to the Pew Research Center.) Helping lead that mission is Littleton resident and YECA’s new director of communications, 26-year-old Lindsay Garcia. Ahead of Earth Day, we spoke with Garcia about being a burning bush for climate skeptics. —PHILIP CLAPHAM

A Littleton woman is helping a new wave of Christians convert their elders into climate change believers.

5280: What message resonates with evangelicals?

Lindsay Garcia: One of the first things God says to humans in Genesis is to be good stewards of the Earth.

So that’s not really something Christians can dismiss.

But many do. Why? A lot of it starts with an incomplete theology. Some

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evangelicals fail to account for that verse and the fact that God repeatedly emphasizes the importance of caring for the poor and vulnerable—those whom climate change has the biggest impact on. There are also political and cultural forces at work. “Evangelical” has become so closely connected

with conservative politics, and climate change has been made a polarizing and partisan issue.

Fortunately, from what we’ve seen at YECA, younger Christians and evangelicals care much more about climate change than past generations and are also more likely to accept the science.

How do you reach evangelicals who don’t believe

Do you receive a lot of negative feedback?

Most of the criticism our organization has gotten has been online. According to my co-workers who have been in this line of work longer, that seems to be common. While we have everything from scientific data to strong theology to back us up, I often find it’s not worth my time to get involved in heated arguments online. They usually don’t lead to anything constructive. The face-to-face interactions I’ve had are much more positive.

I’d much rather focus on talking with people who are truly curious about our work, even if they might not fully agree with everything we stand for.

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY FA B I O C O N S O L I

Courtesy of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action

Tree Huggers For Christ

Your parent organization, the Evangelicals Environmental Network, connects environmental action with an anti-abortion stance.

How do the two intersect?

Methane pollution is directly affecting children’s health, leading to higher rates of asthma and cancer. We even know that it affects children in the womb— sometimes babies are born prematurely or with pre-existing health conditions due to pollution. If you really care about being pro-life, you should also care about these things.

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The world’s largest collection of work

by Banksy, the celebrated pseudonymous street artist, is coming to the Mile High City this month—creating quite the dilemma for Denverites. The English provocateur known for adorning alleyways with witty political and social messages has condemned private exhibits that profit from his pieces. Then again, unless you plan on visiting London, the traveling exhibition, The Art of Banksy (April 14 to June 19 at the Denver Sports Castle), might be your only chance to view the work of a living master. What to do? We asked local arts and ethics experts for some moral guidance. —BARBARA URZUA

IF WE DECIDE NOT TO SEE BANKSY, WHAT LOCAL ARTISTS SHOULD WE SUPPORT INSTEAD? 26 5 2 8 0

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DEAN SOBEL

Former director of the Clyfford Still Museum; professor of the practice of art history and museum studies, University of Denver “I can’t think of any reputable museum that would do an exhibition of a living artist against their wishes. Plus, I’m shocked the entertainment company would advertise the monetary value of all of these works. [Editor’s note: Toronto-based Starvox Entertainment publicly values the collection of 80-plus original paper

works, purchased from private collectors, at $35 million.] No professional arts organization would ever do something like that. However, assuming the works displayed are real, it would be really nice to see them. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an authentic Banksy piece.”

LOUISE MARTORANO

Executive director, RedLine Contemporary Art Center “It would be completely antithetical for us at RedLine to do something that would go against an artist’s wishes.

JAHNA RAE CHURCH

Denver artist and muralist “While I understand Banksy’s point of view, I do still believe there’s a benefit to having the show, in that it makes his art more accessible to those who wouldn’t normally be able to view it. So I don’t think the show should be boycotted, but I also wonder if there’s a way for the show to have a more positive impact, like funds going toward local art education programs.”

1 “Alicia Cardenas, a tattoo artist we lost in the December 27 shooting spree, was such a powerful force in the local art scene, and she was so focused on supporting women, nonbinary, and BIPOC artists. I’d encourage readers to visit her family’s GoFundMe page.” —Martorano 2 “There’s a local collage artist named Yazz who goes by @chattyancestors on Instagram.

She makes pieces (like “Nature’s Time,” at left) centered on Black women and does it in such a beautiful way.” —Rae Church 3 “Frances Dodd is a contemporary impressionist based out of Pueblo, and her color palette is incredibly bright and vivid.” —Riker

From top: Kyle Flubacker/Courtesy of The Art of Banksy; Courtesy of Yazmin Atmore (“Nature’s Time” by Yazmin Atmore, @chattyancestors)

To See Or Not To See?

“I am not sure that an artist who makes public art has the right to declare that museums can’t exhibit his work. Attending the exhibit wouldn’t break any moral laws. In fact, I think witnessing Banksy’s artworks might do something to make viewers more sensitive and empathetic and more likely to be ethical persons.”

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Exquisitely plated dishes and a convivial ambience courtesy of Michael Diaz de Leon draw diners to Brutø.

Eating at Brutø’s tasting counter inside LoDo’s Dairy Block feels less like dining out and more like having supper at a close friend’s abode. That is, if your friend is a professional chef with Latin American roots, a love of Japanese ingredients and techniques, and a talent for showcasing Colorado’s seasonal bounty. “I want diners to feel like they’re coming into my living room and having a fabulous dinner party,” says executive chef Michael Diaz de Leon, whose parents are from Mexico City. To create that vibe, the native of El Paso, Texas, and his team bustle around the hearth-ovencentered open kitchen to pamper guests with a multicourse, omakase-style meal ($85; reservations recommended) complemented by thoughtfully curated wine and cocktail pairings. Since Brutø chef-owner Kelly Whitaker tapped Diaz de Leon to run the 2.5-year-old, 16-seat restaurant in November 2020, the chef has curated specialties—such as freshly milled masa tacos topped with grilled branzino, uni, corn miso sauce, chicory, smoke-kissed salmon roe, and peppery hoja santa leaf (pictured)—that are both upscale and approachable. “I’m feeding you things that I would feed my family and friends,” he says. “When you’re the host, you cook things that you love.” —PATRICIA KAOWTHUMRONG

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A New Generation Tajahi Cooke wants to create a more diverse and stable restaurant industry— starting with the launch of Arvada’s Chef Kitchen this month. BY DALIAH SINGER

Tajahi Cooke is standing in a construction zone. Ladders are scattered everywhere.

Exposed wires hang from the ceiling. A piece of wood that must be slid back and forth currently serves as the front door.

It’s a cold January day, and he’s checking on the progress at Freedom Street Social, a 12,000-square-foot food hall slated to open this month in northwest Arvada. Viewed through Cooke’s gold-rimmed glasses, the work still to be done fades away, and he can see groups of friends lounging on midcentury velvet couches; families gathering around contemporary wood tables; and, if all goes as planned, hungry diners lining up at the eatery he will operate within Freedom Street.

A food hall will be a boon to the rapidly growing suburb. Nearby, houses are lined up side by side like colorful Legos in planned communities with names like Whisper Creek and Candelas. They’re surrounded by vast expanses of open space, wildlife refuges, and lakes—but there are limited nonchain restaurant options for dining out. Freedom Street aims to change that with eight food concepts plus a bar and a coffeeshop with an all-vinyl soundtrack.

From left: Cooke is excited about bringing high-quality, creative food to the suburbs, but he also Tajahi Cooke; his gnocchi dish has a more personal mission: The 33-year-old chef wants to make the restaurant industry

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more inclusive and supportive. At Freedom Street, he will run Chef Kitchen, an incubator to encourage and showcase up-and-coming and new-to-Denver cooks on a rotating basis. “I believe every restaurant should be an institute. You’re literally training young and old minds, guiding them along the way,” Cooke says. A decade into his career, Cooke is ready to pass along his hard-earned knowledge so the chefs of tomorrow are better prepared to create the diverse, stable industry he wishes he had stepped into.

EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT familiar with Cooke’s name, you may

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well have eaten his food. His resumé over the past 10-plus years includes stints at Bacon Social House and now-shuttered Biju’s Little Curry Shop and Block & Larder. He also had a hand in opening two other food halls: Denver’s Broadway Market and Golden’s Tributary Food Hall & Drinkery. Although he loves working in restaurants, the through line of his career has been managing his frustration with an untenable industry that’s left him—and many other chefs—overworked and underpaid. “I was making around $44,000 a year running three restaurants,” Cooke says. “I had to argue, like really fight, to get that.” He began to wonder: How can fledgling cooks find a way to pay the bills and enjoy what they do?

Chef Kitchen is a step toward answering that question. Chefs from right here in Colorado, as well as around the country and the world, will be invited for one-month culinary residencies during which they’ll have full creative control over their menus; be paid a guaranteed salary of $1,500 per week; have their food and labor costs covered (kitchen staffers are provided, if needed); receive mentorship from Cooke; and enjoy a platform from which they can grow their brands, build confidence, and experiment. “This is an opportunity for the chefs to be valued, to be paid what they’re supposed to [be paid],” Cooke says. “There’s no opportunity like this out there right now.”

The project is being funded by Freedom Street’s developers as well as by food sales from the restaurant and the residency’s kickoff events. (Freedom Street is the brainchild of former Marco’s Pizza franchise owners Nick and Amie Costanzo, who teamed up with partners Cameron Cummins, Jeff Kaplan, and Jon Morgan to build the food hall.) Resident chefs will begin their stints by leading a pair of supper club dinners ($100 to $125 per person) on the first Friday and Saturday of the month. Cooke and his wife, Danielle, began hosting similar popup events at a rotating roster of restaurants across the Front Range in early 2021; Freedom Street will be their new home.

“The pandemic shed a light on how upside down hospitality was and the models and metrics that were running it,” says Gertie Harris, co-founder of Fireside at Five, which handles marketing for the food hall. With Chef Kitchen managing all of the business aspects and taking away the financial pressures, she says, “the minutiae go away, and it becomes about the chef, the

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community, the menu, and the storytelling, which is what hospitality should be.”

Cooke plans to host up to 12 chefs each year, some of whom will be relative rookies; others will be established toques testing new concepts or introducing themselves to the Denver market. All of them will go through an application process. The core attribute Cooke is looking for: passion. “You can always see and taste passion,” he says. “I want to see it on their plates.”

Among the already confirmed food pros is Forest Ragar, the former executive chef at Denver’s Watercourse Foods, who worked with Cooke at Bacon Social House. Ragar is familiar with the conventional trajectory of chefs: Cook for someone else, then try to establish your style through food trucks (he now operates one) and pop-ups, with no guarantee of money or support. Chef Kitchen provides that guarantee, if just for a short time.

“Every chef, whether they’ve been cooking someone else’s menu or [making] something they think is hot—there’s something on the back burner they just love to eat and love to cook. That’s the magic; that’s the stuff you want to share with the world,” Ragar says. “To have a format for that, a canvas for that, make that more accessible...that’s something I want to be a part of.”

Another critical piece in casting Chef Kitchen is diversity. Cooke experienced firsthand what it was like to be a Black chef working under primarily white, male bosses.

“The first time I worked for someone of my color, and of my background, in my career was at Biju’s Little Curry Shop,” he says. “Other than [owner Biju Thomas, who hails from

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South India], I never saw another owner that looked like me, that came from where I came from.” Chef Kitchen is about increasing representation in the industry. Says Cooke: “I want this lineup of chefs to represent the world.”

Find our Dining Guide, an extensive list of area restaurants, on page 118 and online at 5280.com/ restaurants.

COOKE KNOWS HOW easy it would have been for his story to turn out differently. He understands that many kids who grew up like him don’t find success like he has. Cooke was raised in Jamaica until he was nine, and his mother was in prison for a large portion of his childhood. He grew up surrounded by violence on the island nation, and to get him away from it, his dad—a tour manager for big-name bands such as the Fugees and Michael Franti—started taking his son with him on work trips all over the world. It opened up Cooke’s perspective and fostered his present-day mission. “I used to be a kid on the streets,” Cooke says, before individuals in his life showed him other options. With that in mind, Cooke and Freedom Street’s owners envision the venue not only as a refuge for chefs but also as a safe space for area school kids. Cooke plans to use the food stall outside of eating hours to teach cooking classes and to host other events that provide teenagers with a positive outlet.

His explorations with his dad were a learning experience. Fortunately for diners, those forays will inspire the menu at Breakfast Club, the morning eatery Cooke will also run out of the Chef Kitchen space. He’s playing around with dishes such as Bangladeshi coffee and Japanese soufflé pancakes.

Standing beside the under-construction Chef Kitchen space in January, Cooke’s excitement is palpable. He’s energized by the opportunity to help others and make good food, but he’s also realistic about what one chef in one kitchen in one Denver suburb can do to help address the restaurant industry’s systemic issues. For him, Chef Kitchen is setting an example of what could be: kitchens run by diverse staffs who are paid fairly and provided the support and leadership they need to succeed. “I don’t expect it to change this business that I love so much; I just want to improve on it,” Cooke says. “The restaurant industry is about adapting, innovating, and moving forward and growing with the times that we’re in. This is one of the ways of adapting with the times.” m

BUS I N E S S

BY R O B E R T S A N C H E Z

Consolidating Interests It’s been a little more than a year since a Boulder media outlet purchased Outside magazine and transformed the outdoor journalism landscape.

But is Outside Inc.’s bold new business plan good for its audience?

R

obin Thurston, the multimillionaire mogul of active-lifestyle journalism, sat in his Boulder office one afternoon this past winter and contemplated his emerging empire. It was impossible for him not to feel satisfied.

Since purchasing what was then called Pocket Outdoor Media in 2019, Thurston had poured more than $150 million of investment capital into the formerly obscure conglomeration of niche publications and transformed it into what he hopes will become the nation’s most extensive purveyor of outdoor life.

Outside, the renowned magazine Thurston purchased in February 2021, is the crown jewel of the enterprise and the namesake of the now rebranded Outside Inc. Today, the company has grown to more than 500 employees and includes 26 magazine titles (such as Yoga Journal and Backpacker), a book publisher, a GPS app, a fly-fishing film tour, and an event-management business. It’s all part of Thurston’s plan: Bring myriad brands from a single industry under one umbrella, anticipate customer needs, charge a subscription fee for all of it, and significantly de-emphasize the advertising revenue model that has become so challenging for newspapers and magazines over the past decade and a half.

“Do I think I’m doing something revolutionary?” the 49-year-old Outside Inc. CEO and Colorado native says. “You know, it’s not like I’m building a rocket going to the moon.”

Outside Inc. would not confirm how many people have already subscribed to Outside+, the service that charges users $99 per year and includes two magazine subscriptions, mapping services, books, reduced entry fees to events, the entire Warren Miller film collection, and discounts on things such as travel, lodging, and gear. But Thurston says he hopes to P H O T O G R A P H BY J A S O N S I N N

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BUS I N E S S grow Outside Inc.’s digital subscriber count to 20 million in the next five years.

The web of information and offerings is based on a data model that can anticipate a user’s future activities based on their current interests—and other users’ past interests.

Outside+, Thurston says, could detect a customer’s shift from mountain biking to trail running, for example, then deliver everything from news stories, running shoe reviews, yoga and food recommendations, and event signups—plus travel and lodging resources—to a computer or smartphone screen.

“It’s about personalization,” Thurston says.

“It’s about having data to be able to understand and hopefully predict what you’re going to do next.” As the company aims for profitability within the year, it has plans to break into documentary films, offer more podcasts, and develop short videos for TikTok and Snapchat.

Thurston has likened his company to publishing’s version of Amazon Prime or Netflix, a hub that serves as guru and storyteller to the active-lifestyle community. Eventually, he says, 70 percent of the company’s revenue will come through its subscription model, which he believes will help transform the publishing space.

“Our goal is how to get you, inspire you, to get the skills and ultimately guide you toward what that next thing is going to be,” says Thurston, who holds a master’s degree in finance from the University of Colorado Denver. “I want to make sure you’re sleeping

to be particularly bad at the venerable publication. In the year since the pandemic had begun, the staff had suffered layoffs, pay cuts, and furloughs. Outside had begun soliciting donations via its website and newsletters to help keep the venture afloat, while freelancers continued to complain that they weren’t being paid promptly for their work. “There were lots of problems,” says one staffer, who requested anonymity to speak openly about Outside and its former and current owners. “Hearing about a new owner, that wasn’t so bad. Change brings questions, but there was a lot of hope that things could get better under Robin Thurston.”

Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner launched Outside in 1977—and quickly sold the magazine the next year to Larry Burke, who owned Mariah Media Network.

Over the years, Outside became the bible of outdoor media, a literary force that would feature the work of Jon Krakauer, Susan Orlean, Sebastian Junger, Tim Cahill, Jane Smiley, and Hampton Sides, among others.

Krakauer’s famous book Into the Wild—the

“It’s about having data to be able to understand and hopefully predict what you’re going to do next.” well, that you’re thinking about your mental health, that you’re thinking about what goes into your body when you do an activity, that you have all the skills to have a great experience.” Ultimately, he says, “the consumer wins by consolidation.”

WHEN THURSTON ANNOUNCED in February 2021 that Pocket Outdoor Media had acquired Outside (based in Santa Fe, New Mexico), the magazine’s staff was cautiously optimistic. COVID-19 had been brutal on the publishing business, but things appeared

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WHERE MYSTERY AND REALITY INTERTWINE

The exhibition has been produced as a joint venture between Lokschuppen Rosenheim, the University of Aberdeen Museums, the Roemer- und -Pelizaeus Museums Hildesheim and MuseumsPartner Austria, and is presented in Denver by Chevron.

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poignant tale of the death of a young man in the Alaskan wilderness—grew out of the feature he originally wrote for Outside. In the 56-year history of the National Magazine Awards—the Academy Awards of the American magazine industry—Outside has won the general excellence award five times and is the only magazine to have won the award in three consecutive years, from 1996 to 1998.

Like most publications in the 2000s, Outside was forced to adapt to an eroding print advertising base that once had been the industry’s lifeblood. While the publication expanded its digital presence and became an online success story, the magazine had downsized over the years. Outside’s print frequency was cut (it now publishes six times a year, plus two gear guides), and staffers began to wonder whether Burke had the wherewithal to sustain the business’ brutal financial realities.

Particularly, they thought Burke had ignored the rapidly changing outdoor community, which had become increasingly focused on making the outdoors more welcoming to women, to the LGBTQ community, and to underserved populations—especially those who are Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Those issues were rarely pushed within the pages of Burke’s magazine. “There was a sense that Larry was a little behind,” says one longtime freelancer who continues to write for the magazine. (Burke could not be reached for comment.)

Burke first met Thurston in early 2020, when Thurston was visiting his mother in New Mexico. At the time, the new Pocket Outdoor Media CEO had only recently exited as chief of Helix, a Silicon Valley–based consumer genetics company, and was still in the early stages of planning to turn the Pocket publishing business into an activelifestyle superpower. Pocket’s then-small stable included the trail-mapping app Gaia GPS and several niche magazines, such as VeloNews—a Boulder-based cycling magazine—and California-based Triathlete.

Thurston, who grew up in Denver but spent much of the 1990s as a professional road cyclist in Europe before returning to Colorado, told Burke he’d be interested in purchasing Outside—including its online content and its loosely affiliated broadcasting arm—if Burke someday wanted to sell.

“We were struggling with the brand,” Thurston says of Pocket Outdoor Media. “To me, Outside was the most iconic brand in the category.”

In November 2020, Burke called Thurston and said, If you can find a way to buy the whole thing, I think I’m done. Thurston

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BUS I N E S S secured financing from investment partners mapping program, which had more than within a few months. That included $150 300,000 mapped routes and an estimated million in a Series B funding round from six million users.

Sequoia Heritage—an early investor in tech “Now we had enough in our portfolio giants such as Apple, Google, Instagram, to offer a $500 value to the customer: comand WhatsApp—that would help fund merce, mapping, events, media, TV, really additional purchases. That Thurston could high-quality video,” Thurston says of the get capital so quickly, he says, spoke to the $99 annual Outside+ membership. “These importance of the Outside magazine brand businesses really needed scale, which I think to the larger business. they now have. It’s been a no-brainer.”

The Outside magazine purchase and the THE SPEED WITH WHICH THURSTON has gobbled quick rebrand of Pocket Outdoor Media up media properties over the past two years to Outside Inc. immediately gave an air of has bred skepticism, particularly about the legitimacy to Thurston’s plan. Overnight, the quality of journalism the company plans to company assumed 530,000 subscribers and offer and whether Outside Inc. is growing outsideonline.com, which regularly receives at an unsustainable pace. Thurston says this three million visits per month. Thurston paid consolidation is good for the consumer, but Outside’s previously unpaid freelancers, and the history of diminished competition in he says the company is now trying to get American business tells a different story. checks to contributors within 30 days—a “Robin Thurston is Thanos, and we’re the goal he admits is still in progress. fucking Avengers,” says Mike Rogge, the At the same time, more businesses were publisher and editor of California-based Mounfolded into the Outside Inc. portfolio. Among tain Gazette, an outdoor-lifestyle magazine them was Pinkbike—one of the world’s that publishes twice a year. Small, indepenmost popular mountain biking websites dent publishers—such as Height of Land for news, opinions, and gear reviews (one Publications, Adventureactivities Journal, Bomb estimate has the site at 700 million annual Please join us for family-friendly 1 hourand before the concert.

Thurston’ s model oversimplifies page views)—and its affiliated Trailforks These Snow—argue performances include FULL SCREENING OF THE FEATURE FILM!

outdoor enthusiasts’ lives and will turn consumers into algorithms in search of the next sale, Rogge says.

It’s also a major risk. “You’re putting all these titles under one company, so what happens if this doesn’t work?” says Rogge, who revived the Mountain Gazette brand two years ago. Thurston “is trying this onesize-fits-all thing, and I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all in this industry. I think customers can sniff that out a mile away.”

Readers of some publications under the Outside Inc. umbrella have been similarly critical. After Pinkbike’s acquisition in July 2021, the site’s editor wrote that Outside Inc.’s purchase meant more resources for “bigger and better projects” and that readers would benefit from the folding of Pinkbike content into the wider Outside+ universe.

The reaction among readers was swift. “Welp, it’s been a good run…. I fear change and can only assume this is the end as we know it,” one Pinkbike reader wrote in the comments section at the end of the editor’s letter. “Bye bye, Pinkbike!!” another person wrote. “It was a good run…. Let the watering down begin.”

“With anything, there’s always pushback, but this was definitely more than expected,”

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BUS I N E S S says Karl Burkat, Pinkbike’s co-founder, who now leads editorial teams for seven Outside Inc. titles. “There are comments up there, like, Oh, you’re going to retire, and this guy’s going to buy a Tesla. The general perception is that when businesses get acquired, things get worse. The only thing we can do is prove them otherwise—that we’re the exception, that it won’t happen to us.”

Thurston argues the consolidation of similar publications—such as VeloNews and Peloton— translates into a broader knowledge base and more people covering a larger swath of news that will better serve readers. Several Outside magazine staffers and freelancers, however, worry about the quality of their publication.

Ultimately, they’re unsure how the magazine fits into Outside Inc.’s larger mission.

IN EARLY JANUARY, 15 of 17 eligible members of Outside’s editorial staff expressed an interest in unionizing—pushing for more salary transparency and a salary floor for employees—a move that could’ve had enormous implications if Thurston wanted to take the company public. Outside Inc. refused to recognize the union. “We respect an employee’s right to unionize, but we don’t

believe unionization is a needed path for our employees and we hope to continue to have an open and constructive dialogue to better understand this disconnect,” Outside Inc. wrote in a statement at the time.

On February 18, the members of the Outside editorial staff who’d signed off on the union mission statement withdrew the bid. In a Twitter thread, the group said, in part, “Over the past six weeks, we have had many tough conversations. Managers, both corporate and direct, have said that they hear our concerns and have repeatedly asked for more time to implement change.

We are granting an opportunity for both sets of leaders to deliver on that promise, and intend to work in good faith to help them do so. To that end, we will continue what we started through this effort, and spend the coming months working together to enact the improvements we believe are necessary to make Outside a viable and equitable workplace for years to come.”

Overall, one staffer who took part in the unionizing efforts says, benefits at the magazine have improved, and there’s been a better effort to diversify the magazine’s pages under the new ownership. Still, there’s

plenty of room to improve, especially if continued complaints by freelance writers about being paid in a timely fashion are to be believed. There’s also uncertainty about the future of Outside and what happens to the company as more titles are added to its parent’s quiver. “To keep its employees happy, a company that is growing too fast should grow slower,” the staffer says. “We have to hold Outside Inc. to the promises of positive change that we were given when the magazine was initially acquired, and we need to give a path for better working conditions at these other companies.”

On top of that, the question on many staffers’—and readers’—minds is whether the publication, which won a worldwide audience for its intrepid storytelling, in-depth research, and sharp photography and design, will continue to prioritize the journalism that made it famous. “Everyone’s waiting and wondering what Robin Thurston is going to do,” says one Outside writer. “Is he interested in paying for the next Into the Wild, or does he only care about his service?”

Robert Sanchez is 5280’s senior staff writer.

Email feedback to letters@5280.com.

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This impressive trio: Pamela Hill, RN, CANS (Founder), Alysa Paul (President) and Emily Prete (COO), proudly represents an entire team of aesthetic professionals who contribute to the medical spa’s robust culture and sterling reputation. The efforts of these three women to continuously uphold the Facial Aesthetics standard of excellence built on education, skill, safety, and results has been the driving force behind three decades of success.

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With an invaluable commitment to their patients and over 45 years of combined experience, Dr. Philippe A. Capraro, Dr. Matthew B. Baker and Dr. Teresa C. Cunningham, are three of the most sought-after plastic surgeons in the United States. By blending their surgical expertise with a robust and ever-expanding list of medical aesthetic treatments, cutting-edge procedures and technologies, and an expertly trained clinical staff, Grossman | Capraro Plastic Surgery has successfully evolved into Colorado’s most elite destination for both surgical and non-surgical aesthetic procedures.

Grossman | Capraro Plastic Surgery believes in the whole experience – the relationships formed, the care and attention to detail, the many luxuries provided along your aesthetic journey, and most importantly, the outstanding results you can expect to receive. This is what puts Grossman | Capraro Plastic Surgery in a league of their own.

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In collaboration with Steadman Philippon Research Institute, our 21 elite physicians practice the latest, evidence-based treatments, continually improving techniques, procedures and outcomes.

The goal of The Steadman Clinic is to deliver the highest standard of orthopaedic care and personal attention to every patient—recreational and professional—seeking our help. Our success in helping our patients reach their goals is what attracts people from all walks of life, from all over the world, to The Steadman Clinic.

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BEHAVIORAL HEALTH FAMILY CARE CENTER Mental illnesses impact over 47 million Americans, but less than half get the care they need. Family Care Center (FCC) was founded in 2016 with the mission to improve access to mental health care in the local community and has since become Colorado’s largest and fastest growing outpatient provider of services for behavior health. FCC operates or has in development 15 clinics in Colorado.

Spanning from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins, with clinics under development—including locations in Littleton, Lowry, Parker, Lone Tree, Golden, Central Park, Loveland, and Fort Collins. “FCC was founded to positively impact the lives of its patients and the community it serves and initially did so in the military and first responder communities; both of which present some of the most demanding and challenging mental environments. From those roots, we have been grown to serve the community with a broad set of services to treat a wide spectrum of mental illnesses and patients,” said Wayne Cavanaugh, CEO of Family Care Center. He continued, “We recognize the incredible and growing need for behavioral health services throughout Colorado and are honored to be bringing our outstanding patient services and talented providers to the broader Denver community.”

FCC brings together the highest quality providers with a wide range of skills—including psychiatrists, psychologists, marital therapists, family therapists, licensed professional counselors, and child therapists—to work as a team to help individuals and families on their journey to grow and thrive. Renowned for achieving outstanding results, FCC care teams specialize in treating adults and children with depression, anxiety, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, and many other conditions. FCC is creating access to care for mental illness and helping Coloradans restore their health and wellness.

FCC offers treatment both in person and remotely via telehealth technology. As Colorado’s #1 provider of outpatient behavioral health services, Family Care Center providers are ready to help.

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HAIR ACCESSORIES SOULVATION Soulvation is a women’s hair accessories brand that specializes in buttery soft headbands and unique hair ties. What first began with $300 and a sewing machine in 2019 with their founder, Leah Kay, has snowballed into a multi-million dollar brand and one of the fastest growing companies in Colorado in 2021. Soulvation hair accessories provides women with comfortable products to make getting ready in the morning faster and easier as well as providing products that are functional. Their products are sold online (www.soulvationsociety.com) and also sold through Free People and Scheels locations across the country and also through small boutiques.

Although they are mostly known for their superior hair accessories, they have also expanded into their own clothing line.

The Soulvation brand is an inspiration to many women-owned business start-ups as they have shown the success of taking a handmade product and turning it into an established brand recognized across the country. Leah Kay, founder and CEO of Soulvation, is also working on a collaborative NFT collection, called Funding Females, that will provide funding for female founders of small businesses. Only 2.3% of venture capital goes toward female entrepreneurs, and Leah wants to help make a difference through funding and business education for newer women in the entrepreneurship community that may not have the connections, capital, or experience to grow. A handful of Soulvation’s hair accessories are featured in the exclusive 10,000 piece NFT drop.

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ANIMAL RESCUE

THE WILD ANIMAL SANCTUARY Down in southern Colorado, Kingsly, Luxor, and Emory explore their massive habitat together at the 9,684 acre Wild Animal Refuge.

The Wild Animal Sanctuary, a Colorado 501(c)(3) nonprofit located 30 miles outside of Denver, rescued these Tiger brothers in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Justice in the Summer of 2021 as part of the largest endangered species rescue operation ever carried out. Along with 68 other animals, this major raid occurred at Jeff and Lauren Lowe’s “Tiger King” Park located in Thackerville, Oklahoma, as conditions at the facility continued to decline. To no surprise, Kingsly, Luxor, and Emory arrived at the Sanctuary with a variety of medical problems.

As the largest and oldest carnivore sanctuary in the world, The Wild Animal Sanctuary has over 42 years of experience in treating and rehabilitating captive wildlife. All of the 600+ current residents at the Sanctuary come from exploitative, neglectful, and abusive situations, with the vast majority of animals requiring medical intervention following a rescue.

After undergoing a highly specialized rehabilitation process, these tiger brothers were introduced into a large acreage habitat at The Wild Animal Refuge— an extension property of The Wild Animal Sanctuary.

Kingsly, Luxor, and Emory are often seen roaming across amazing natural landscapes together and now have a new life, a forever home, free from exploitation and abuse.

You can watch and learn more about their rescue operation by visiting TigerKingRescue.org.

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Colorado Siding Repair is a professional exterior remodel company specializing in exterior design, renovation, and repair. Our customers seek to transform their homes and become leaders in their neighborhoods— bellwethers of positive change and pride of place. They seek a trusted guide to lead confidently with innovation and expertise. Colorado Siding Repair is that guide.

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LUXURY REAL ESTATE DENVER’S TOP TEAM (303) 881-3514 215 Saint Paul Street, Suite 200, Denver, CO 80206

denverstopteam.com

Actions speak louder than words and Denver’s Top Team’s track record proves that their performance is EXTRAORDINARY. Their service and passion to be the best is proven by being the third year in a row as the #1 small team in sales production at Kentwood Cherry Creek. They help each client achieve their real estate goals by bringing unparalleled negotiation skills, integrity, deep understanding of the community, and a wealth of knowledge to the table. Whether they are working with Luxury properties or first time home buyers, they give everyone the same quality service and respect.

When working with Denver’s Top Team, you have three experienced professionals who are passionate about real estate and eager to help you through your home buying and selling process. With this team on your side you will turn your dreams into reality and EXPERIENCE TOP RESULTS!

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PERSONAL INJURY LITIGATION BURG SIMPSON ELDREDGE HERSH & JARDINE 40 Inverness Drive East, Englewood, CO 80112

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Stephen Burg is a shareholder and a trial attorney with Burg Simpson Eldredge Hersh & Jardine. As the Practice Group Leader of the firm’s Personal Injury Department, Stephen is focused on representing victims of automobile and motorcycle crashes, trucking accidents, product liability injuries, gas explosions, wrongful death, and harmful drugs and medical products.

A dedicated advocate for those who have been harmed by the carelessness of others, Stephen Burg has a longstanding reputation for his formidable skills as a litigator and a negotiator. He has a passion for holding negligent parties accountable for their actions and for maximizing financial recoveries for his clients.

Mr. Burg has been recognized for his legal excellence both nationally and locally. He was named as a “Recommended Attorney” by the U.S. Legal 500, and has been consistently recognized by the National Trial Lawyers as a “Top 100 Trial Lawyer” since 2012. He has also been selected by his peers as a Best Lawyer in America and a Colorado Super Lawyer.

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INTERIOR DESIGN Keia McSwain,

BLACK INTERIOR DESIGNERS NETWORK (404) 468-5791

blackinteriordesignersnetwork.com

NeKeia “Keia” McSwain is president of the Black Interior Designers Network and CEO of Kimberly + Cameron Interiors, based in Denver, Colorado. She is a brilliant, self-taught and award-winning interior designer who appreciates art, travel, music and curating textured and layered spaces. Keia has been named a New American Voice

by Architectural Digest and her work has been recognized in Wall Street Journal, Forbes and House Beautiful among others. Keia’s ability to express both her creativity and will to serve are two factors that have a heavy influence on her life.

As the President of The Black Interior Designer’s Network (BIDN), Keia is a true pioneer for change in the interior design industry.

The BIDN, founded in 2010, is dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion within the interior design industry by highlighting designers of color and supporting black designers with business development opportunities. In 2017, Keia stepped up to the role of president to further elevate and serve designers of color nationwide, with the goal of ultimately closing the opportunity and income gap of the minority community. McSwain’s dedication to promoting diversity is changing the dynamic of the interior design industry in a profoundly positive way!

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PEDIATRIC DENTISTRY

Dr. Elizabeth Crespi and the devoted team at Sunrise Pediatric Dentistry provide high-quality dental services to infants, children, and young adults. In order to prevent dental problems, the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry recommends that children see a pediatric dentist no later than age one. “We want kids to be excited about going to the dentist,” says Dr. Crespi. “That begins by seeing them early and creating positive associations with dentistry. I take pride in using my specialized training in pediatric dentistry to tailor each child’s individual experience. I strive for the best quality care while simultaneously making the dental office a fun, inviting place where kids feel safe.”

dental visit, making it not only fun but also educational. The office is state-of-the-art with only the latest and safest dental materials and technologies. We’ve made safety upgrades to care for your family during the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents can relax knowing we aim to accommodate any family’s busy schedule.

An important part of Dr. Crespi’s training is her extensive hospital experience in anesthesia and emergency care. When treating patients, she practices specific behavior management and calming techniques. This ensures kids of all ages will have a positive dental visit at Sunrise. As a mom to a young child herself, Dr. Crespi can relate to challenges many parents face. Come join our patient family!

Dr. Crespi and her team embody Sunrise Pediatric Dentistry’s Mission Statement: “We are committed to delivering the highest standard of pediatric dental care and education in a compassionate, fun environment where our patients are seen and heard regardless of socioeconomic background, gender identity, or race.”

SUNRISE PEDIATRIC DENTISTRY

The Sunrise experience begins with the kid-friendly reception area.

Our specially trained team guides each child through his or her first

sunrisepedsdentistry.com | (720) 660-2467

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3650 East 1st Avenue, Suite 301, Denver, CO 80206

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BEAUTIFUL SMILES i-ORTHODONTICS

Life continually takes us down various paths, but it eventually leads us to where we belong.

We are excited to welcome home Dr. Isaac Chung, who has returned as partner and lead orthodontist!

The timing was right, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to have him return in this new capacity.

Dr. Isaac’s compassion, kindness, strong work ethic, integrity, and passion for putting patients first will take us to a whole new level.

LONE TREE | DOWNTOWN DENVER CHERRY CREEK | AURORA | VAIL VALLEY (303) 662-9000

i-Orthodontics was established with a greater mission than straightening teeth. We’re here to change lives and Dr. Isaac is excited to be part of that mission and intends to carry it on with Dr. Anil Idiculla.

i-ortho.com

Come discover how you can Live Life Smiling™.

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THE FACE of CUSTOM JEWELRY DESIGN Sarah Ortega is the owner of Sarah O. Jewelry, Denver’s premier destination for custom fine jewelry. “As a Latina, female business owner in a traditionally male dominated industry, it was important for me to create an inclusive environment where everyone feels welcomed and celebrated no matter how they look or who they love,” says Sarah.

Sarah O. Jewelry is known for creating unique yet timeless diamond, gemstone, and custom fine jewelry that empowers you to be uniquely you. From traditional to alternative, they offer a variety of designs that capture the essence of their “Casual meets Couture” vision. Sarah O.’s signature style is a nod to past traditions that speak to the modernity of today’s trends.

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With locations in the Tennyson-Berkeley neighborhood and the Dairy Block downtown, the all-female team of 25 was honored to receive 5280’s Top of the Town Reader’s Choice - Fine Jewelry in 2021.

Sarah Ortega,

SARAH O. JEWELRY (720) 502-3229 | 4301 Tennyson Street, Denver, CO 80212 (720) 708-2947 | 1825 Blake Street, Ste. 120, Denver, CO 80202

sarahojewelry.com

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COLORADO CANNABIS Brandon Johnson, Jason MacDonald, Sarah May, Mary Rath, Chuck Espinosa, Denise De Nardi, Allison Brenner, Lauren Cook, Eric Echevrria (PICTURED LEFT TO RIGHT)

NATIVE ROOTS CANNABIS CO. nativerootscannabis.com

Locally grown and locally owned since 2010, Native Roots Cannabis Co. is Colorado’s premier medical and recreational adult-use cannabis dispensary with over 20 locations. Grown with Love, we strive to elevate the retail experience & educate first-timers and the experienced alike by providing our award winning flower alongside a broad variety of high-quality products from your favorite brands in a warm and welcoming environment.

As an employer, we are known for our extensive training programs and have recently been recognized as one of America’s Top Cannabis Employers in 2021. Whether you value excellent customer service, education, selection, quality or value, we have the products to help you achieve your goals. At Native Roots Cannabis Co. we use cannabis to enhance the lives of our customers, employees and communities.

Visit our website to join our loyalty program, check out our 20 locations, or place your order online for pick up. Into social? Check us out on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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MODERN LITIGATION HAILEY | HART PLLC (720) 400-7970 383 Corona Street, Suite 319, Denver, CO 80218

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Hailey | Hart PLLC is a women-owned and operated law firm for plaintiffs. We handle cases involving serious personal injury and significant insurance disputes. We represent clients hurt in automobile, trucking, bicycle, construction site, and workplace accidents. We also help policyholders collect benefits owed under homeowners, commercial property, disability, auto, and health insurance policies.

The attorneys of Hailey | Hart have been nationally recognized as the best in the business by Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers, and 5280. Hailey | Hart was selected as a Best Law Firm©️ by U. S. News for 2022.

Hailey | Hart is committed to delivering first-class service and excellent legal representation. Our lawyers and clients work as a team. We try each case with integrity, diligence, and transparency while always putting the clients’ needs first. We pride ourselves on being your ally and advocate.

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HOME FINANCING COMMERCE BANK Chris Flanders

Megan Wiegand

(303) 214-5423 commercebank.com/ chrisflanders

(303) 214-5433 commercebank.com/ meganwiegand

TIPS FOR BUYING A HOME IN A SELLER’S MARKET Being prepared and being ready to act fast are keys to success when buying in a seller’s market.

TIP: Get preapproved. A preapproval letter is documentation from a mortgage lender stating that you’ve been approved for a loan, and sharing the amount you’ve been qualified to borrow for a mortgage.

TIP: Make your best offer first. Consider offering above asking price if you have your heart set on a specific house, but make sure it’s an offer you can comfortably afford.

TIP: Keep contingencies to a minimum. A straightforward offer means less stress for the seller, and that makes you a more attractive buyer.

At Commerce Bank, we make the financing process as seamless as possible. Let’s work together to connect you with a place to call home.

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INDIAN CUISINE Simeran Baidwan moved to Denver, CO at an early age with his family.

Simeran has always had a passion for work. His dream was to bring the vibrant, exotic taste and culture of India to his community. He was able to fulfill those dreams and open Little India Restaurant in 1998… and the rest is history. Little India has been serving up authentic, fine Indian cuisine that has not only been showered with critical acclaim, but also by awards too numerous to count. From the minute you step inside and take in the wonderful décor and ambiance - which features genuine Indian art and music - you know you’re in for a special meal, as well as experience. From their signature curries to traditional dishes, to modern twists on classic favorites, there really is something for everyone to indulge and enjoy at this exotic eatery. There are currently four locations, one on South Downing St, the Original on 6th. Ave., third

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in the beautiful heart of the West Highlands & the fourth location is in the Central Park Neighborhood with a warming and comforting atmosphere. Over the years, Simeran has said his success is based on three main ingredients, and those are as follows. Fresh and quality ingredients: Our recipes utilize only the finest and freshest ingredients. Good ingredients are the heart and soul of every dish and we never compromise on quality. Experienced and good people: Our chefs began their careers in northern India and have mastered the art of cooking authentic Indian cuisine for our clients. Excellent and welcoming service: Our customers are our top priority, and we treat each one as if they are our only customer. Indian tradition is to treat each guest as if they are a living god, and we are committed to treating all of our guests to a heavenly experience.

Simeran Baidwan, LITTLE INDIA 330 E. 6th Ave. | 2390 S. Downing St. | 3496 W. 32nd Ave. 7352 29th Ave. | littleindiaofdenver.com

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SERVING OTHERS

DENVER RESCUE MISSION FRONT LINE STAFF (303) 297-1815 6100 Smith Road, Denver, CO 80216

denverrescuemission.org

At Denver Rescue Mission, we know the challenges of homelessness run deeper than simply needing to “get a job.”

Experiencing homelessness often means feeling hopeless, and it’s a daily struggle just to survive. This has been especially true over the past year as the need for the Mission’s services— emergency services, rehabilitation, transitional programs and community outreach—has dramatically increased due to COVID-19. We’ve grown during the pandemic to keep up with the needs of Denver’s most vulnerable.

In 2020-2021, the Mission provided 815,516 meals and 322,027 nights of shelter, graduated 82 men from the New Life Program and much, much more.

Our job at the Mission is to remind our guests that they are loved, they are not forgotten and there is hope. It’s what we do.

It’s our passion. And thanks to the support of our caring Denver community, we’ve been serving with gratitude for 130 years.

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COMMUNITY IMPACT COMCAST MOUNTAIN WEST REGION 8000 E. Iliff Avenue, Denver, CO 80231

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Since the founding of Comcast in 1963, our core values are rooted in improving the communities where we live and work. Service to our communities is part of our DNA. Our company and our employees work with community organizations throughout Colorado to address needs within our communities and make our products, technology, and experiences accessible to the widest possible audience.

From supporting our local communities during disasters like the recent Marshall Fire, to providing technology support to small businesses impacted by the pandemic, and our decades long commitment and investment to advance digital equity, Comcast employees are committed to building a future of unlimited possibilities and keeping our communities connected.

Recognized by Fortune as one of the ‘100 Best Companies to Work For,’ we remain dedicated to using our voice, resources, and reach to create positive and substantive change in people’s lives in our communities.

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LOCAL DESIGN BUILD

FACTOR DESIGN BUILD (303) 872-3482 4255 Jason Street, Suite 100, Denver, CO 80211

factordesignbuild.com

Factor Design Build was founded by Josh Fiester and Kent Simpson as a full-service design-build firm. In an industry often associated with obscurity, Josh and Kent saw an opportunity to provide an alternative model for homeowners. Factor Design Build prides themselves on transparency and simplicity, meaning the process becomes streamlined and enjoyable for you.

Factor has an unusual ability to understand and balance the art and science necessary to design and execute beautiful work.

They provide concierge-level service for their clients, from initial design to the highest quality construction, functioning as the single point of responsibility in a residential remodel project.

By managing every step of the project through a collaborative partnership with clients, the architectural/design team, and the construction team, they can deliver the project within budget and on schedule. Because they manage the job from start to finish, your experience will be both efficient and enjoyable.

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COLORADO HEALTHCARE OPTUM optumcare.com/colorado 74

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Optum is one of the largest primary and specialty care providers in Colorado. Our physicians and care teams are committed to helping people get and stay healthy.

We are dedicated to helping make the health system work better for everyone and that starts with putting our patients first. Our care teams take the time to listen and understand patients’ health care goals, helping to ensure they get the services they need.

The Optum Colorado family includes New West Physicians in the Denver metro area, Optum in Colorado Springs and Mountain View Medical Group throughout the Pikes Peak Region. Our local care teams are backed by Optum’s leading information and technology-enabled health services, giving our primary care doctors and specialists access to advanced technology and data to help people live their healthiest lives.

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FAMILY LAW

Rich Harris is the president and founding attorney of The Harris Law firm. With a focus on caring for clients, employees and the community, The Harris Law Firm is dedicated to outstanding legal representation.

WE ARE GUIDED BY VALUES. We work with our clients backed by the power of conviction and integrity. We are committed to outstanding legal services.

WE FOCUS SOLELY ON FAMILY LAW AND ESTATE PLANNING. By devoting our entire practice to family law and estate planning, we are able to provide superior legal representation in this ever-changing and complex area of law.

WE WORK AS A TEAM. Our clients receive a thorough, detailed approach to their case that is enhanced through cooperative strategizing with our teams. With strong respect for client privacy, our firm offers the power and value of a team of legal minds willing and able to offer insight and expertise.

WE FOCUS ON CHILDREN. Our approach prioritizes the well-being of families, always committed to minimizing pain and emotional trauma in children.

WE ASSIST FAMILIES. Our legal teams firmly believe that family law cases must address more than just legal needs. Family law requires a respect for the emotional needs of our clients and their families. We offer easy access to family counselors and other support professionals as an added benefit.

WE DEVELOP A CULTURE OF DIVERSITY. We are dedicated to serving all families in Colorado by strategizing and providing unique solutions based on individual client needs. We take pride in providing the best services for our diverse community as they navigate through some of the most difficult challenges they may face.

THE HARRIS LAW FIRM, PLLP (303) 622-5502 1125 17th Street, Suite 450, Denver, CO 80202

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AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION BLACK BUSINESS INITIATIVE (303) 900-7780 | 1031 33rd Street, Denver, CO 80205

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At the Black Business Initiative, we imagine a world where the Black community thrives due to increased agency and ownership, allowing us to leverage our collective power to advocate for our best interests to close the wealth gap. We aim to change the narrative by creating and supporting holistic solutions by working with community members, government, private partners, and organizations.

Jice Johnson is the Founder and CVO of the Black Business Initiative. Jice has dedicated her life to building a strong economic base in the Black community. Playing a vital role as an advocate, she empowers Black entrepreneurs, leaders, and professionals with the information and tools needed to have an intergenerational stake in economic equity and liberation.

As the Creative Director for the Black Business Initiative, Shay Johnson works hard to ensure her actions speak as loudly as her words. She is the author of 12 Affirmations To Shift Your Life in 1 Year, changing the narrative to amplify Black voices. Shay’s local and national presence is equally creating a powerful narrative.

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COSMETIC DENTISTRY

Dr. Susan Kutis, owner of Blue Sage Dental, has worked in the dental field for over 20 years and has been practicing cosmetic and family dentistry for 14 years. Her number one goal is to build lasting relationships with patients. She is passionate about providing the most conservative and functional dental care for her patients using the most current techniques for optimal results. She provides the best quality dentistry through making personal connections, demonstrating empathy and compassion, and exceeding expectations in customer service. Dr. Kutis has been awarded Top Dentist recognitions in both Chicago and Denver.

Dr. Kutis’ investment in continuing education at leading international organizations for dental education has set her apart, recognizing Blue Sage Dental as one of the best cosmetic and family dentistry practices in Colorado. As a board member of Metropolitan Denver Dental Society (MDDS), Dr. Kutis helped organize one of the largest dental conferences in the western United States—providing education, support, and advocacy for the dental organization.

Additionally, Dr. Kutis is an educator for the Pacific Aesthetic Continuum and the Chair of the Colorado Dental Association

Foundation. During the pandemic, Dr. Kutis was inspired by other dental leaders that stepped up and provided guidance and support during a very difficult time.

The aspect of her job that Dr. Kutis is most proud of is the profound effect her cosmetic work has on her patients’ lives. Dr. Kutis says, “It brings so much joy when a new patient that is too embarrassed or ashamed to smile comes into my office. I’m able to change their lives for the better—giving them a functional smile that exudes confidence.”

There is a reason Dr. Kutis has so many loyal, long-term patients: they want the best dental care possible, and Blue Sage Dental delivers. Visit bluesagedental.com for before and after photos of her cosmetic procedures.

BLUE SAGE DENTAL 10354 W. Chatfield Avenue, Suite 100, Littleton, CO 80127

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ORTHOPEDIC CARE Dr. Davis Hurley, CEO,

ORTHOPEDIC CENTERS OF COLORADO Multiple locations across Colorado

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At Orthopedic Centers of Colorado, we are committed to getting patients back to fully participating in life. Our more than 160 dedicated, experienced orthopedic surgeons, doctors, and allied health specialists are focused on partnering with our patients to improve their ability to live pain-free, bringing the best patient experience across all locations and specialties through our whole-person approach to care.

“We are a physician-driven organization that promotes peace-of-mind within our communities by providing patients with expert care, accessible locations and a more efficient experience.” says CEO, Dr. Davis Hurley. “Our private practice model allows us to remain nimble and focused on improved patient outcomes and reduced costs, while fostering strong personal relationships with our patients.”

Whether you’re a serious athlete, or someone just serious about getting back to all the things you enjoy, visit one of Orthopedic Centers of Colorado’s 24 office, therapy, and MRI locations across the Front Range and experience the difference.

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A GROWING WINE INDUSTRY Carboy’s story is an evolving one that began in 2016 with

founders Craig Jones, Kevin Webber, and Head Winemaker Tyzok Wharton. What started as an effort to bring a fun, innovative wine experience to the Front Range, in five short years, has become a crusade to put Colorado wine in a national spotlight as one of the next frontiers in American winemaking. Today, Carboy Winery joins a new dawn and renewal of Colorado’s Grand Valley as a wine region on the rise. Together, with a host of other talented winemakers in Colorado, they’re slowly turning a state known for its beer into one that creates exciting wines, lifting the industry into prominence. Hospitality, sustainability, and storytelling are all on display when visiting Carboy Winery which boasts four

locations (Littleton, Denver, Breckenridge, and Palisade) and two estate vineyards, making them one of the largest producers in the state. Through ambitious winemaking and innovation with new varietal wines, sparkling wines, and wine seltzers, Carboy embodies the adventure of Colorado wine.

Kevin Webber, CEO Tyzok Wharton, Head Winemaker

CARBOY WINERY 6885 South Santa Fe Drive, Littleton, CO 80120

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BUSINESS BANKING Jay Davidson,

First American State Bank was established July 5, 1995, in the heart of Greenwood Village. We offer white glove customer service, commercial and retail banking products in both loans (Commercial, Industrial, Home Mortgages) and deposits (Treasury Management services for small businesses, CD’s, Deposit Accounts and Wire Services).

We are passionate about seeing individuals and new businesses realize the American dream of ownership. Our success comes from hiring the most technically and culturally capable employees, carefully choosing our customers and having a single, unifying vision. Treat everyone with respect.

Advice.

FIRST AMERICAN STATE BANK

First: Let the long view guide your actions.

8390 E. Crescent Pkwy., Greenwood Village, CO 80111

Third: Think carefully and honestly, then act ethically.

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Second: Plan but do not let your plan paralyze you from acting. Plans change, lost opportunities are gone forever.

CO-SPONSORED BY THE CHILDREN’S DIABETES FOUNDATION & FIRST AMERICAN STATE BANK

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WINE AND LIQUOR DELIVERY Rufus Nagel,

MOLLY’S SPIRITS mollysspirits.com

Rufus Nagel, C.E.O. of Molly’s Spirits, has always believed in the importance of Alcohol Delivery. We have been using electric cars to deliver alcohol in the Denver Metro Area since 2016. The lower cost of operations, positive environmental impact, and longer usefulness was known to us long before it was common knowledge.

When the pandemic hit in March of 2020, we quickly ramped up from 6 cars to 20 cars at two locations almost overnight. Over the course of the two year pandemic we have driven over 1,000,000 electric miles, delivered 150,000 orders, and saved 680 metric tons of Co2 emissions from Denver residents’ lungs. An existing partnership with Drizly as well as our own eCommerce platform at www.mollysspirits.com has taken our delivery department to new levels we didn’t think possible.

We even have a dedicated team to help personalize orders and set up delivery for event needs, both personal and corporate.

Our incredible selection of over 13,000 products, knowledgeable staff, and personal touch makes for an amazing experience. Whether you’re shopping for wine to go with tonight’s entree, planning a dinner party, or stocking the bar at your wedding, Molly’s Spirits is the best choice for your everyday needs and special events.

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ATTAINABLE DESIGN INSIDE STORIES (303) 783-9327 5650 S. Windermere Street, Littleton, CO 80120

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Interior Design is a phrase that has become synonymous with the upper echelon. It has been labeled unattainable for most, yet a desired service nonetheless.

Enter: Denver-based interior design firm, Inside Stories, led by owner Miranda Cullen.

Inside Stories was established in 2015 as an alternative to offerings typical of a full-service interior design firm. Today, with 20 talented team members, Inside Stories services projects coast to coast. What started as a micro-design revolution has broadened to encompass anything our clients can dream up. From a paint consultation to a luxury, custom-built home, projects of all sizes are welcome. Our unique approach has uncovered a way to make interior design accessible to anyone. Inside Stories delivers a customizable service that allows flexibility in budget and timing requirements, without compromising on aesthetic or customer service.

At Inside Stories, we believe everyone deserves a personalized space where they can thrive.

Give us a ring. It’s time to experience your home!

5280 M A G A Z IN E P ROM OT ION

SCENE PROMOTIONS | EVENTS | SPONSORSHIPS

APR 15-24

Photo Credit: Ariel McCarty

by Rachel Neville

Colorado Ballet Presents Ballet MasterWorks Ellie Caulkins Opera House Our season crescendos to a mesmerizing close with a compilation of unique works of art, combining unforgettable music and incredible physical expression. This dynamic program includes George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, Jirí Kylián’s Petite Mort and Twyla Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs.

MAY 7-21 Bizet’s Carmen Ellie Caulkins Opera House We conclude Opera Colorado’s grandest season to date with Bizet’s smoldering drama, Carmen, filled with some of opera’s most iconic melodies.

Not a soul can resist Carmen’s seductive charm, not even the naïve Don Jose.

But when she leaves him for a charismatic bullfighter, Don Jose’s infatuation turns obsessive. What fate, or choice, waits for the woman no man can tame?

Information and tickets at operacolorado.org/carmen.

Information and tickets at coloradoballet.org/Ballet-MasterWorks.

Follow @5280scene for a behind-thescenes look at 5280 marketing.

MAY 21 The 5280 Brunch Event Jaquard Hotel & Rooftop | 10am - 1pm It's official! The 5280 Brunch Event will return on May 21, 2022.

All the brunchy things you love under one roof! Plus giveaways, photo booths, lounges, and more. Presented by Vitalant.

Information and tickets at 5280scene.com.

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Fueled by melting snow, Colorado’s cascades are never better than in late spring and early summer. We found 27 spindly trickles, misty plunges, and bona fide gushers worth the hike. B Y J E S S I C A L A R U S S O

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WATERFALLS C

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North Clear Creek Falls sits just off southwestern Colorado’s Silver Thread Scenic Byway.

P H O T O G R A P H BY E R I C S C H U E T T E

Credits Tk

LOWER & UPPER FISH CREEK FALLS

CHASING WATERFALLS

TOP TREK

N AT I O N A L T R E AS U R E S Rocky Mountain National Park boasts 30-some named waterfalls and a plethora of less official cascades waiting to be found by adventurers in the know. We asked Sandy Heise, who wrote Colorado Waterfall Hikes (a Colorado Mountain Club guidebook), to help us rate some of her favorites.

KEY: WALK IN THE PARK

TRULY A TREK

TOURIST TRAP

HIDDEN GEM

 ADAMS FALLS 0.9 miles round trip

NEARBY CITY:

5 miles round trip

Near Grand Lake, the East Inlet Trail leaves from its eponymous trailhead and delivers out-ofshape tourists, families with little ones, and everyone else to 55foot Adams Falls’ observation area in less than half a mile.

DIFFICULTY: Moderate

 ALBERTA FALLS

APRÈS-HIKE: Just northwest of downtown, pop into How Ya Doin’ Pizza N’ Eats to order a to-go pie. We recommend chasing it with a Chowder hazy IPA at Storm Peak Brewing Company next door, where a new rooftop deck is due to open this summer.

1.7 miles round trip

Steamboat Springs DRIVE TIME FROM DENVER:

3 hours HIKE LENGTH:

Hop a stress-free (and fee-free) ride on the Bear Lake Road shuttle to the popular Glacier Gorge trailhead. The hike to one of the park’s prettiest flows is just long and difficult enough to make flatlanders feel like they accomplished something.

From left: Noah Wetzel; Jason J. Hatfield

 CHASM FALLS

Lower Fish Creek Falls is a magnificent, 283-foot behemoth you can view from a paved overlook path or a wooden bridge at the base, both of which are about a quarter-mile from the parking lot. (Note: You’ll need $5 cash or a check for the day-use fee.)

Leave those spots to the tourists and continue up the trail: Your true destination is the upper falls.

The approximately twomile journey to get there starts with a narrow path that switchbacks through evergreens; you’ll emerge onto a flat stretch through an aspen grove before crossing a footbridge and climbing again. This time, you’ll scramble over rocky terrain and across a ledge with just enough exposure to give you a thrill. Your reward is a two-tiered waterfall tucked into a cliff—and the possibility that you’ll have it mostly, if not all, to yourself.

3 miles round trip

Save this 25-footer—right off Old Fall River Road—for early to mid-October, when the dirt road closes to cars. From the Endovalley Picnic Area, follow the thoroughfare to Chasm Falls Trail; a short series of switchbacks leads down to a viewing platform, where you can watch the Fall River bounce down a rocky chute and into a small pool.  LOWER WILD BASIN FALLS

Alberta Falls

you to the Calypso Cascades, which tumbles over boulders and fallen trees. Press on a little less than a mile more, over steep terrain, to watch from a footbridge as Ouzel Falls plunges over a granite ledge.

eventually traversing an exposed shelf from which views of Columbine Falls flowing into Peacock Pool emerge.

 BRIDAL VEIL FALLS

Those up for more mileage can continue past Alberta Falls and up a gorge to serene, peakringed Loch Vale. Wooden planks help hikers navigate a boggy section before stone steps lead the way to Taylor Glacier–fueled Timberline Falls, a 100-foot enchanter that shoots over a blocky, vegetation-dotted cliff.

6.4 miles round trip

Sure-footed hikers will enjoy various unnamed cascades along the journey from the Cow Creek trailhead to Bridal Veil Falls, which generally flows late into the fall along low-angle rock. Start from the less busy Lumpy Ridge trailhead to pass Gem Lake on an alternate, 12.8-mile out-and-back route.  COLUMBINE FALLS

5.4 miles round trip

8 miles round trip

This moderate-distance ramble from the Wild Basin trailhead provides access to three separate falls. After about a third of a mile, you’ll reach Copeland Falls (look for upper and lower portions babbling over rock in two places); another 1.5 miles gets

Because this trek leaves from the popular Longs Peak trailhead, it’s often more crowded than its mileage would suggest—and that, combined with the elevation (11,660 feet at the highest point), means it’s necessary to get started early. After 2.4 miles, the trail rises above treeline and gets rockier as it enters a high-alpine cirque,

 TIMBERLINE FALLS 8.4 miles round trip

 YPSILON FALLS 9.2 miles round trip

A river and two alpine lakes make the 4.6 miles and nearly 2,600 feet of elevation gain required to get from the Lawn Lake trailhead to multitiered Ypsilon Falls even more rewarding. Evergreens line the path of this mountainside beauty, which is tucked away in the less-frequented Mummy Range.

IF YOU GO: To combat overcrowding, Rocky Mountain National Park is implementing a timedentry reservation system from May 27 to October 10 this year. You’ll need a permit (free at recreation.gov, with a $2 processing charge) for a two-hour admission window in addition to an annual or day pass. Reminder: Dogs are not allowed on the park’s trails.

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WAT E R B E D S Plan camping trips around these destination-worthy falls. as well book an overnight stay for a few bucks more.

Seventy-five individual sites and 12 large group sites ring the reservoir, a popular summer camping destination just an hour and a half southwest of Denver, near Deckers. SUP boards and kayaks are available to rent for flatwater fun, but savvy campers (and their kiddos) know to leave the lake and head into the forest via the aptly named Waterfall Trail, which reaches the top of the main falls in just 0.3 miles. If you have sturdy footwear, you can follow the creek upward—taking care to step on rock or solid areas so as not to cause erosion—to discover more burbling cascades and mini-falls. From $30 per night

Zapata Falls

ZAPATA FALLS

RIFLE FALLS

Northwest of Glenwood Springs, Rifle Falls State Park has a surprisingly lush, almost tropical feel thanks to its location along Rifle Creek and its namesake waterfall, which plunges 70 feet over a travertine cliff. Reserve one of the park’s seven walkin tent sites, sheltered by overhanging trees, near the creek. (There are also 13 RV-ready spots with electric hookups.) Instead of walking back through the day-use lot and campground to get to the falls, take 1.5-mile Squirrel Trail; it loops around most of the pavement and passes through a Gambel oak grove. Then take the ADAaccessible path to the base of Rifle Falls, which was split into three parts in

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the early 1900s when the creek powered a hydroelectric plant. Continue on 1.5-mile Coyote Trail to explore a set of limestone caves (bring a flashlight) and to view the stunning water feature from above.

From $22 per night BUFFALO CREEK FALLS

Would-be hikers have to pay a day-use fee ($14 for visitors 16 and up; $6 for children six to 15) to access the lovely flow that spills over a rock shelf near privately owned Wellington Lake, so you might

Perched above the otherworldly, giant-sanddune-dotted San Luis Valley, the Bureau of Land Management’s Zapata Falls Campground in Mosca has 23 reservable campsites, some of which are large enough for RVs, and one group area. The half-mile journey to its eponymous waterfall begins from the adjacent day-use area and ends in the creek itself (water shoes and poles highly recommended): You’ll need to wade through a watery chasm to view the 25-foot falls bursting through a rocky crevasse.

If you’re lucky, you might spot a black swift, a rare species of bird that lives in the misty nooks behind the spout. Up for more mileage? Connect to the South Zapata Lake Trail for a roughly nine-mile round-trip hike. Just be sure to make it back to your tent in time to watch the sun dip below the San Juan Mountains to the west. From $11 per night

TOP TREK

MAXWELL FALLS

CHASING WATERFALLS

From left: Ethan Welty; Aaron Johnson; Ryan McKinney

NEARBY CITY: Evergreen DRIVE TIME FROM DENVER: 45 HIKE LENGTH: 4.4 DIFFICULTY: Easy

minutes

miles round trip

to moderate

APRÈS-HIKE: Nine-month-old Marshdale Burger Co. is only a 10-minute drive from the Maxwell Falls trailhead, allowing you to quickly refuel with the 285 Traffic Jam, a quarterpound patty with bacon jam, arugula, and goat cheese on a brioche bun. Happy hour specials—including a dollar off draft pints— run from 3 to 5:30 p.m. every day.

With fragrant pines, splashy creek crossings, very little elevation gain, and its namesake series of lovely cascades, Maxwell Falls Trail is an ideal close-to-Denver trek for families and visiting flatlanders. Start from the lower trailhead off South Brook Forest Road, where you’ll find a dozen parking spaces that fill very quickly on weekends. (FYI: The path from the upper trailhead is two miles shorter but poorly marked and steeper.) For about an eighth of a mile, follow the well-trampled trail—lined in summer with purple bee balms and bright yellow black-eyed Susans—up a gradual incline. The path is a lollipop loop, so when you come to the Y intersection, go right for a shady, mile-long jaunt that takes you to the bottom of the falls, where you can linger for a snack on the rocks.

Continue up the trail to find yourself right above the dropping stream; it’s a unique angle for snapping Instagram-worthy shots of the pooling water below. The gently sloping terrain on the other side of the loop makes for a leisurely, enjoyable cooldown whether you’re from sea level or not. —Barbara Urzua APRIL 2022

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Telluride

DRIVE TIME FROM DENVER: 6 HIKE LENGTH: 2.4

hours, 15 minutes

miles round trip

DIFFICULTY: Strenuous APRÈS-HIKE: Opened in September 2020, the Stronghouse is Telluride’s newest brewpub. Inside the beautifully renovated 1892 warehouse, you can enjoy a flight of handcrafted brews and a hot, salted Bavarian pretzel alongside local mucketymucks and old-timers.

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Bridal Veil Falls reigns over Telluride’s photogenic box canyon. To get to the bottom of this 365-foot beauty, the tallest waterfall in the state, hikers used to have to jostle with Jeeps for 2.4 miles on a dusty four-wheel-drive road. As of 2019, however, you can climb a 1.2-mile trail to the base of the falls instead. The journey may be short, but it’s not easy: After parking near the Pandora Mill at the east end of Telluride, you’ll stair-step up boulders and wind through steep rock gardens, exposed root webs, and groves of aspen trees. Behind you, the canyon unfolds with parks and forests carpeting the valley and reddish-gray cliffs framing the panorama. Watch for signs pointing to short side trails to two stunning cascades that tumble over steep cliffs along the way—great places to take a breather, given the limited availability of oxygen around 9,000 feet. At the shore of Bridal Veil’s pool, stare up at the long, sinuous waterfall above, listen to its unique melody, and feel the waves of mist as they disappear into the dry mountain air. —Kate Siber

From left: Whit Richardson; Eric Schuette

NEARBY CITY:

CHASING WATERFALLS

R OA D S I D E AT T R AC T I O N S

Some of the state’s most fabulous falls require little to no hiking.

Follow the prompts to find the relatively accessible adventure that’s ideal for you.

ARE YOU INTERESTED IN HITTING ANY AMOUNT OF TRAIL? Treasure Falls

A tiny bit of trekking is all right.

That’s a no for me.

What about stairs?

How far are you willing to drive?

Not very.

A few hours would be fine.

Let’s make it a road trip!

Don’t make me regret saying OK.

Still no.

Would you enjoy a history lesson?

BOULDER FALLS Boulder

The payoff-to-exertion ratio here is high, especially considering it’s only 40 miles from Denver. Just 100 yards of dirt trail (closed seasonally for maintenance from November 1 to May 1) separate the parking area off Boulder Canyon Drive from the base of this short but powerful waterfall.

GUFFEY FALLS Florissant

TOP TREK

BRIDAL VEIL FALLS

Pack a picnic and your bathing suit to visit this waterfall-fed swimming hole, also known as Paradise Cove. It’s a steep 0.4 miles from the Guffey Gorge Day-Use Area’s gravel lot ($6 fee from mid-May to mid-September) to where the thin stream—and, often, cliff jumpers—drops into a perfect punch bowl.

Sure!

HELEN HUNT FALLS Colorado Springs

TREASURE FALLS Pagosa Springs

Just off U.S. 160, the mile-long out-andback to Treasure Falls’ two observation decks—from which you can often feel the mist coming off the 105-foot dazzler—is the perfect leg-stretcher.

Stop at the visitor center (open Memorial Day to Labor Day) within North Cheyenne Cañon Park to learn about this destination’s namesake: Helen Hunt Jackson, a mid-19thcentury poet and Native American rights activist.

Then take in the view from the parking area at the base or walk up to the bridge that spans the top of the falls.

SEVEN FALLS Colorado Springs

At the Broadmoor, you get what you pay for—and in this case, $17 grants visitors entrée to the private resort’s 181-foot stunner, which bounces down a 1,250-foot box canyon in seven distinct segments. Those who are unable to enjoy the attraction’s two moderate hikes and/or climb the 224 waterfall-adjacent steps can ride an elevator to the Eagle’s Nest observation platform.

I’m just here for the views.

NORTH CLEAR CREEK FALLS Lake City

One of four waterfalls along southwestern Colorado’s Silver Thread Scenic Byway, this wide, 100-foot fountain looks like something out of Middle Earth. Pull off unpaved Forest Road 510 and snap pics from the ADA-accessible, guardrail-protected observation area.

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` TOP TREK

U N C H A RT E D WAT E R S

Why you should consider dodging the crowds and exploring less-visited Colorado waterfalls—including those that aren’t even named on official maps.

NEARBY CITY: Vail DRIVE TIME FROM DENVER:

1 hour, 45 minutes HIKE LENGTH: 4

round trip

APRÈS-HIKE: Order the dangerously drinkable Banana Dolphin—a tropical treat made with bourbon, pineapple amaro, and banana liqueur—to pair with meats and cheeses at Root & Flower, which moved into its current digs in Vail Village in 2020.

DIVINE FINDS Hidden in Colorado’s backcountry are delights like this seasonal waterfall, which spills into the Flat Tops Wilderness area’s Keener Lake, a 3.7-mile march (one way) from Stillwater Reservoir.

published in July), 73 of the featured falls didn’t have monikers recognized by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, meaning they literally weren’t on the map. To find them, Paul used topographic records to look for places where waterways intersected with steep slopes. Then she chased them down, provided they were on public land near relatively established trails. The resulting descriptions include detailed directions, elevation changes, GPS coordinates, and photos.

Today, even as the internet teems with trail reports that make it easier for inexpert hikers to access backcountry gems, Paul says she hears from people who say she should keep her finds a secret.

Her position, however, is that greater access is the best way to protect these landscapes.

“If people don’t visit them, they don’t know what they’re missing,” Paul says. “And then when there’s legislation—they want to lease out land for drilling or they want to sell public land to private owners—people aren’t going to know what they’re giving up.”

TRAILS LESS TRAVELED

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miles

DIFFICULTY: Moderate

Susan Joy Paul shares three of her favorite off-the-beaten-path waterfalls.

1. Near southern Colorado’s Antonito, the 1.3-mile-long hike (one way) to Rough Creek Falls takes you through a narrow gorge and up close to where Rough Creek, fueled by two alpine lakes, plunges over a cliff.

BOOTH FALLS

2. If you have a vehicle that can navigate unpaved East Fork Road near Pagosa Springs, it’s a 0.25-mile stroll (one way) from the trailhead to Silver Falls. Its veil, spread over dark volcanic rock, is best in the midday sun.

3. Paul swears Apache Falls, in the Greenhorn Mountain Wilderness southwest of Pueblo, is worth the strenuous, 11-mile round-trip trek it takes to reach the spray, which stretches more than 100 feet from a ledge to the trail.

The towering aspens and expansive views of Vail Valley on this nearly two-mile trek are almost enough to distract you from the burning in your legs as you gain a hefty 1,300 feet. If you go on a weekday, you just might get to enjoy the popular destination solo from a perch on a ledge above the thundering 60-foot falls. Otherwise, expect to share the vista. The trail is so busy that this past summer, Vail implemented a drastic solution to seasonal overcrowding: a complete closure of the trailhead parking lot to vehicles. Instead, visitors were encouraged to ride the free East Vail blue line shuttle (note: no dogs allowed), accessible from the Vail Transportation Center at Vail Village, to and from the Booth Lake trailhead. The program will go back into effect in May, and although it might require a bit more planning, not having to stress about finding a parking spot makes the experience that much more idyllic.

—Sarah Banks m

From left: Noah Wetzel; Regensburger Photography

Before a mud slide obliterated the 1.2-mile trail to Hanging Lake (and Spouting Rock) in July 2021, a permit system was already in use to limit visitation, which peaked at 186,000 in 2018. Luckily, Colorado’s most famous water feature—a National Natural Landmark near Glenwood Springs— was spared. Perhaps Mother Nature was simply tired of drones and Instagram influencers sullying the blue-green travertine pool into which Hanging Lake’s curtains of water pour. Full trail reconstruction will likely take years, and whether the damage was an ecological warning shot or an arbitrary tragedy, the imperative for Coloradans to spread out their footfalls is clear.

That doesn’t mean you can’t visit the state’s marquee waterfalls. But it might encourage weekday trips, taking public transportation to alleviate parking congestion, or seeing the spouts in the shoulder seasons, when they remain beautiful but could be frozen (spring) or slowed to a trickle (fall). And it definitely requires that you leave no trace: Stay on the trail and, in most cases, out of the water. Of course, you could also seek out lesserknown but still spectacular cascades, especially if you’re willing to drive and/or walk a bit farther, says Susan Joy Paul, who covered more than 300 miles on foot to research Hiking Waterfalls in Colorado.

When her Falcon Guides book was released in 2013 (a second edition will be

Credits Tk

CHASING WATERFALLS

The Fungus Among Us Nearly three years ago, Denver became the first U.S. city to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms, which advocates—and scientific studies— say offer an array of therapeutic upsides.

Since then, an ecosystem of proponents has sprouted in an effort to deliver the magic of psilocybin to those who might benefit. The movement still has a lot of room to grow.

BY LINDSEY B. KING

Psilocybin is a hallucinogenic compound found in psilocybe mushrooms.

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Mycophiles Unite

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tone, employing phrases that suggest something more meaningful than getting sideways and watching The Fifth Element.

He talks about “natural medicine” being a human right, using it “with intention,” and “honoring the traditional, Indigenous, and shamanic” roots of psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in many species of fungi. He is not alone in his veneration for so-called magic mushrooms, nor in his belief that they have the ability to expand consciousness, reboot the ego (which scientists call the default mode network), and, in doing so, treat a variety of mental health conditions when paired with talk therapy.

There is evidence on several continents that very early humans may have purposely ingested psychedelic mushrooms. Ditto for ancient Siberians, Greeks, and Egyptians.

The Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica have well-documented histories of using hallucinogenic mushrooms in healing rituals.

TERMINOLOGY

THE STORY CHANGES a little bit each time it’s told, but the basic details of how Denver became the first U.S. city to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms remain mostly the same: A group of people, some of whom had taken to calling themselves the Psychedelic Club of Denver, began meeting at St. Mark’s and Hooked on Colfax coffeeshops in late 2017 and developed a plan to change city law.

“It’s just one more example of a small band of rebels making something big happen,” says Kevin Matthews, who ultimately led the Decriminalize Denver campaign. “Two and a half years later, Initiative 301 passed.”

Matthews didn’t start out looking to rebel. After graduating from East High School in 2004, he went to the U.S. Military Academy and planned to make a career out of his service. That dream fell apart when the then 22-year-old was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and was discharged and retired from the service.

“I came home to Colorado with a loss of a sense of self,” he says. “Then I had an experience with mushrooms in 2011 on a playground in Park Hill that told me I didn’t have to be depressed my whole life. I wasn’t healed, but I found relief.”

Matthews speaks about what he calls his “relationship” with mushrooms in a reverent

But it wasn’t until the late 1950s that the U.S. medical establishment got interested in the substance. For more than a decade, psilocybin was viewed by science as a miracle drug— that is, until 1960s counterculture compelled Congress to ban it in 1968, signaling the beginning of the end for U.S. research efforts.

Recently, though, psychedelics such as psilocybin have re-entered the national conversation. After receiving Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for renewed research in the late 1990s, Johns Hopkins University released findings in 2016 that suggested people suffering from cancer-related anxiety or depression found relief for up to six months from a single large dose of psilocybin. In 2018, New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan published How to Change Your Mind, both a treatise on and a personal exploration of the mind-expanding capabilities of psychedelics.

That same year, and again in 2019, the FDA bestowed breakthrough status on psilocybin as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression and major depressive disorder.

Still, psilocybin remains illegal both in Colorado and under federal law. Denver’s landmark decriminalization of the substance, however, has sparked similar reforms in other U.S. cities and states and has rallied mile-high mycophiles who are tired of concealing their use of what they say is a safe, nonaddictive, effective medicine. They don’t want to hide anymore. If Matthews and an expanding cohort of supporters have their way, they won’t have to. With help from New Approach PAC (a group based in Washington, D.C., that has funneled money into various drug legalization efforts nationwide), Matthews and his ilk are pushing for a statewide ballot initiative this November that would immediately decriminalize psilocybin and set up legal medical access in the state by late 2024. In January, state lawmakers also put forth HB 22-1116, which aims to establish a review panel to study plantbased medicines. All of this could bring psilocybin further out of the shadows, create wider accessibility, and germinate a more public conversation about how Coloradans want to approach magic mushrooms.

PSYCHEDELICS • a class of hallucinogenic substances whose primary effect is to trigger nonordinary states of consciousness, often characterized by psychological, visual, and auditory changes. Psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, ibogaine, mescaline, and other substances fall under the umbrella of psychedelics. Ketamine (which is legal with a prescription) and MDMA (which is not) are not considered classic psychedelics by many experts, although they often deliver similar effects.

Previous spread: Alexander Volkov/Getty Images. This page: Yarygin/Getty Images

THE FUNGUS AMONG US

TIMELINE

Psychedelic mushrooms have been used by cultures across the globe since time immemorial, but their magical ways didn’t fully arrive in the U.S. medical establishment until the 1950s. Starting there, we take an abbreviated look at psilocybin’s winding journey, which could lead to an FDA approval in the coming years.

A

Clockwise from top left: Courtesy of R. Gordon Wasson Estate; A. Jones/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Getty Images; Microgen/Getty Images; Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images; Courtesy of Jerod Harris for TEDMED; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; Novartis Archives (SA_FOT 06.15 Hofmann, Albert VIII10701); Peter Dazeley/Getty Images

1955 An amateur

mycologist from Manhattan named R. Gordon Wasson and his wife, Valentina, visit Huautla de Jiménez, a town in Oaxaca, Mexico, where Wasson cajoles local medicine woman María Sabina into letting him (and photographer Allan Richardson and Valentina) participate in a Mazatec mushroom ritual used for healing and connecting with the divine.

1957

Life magazine publishes a photo essay by Wasson and Richardson titled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” and introduces psychedelic mushrooms to a wide American audience.

Although it was likely not Wasson’s intention to out Sabina, the article and subsequent reportage leads to her and the town’s identification. The coverage sets off a wave of spiritual tourism to the area that irreparably changes the community, which shuns Sabina for her role in the onslaught of visitors.

1958

Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann is the first to isolate, synthesize, and name psilocybin and psilocin, two psychedelic compounds found in magic mushrooms.

His employer, Sandoz Pharmaceutical, begins selling psilocybin in pill form in 1960.

LONG

STRANGE 1999–2000

1960 Inspired by the

Life article, Harvard University psychologist Timothy Leary travels to Mexico to research psilocybin, and upon his return to Cambridge he begins the Harvard Psilocybin Project, a research program that explores the use of the substance in psychology and religious studies.

The project encounters controversy over its methodology, and Leary is dismissed from the institution in 1963. He goes on to become a prominent voice in the psychedelic movement and a bombastic counterculture iconoclast.

1960s to mid–1970s

For much of the ’60s and ’70s, research into psilocybin continues despite a federal ban in 1968 and its subsequent categorization as a Schedule I drug by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. By the late ’70s, residual federal grant money dries up, taxpayers aren’t eager to continue funding research into counterculture drugs, and scientists no longer want to be associated with Leary and his brethren.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University design a study—approved by the FDA and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)—to determine if psilocybin can elicit a transcendental experience.

They administer the first legal doses of psilocybin in the United

States in more than two decades. Short answer: Yes, it can.

2006

Roland Griffiths, a Johns Hopkins University researcher, publishes a paper in Psychopharmacology about the first double-blind,

placebo-controlled clinical study in more than 40 years that looks at the psychological effects of a psychedelic, specifically psilocybin.

Participants report the experience delivers substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance and attribute positive changes in attitude and behavior to the psilocybin experience.

TRIP 2016 Griffiths and his

team publish findings in Psychopharmacology that say more than 80 percent of patients with terminal cancer experience a “significant decrease in depressed mood and anxiety” after combining psilocybin with psychotherapy.

2018–2019 The FDA

twice designates psilocybin as a breakthrough therapy, first for treatment-resistant depression and then for major depressive disorder.

The designation allows for the expedited development of promising pharmaceuticals that are intended to treat serious conditions.

2019 Denver becomes the first U.S. city to decriminalize psilocybin. Other U.S. cities—including Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Oakland and Santa Cruz in California—follow suit in the coming months and years.

In November 2020, Oregon is the first state in the country to decriminalize and legalize the substance for therapeutic use.

2022

Researchers around the globe continue clinical trials with psilocybin. The FDA says that despite psilocybin’s breakthrough therapy status, there is currently no timeline for its approval.

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STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

THE PSILOCYBIN EXPERIENCE

To reap the therapeutic rewards, experts say treating mushrooms as medicine—not as a recreational drug—and finding the right person to guide you through the process are essential.

IDENTIFY A FACILITATOR

These folks go by many names, which can mean different things. “Sitters” or “space-holders” keep watch over users to ensure basic safety and reassure those who might experience anxiety or fear. Sitters, whose rates start around $400 for a six- to eight-hour trip, usually do not provide mushrooms, in-session directives, or aftercare talk therapy, which is known as integration. They are basically high-level babysitters for those under the influence. In this scenario, it is incumbent upon users to bring their own mushrooms and find à la carte integration services. Guides, shamans, medicine people, spiritual healers, and similar monikers are titles typically reserved for those with years of experiential knowledge of natural medicines and who take an active part in leading a person on a journey. It is not unheard of for licensed therapists to do so-called underground guiding, an activity that could cost them their licenses. It is also not atypical for guides to have some formal training through organizations such as Fort Collins–based Psychedelic Research & Training Institute. But not everyone who does medicine work has a classroom education; in many cases, guides have learned from other veteran guides, MENTAL NOTE sometimes as a part of long-standing traditions in “People come to me because of the ritual, the ceremony. My sessions are Indigenous cultures. Guides’ fees—which can run very nonclinical. That might not work for everyone. I play live music; I as high as $1,000 or more, cash only—might sing. We’re at my home, one-on-one. There’s low light and salt lamps include a prep meeting; the medicine itself; and blankets, and we’re on the floor. But it’s OK if my way doesn’t work a directed session that can involve music, singing, or chanting; and post-trip for everyone. There are other ways.” —a Fort Collins–based licensed therapist integration therapy.



5 Credits Tk

the divine.” —a Boulder-area licensed therapist

4 STEP



STEP

TAKE THE TRIP

A psilocybin session is a daylong enterprise. The process for a large-dose journey generally includes a conversation about intention and safety; ingestion of the substance (often using dried-mushroom-steeped tea, dried mushrooms dipped in honey, or dried mushrooms infused into chocolate bars), which can take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to kick in; and up to an eight-hour trip in which the client typically lies prostrate, sometimes with an eye mask on. Few seem to have the vocabulary to explain what tripping is truly like. There’s a lot of “dissolving” and “melting” and “being one with the universe.”

If your eyes aren’t covered, coffee mugs begin to breathe. Fractal patterns emerge from houseplants. Colors become more vivid. In How to Change Your Mind, Pollan writes, “The idea that there had ever been a disagreement between matter and spirit seemed risible, and I felt as though whatever MENTAL NOTE it is that usually divides “This is spiritual work. I work with atheists, but even for them me from the world out there had begun these journeys help them connect with something larger than to fall away.” themselves. A high dose of mushrooms can connect you with

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THE FUNGUS AMONG US

STEP

1

MAKE SOME CONNECTIONS

Because psilocybin is still illegal in Colorado, there’s no such thing as an aboveboard session with a licensed therapist. Instead, the mushroom-curious will need to find those who have experience assisting people with psilocybin journeys despite the illegality of the pursuit. This is no easy task. Almost everyone involved in what the community calls “medicine work” finds clients through hush-hush methods, since decriminalization doesn’t yet allow people to share mushrooms or use them in a communal setting. That could change soon, but for now finding a facilitator means asking around in the right circles (see “Mycelium Web” on page 102).

STEP



2

MENTAL NOTE

“My practice is all word-of-mouth. No website, no advertising. If someone contacts me out of the blue with no referral, I ignore them. I say no to a lot of people because, really, other licensed therapists are the biggest risk [when it comes to being caught]. I also only use encrypted communication just to be safe.” —a Boulder-area licensed therapist

3

PREPARE YOURSELF

STEP

Most practitioners like to get to know their clients before the psilocybin session. Learning about clients’ histories with psychedelics as well as why they’re interested in using psilocybin can inform how the session might unfold and what the facilitator needs to anticipate. First-timers, for example, might feel anxious and need more support. Other questions help sitters and guides assist clients in developing the right “set” and “setting.” “Set” refers to the mindset—including mood and expectations—a client brings to the experience. “Setting” describes the physical and social environment surrounding the session. (Ideally, that’s lying in a safe space, not wandering around LoDo.) Further inquiry can give the guide an idea about intention, or what a client wants to work on during and after the trip. Intentions might look like this: Allow me to let go of a long-held grudge, or help me process my dad’s death, or show me how to stop smoking.

MENTAL NOTE Setting an intention doesn’t necessar“Questions I’ve used for preparation are: What do you want to change about ily mean that the mind, destabilized your life? Where do you feel like you’re stuck? How does your behavior by the medicine, will be able to compare with your values, beliefs, and goals? What are you hoping to get out of solely focus on that goal, but experts your experience? But I’m hands-off during sessions. I believe there is natural say that’s OK. The intention can live in the recesses and be a intelligence in these substances—and in us. The wisdom doesn’t come from mooring line. me. It comes from the person and the relationship with the medicine.”

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—a Denver-based space-holder

MENTAL NOTE

Credits Tk

DO THE WORK

Integration is the post-trip therapy that, with the guidance of an expert, can help a person generate their own insights into and notions about the experience. These sessions are not unlike typical talk therapy, except they focus on how the journey can be harnessed to help make change.

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“In a normal situation where I’m working with a patient on, say, self-worth, it could take three years to get anywhere. With psychedelics, it might be five weeks. Why? We build our lives around what we already believe. We reinforce our perspectives. As children, we have no rules. We’re free-forming it. As adults, things become fixed. We get stuck in what we know. Psilocybin blows that open. It makes you flexible again.” —a Denver-based licensed therapist APRIL 2022

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SCIENCE

THE FUNGUS AMONG US

NATURAL Rx

A growing body of research suggests psilocybin could be a promising prescription for several ills.

HE ALT H CONDI T ION Tobacco addiction

Treatment-resistant depression (TRD)

Alcohol dependence

TERMINOLOGY

Major depressive disorder (MDD)

NO TE WORTHY RE SE ARCH

KEEP IN MIND

Results of a Johns Hopkins University pilot study published in 2014 showed that 80 percent of long-term heavy tobacco smokers abstained from smoking for six months after just two treatment sessions with psilocybin.

Quitting smoking is notoriously difficult. According to a 2013 study, the risk for relapse among individuals who had been abstinent for 12 months or less was above 50 percent.

In November 2021, Compass Pathways, a U.K.-based pharmaceutical company, released results from a midstage trial, which revealed that nearly 37 percent of patients who took a 25-milligram dose of psilocybin showed a 50 percent or more reduction in depression symptoms at the three-week mark and again at three months, compared with the patients who took the placebo.

There are approximately 100 million people worldwide with diagnosed TRD. These patients have tried, in some cases, multiple mainstream antidepressant medications without finding relief.

In a 2019 paper in Psychopharmacology, a project

by Johns Hopkins illustrated that alcohol-dependent patients significantly reduced drinking behaviors over eight months after participating in just one or two psilocybin treatment sessions.

Research shows that alcohol has one of the highest rates of relapse among abused substances, with some studies indicating a relapse rate for alcohol as high as 80 percent during the first year after substance abuse treatment.

Published in JAMA Psychiatry in November 2020, results from a Johns Hopkins study showed that 67 percent of participants with MDD demonstrated a more than 50 percent reduction in depression symptoms at a one-week follow-up exam and 71 percent at a four-week appointment. Overall, four weeks post-treatment, 54 percent of participants were considered in remission, meaning they no longer qualified as being depressed.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than 21 million people in the United States (and 19.5 percent of adults in Colorado) have experienced major depression, yet mainstream antidepressants don’t work for roughly 30 percent of those who try them.

MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE • a profound, potentially transformative psychological happening occasioned by psychedelics, including mushrooms, that many experts believe is central to the therapeutic benefits of the substances. According to researchers in the ’60s, as well as those in the early 2000s, so-called mystical experiences are often characterized by an inability to fully describe what’s transpired; feelings of interrelationship with all people and things; sensations of harmony, delight, and sacredness; the transcendence of time and space; and a deep-seated belief that the encounter is a fount of truth about the nature of existence. Because mystical experiences seem to encourage individuals to break out of their usual patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, experts have surmised that it’s conceivable they could force alterations in personality.

Previous spread and this page: Yarygin/Getty Images

Based on a quick scan of available research, even a layperson can deduce that psilocybin has established its merit as a remedy for a host of issues endemic to the brain. Under the influence of psychedelics, the brain’s default mode network—an assemblage of circuits and hubs that researchers say is the closest approximation of what we call the ego—appears to reset itself, allowing users to rethink who they are and who they want to be. In short, they become more open to change. Furthermore, enough studies have been done to demonstrate that the substance is well-tolerated and not habit-forming and has remarkably few side effects, especially when compared with commonly prescribed mental health drugs. Here’s a look at what some of the research has shown to date.

Veronica Lightning Horse Perez

Access Denied

Making psilocybin more readily obtainable might seem like a good idea—but few agree on how to accomplish it.

VERONICA LIGHTNING HORSE PEREZ

believes every therapeutic modality, including energy work and crystals, has its purpose.

The board-certified therapist—who simultaneously works as a shaman, hypnotist, spiritual coach, and medicine woman—also believes in hard science. It is this mix of knowledge that has led the 40-year-old Denverite with an Apache bloodline and Lakota medicine training to be the liaison between what she calls “the suits and the hippies” in Denver’s and Colorado’s stillnascent bids to liberate magic mushrooms.

As a designated co-representative on the statewide ballot initiative campaign for decriminalization, Perez says she has big dreams for psilocybin but also big worries.

She’s concerned that Indigenous peoples’ historical wisdom and know-how will be disregarded; she’s wary of people of color being shut out of the conversation and being deprived of access to a substance that can be life-altering; and she’s disturbed by the very real possibility that a fungus that grows on six continents in the wild could be medicalized in a pricey, by-prescriptiononly way and turned into “just another drug someone can charge money for.”

She’s not alone in her doubts that Colorado can get psilocybin right in all the ways it got cannabis wrong. There are, for

Black and Indigenous diasporas through her Denver company, Yaya. “We need to get the right people in the room. We shouldn’t put an arbitrary timeline on what needs to happen and when, just so people can make money off psychedelics. Let’s not pave the way for cannabis 2.0.”

Cannabis isn’t the only model some mushroom advocates would prefer to avoid.

Over the past decade, ketamine therapy for depression has gone from unheard-of to ubiquitous. Ketamine clinics—which give

Sarah Banks

“IF I HAD MY WAY, PSILOCYBIN WOULD BE STRUCK FROM THE FEDERAL DRUG LIST AND BE NO MORE REGULATED THAN BUTTON MUSHROOMS.” example, concerns that the underground community—rife with knowledge and open to exploration—will be lost to a regulatory process that favors a for-profit, corporate, dispensarylike setting. Some say questions about social equity, which have plagued legal cannabis in Colorado, have not yet been answered in a satisfactory way in the psychedelic space either. “We need to slow down,” says Sabrina Frometa, who has worked in the movement to uplift the

infusions of the legal, dissociative anesthetic that deliver about a week’s worth of relief from symptoms of depression—began popping up across the Denver metro area in recent years. The treatments (which start at around $400 per session) are not covered by insurance because providers are using it off-label, making the therapy out of reach for many people. The ketamine model also feels very clinical, something many psilocybin advocates say is counter to how

mushrooms should be used and not how many people—particularly people of color leery of the American medical establishment—would feel comfortable taking the medicine. “Ketamine is a lab drug,” says one local guide, who adds it’s also highly addictive. “It has far less potential to be spiritual.”

Of course, there are those who say making psilocybin available in a doctor’s office or “healing center”—the language used on the ballot initiative—will make some feel more at ease. Cancer patients, for example, might like being treated by doctors and nurses.

In short, the consensus in the psychedelic community on how to move mushrooms from an illegal substance to one everyone can benefit from is that there’s very little consensus. Other than agreeing that statewide (and federal) decriminalization is paramount and that people of color should be included on any future regulatory bodies, common ground is difficult to find. To Perez, it’s all about control over a substance she says no one has the right to own. “Earth medicine belongs to no one,” she says. “We need to respect those who have kept the knowledge alive, but this belongs to the earth. If I had my way, psilocybin would be struck from the federal drug list and be no more regulated than button mushrooms.”

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Colorado was home to a robust psychedelic community long before its largest city decriminalized psilocybin. However, the 2019 rule-loosening in Denver has produced a more nurturing environment statewide, where players old and new can thrive.

PSYCHEDELIC RESEARCH & TRAINING INSTITUTE

NOWAK SOCIETY The Fort Collins–based nonprofit nurtures the psychedelic community and gives voice to the movement. In practice, that looks like Q&A sessions, professional networking get-togethers, and, this year, its first Psychedelic Education Festival, being held in Denver on October 1.

NAROPA UNIVERSITY Naropa recently announced a new certificate in psychedelicassisted therapies. In March, the first cohort of students—all professionals in psychotherapy, nursing, medicine, or chaplaincy—began the 10-month course, which teaches students about psychedelic therapy modalities that use MDMA, ketamine, and psilocybin.

Founded in 2019 in Fort Collins, PRATI provides licensed therapists and medical professionals with training on ketamine-assisted therapy and uses that model to explore the potential of other psychedelics in mental health care.

The nonprofit also hosts webinars that are open and free to the public.

PSYCHEDELIC CLUB OF DENVER This six-year-old nonprofit connects pro-psychedelic organizations (by hosting its Warehouse Party in June and December), provides harm reduction (like free checks to ensure the purity and safety of substances), and helps boost the benefits of psychedelics (through integration services).

DENVER MUSHROOM COOPERATIVE A collection of mile-high mushroom lovers, this two-yearold group meets frequently to talk about growing and using all kinds of fungi, even the nonmagical kind.

Yarygin/ Credits Tk Getty Images

LOCAL ECOSYSTEM

MYCELIUM WEB

THE FUNGUS AMONG US ALTERED STATES INTEGRATION

SPORE

Since 2019, Altered States Integration has been providing integration services to help people process the thoughts and emotions associated with psychedelic trips—without being involved in the acute psychedelic experience.

MAYA HEALTH Because there has long been psychedelic therapy going on outside of clinical trials, there’s a wealth of information to be collected from practitioners and patients about what works. This three-year-old Denver firm is gathering that real-world insight and charting it along with data from approved psychedelic research.

The results will inform best practices for care.

TELLURIDE MUSHROOM FESTIVAL This popular festival attracts mycophiles of all stripes; however, the gathering also serves as a forum for those who prefer psilocybes over shiitakes. In 2021, Paul Stamets, an expert on psilocybe mushrooms, gave a keynote speech.

Since 2020, the Society for Psychedelic Outreach, Reform, and Education has been connecting the disparate psychedelic groups in the state.

Why? To build a unified movement that pushes for policy reform, fosters social equity, and ensures a diverse array of voices are heard when decisions are made about how psilocybin will be regulated.

MCALLISTER LAW OFFICE Sean McAllister, a veteran cannabis attorney, shifted his practice’s focus to psychedelics when Denver decriminalized magic mushrooms. He also serves on the Denver Psilocybin Review Panel and has his hands all over the proposed statewide ballot initiative for November.

HELIX CONSULTING GROUP

Credits Tk

TERMINOLOGY

At his year-old Arvada public affairs firm, Kevin Matthews, the architect of Initiative 301, keeps pushing the psilocybin envelope. He became a lobbyist in 2021 and worked to get the Legislature to run a bill to decriminalize mushrooms statewide that year. That failed.

Matthews is now leading the ballot initiative push.

DECRIMINALIZATION • the removal of criminal penalties for drug law violations usually related to personal possession. Denver’s decriminalization of psilocybin makes possession (including cultivation and storage) by people 21 and older the lowest enforcement priority for police and prosecutors. The measure did not make psilocybin legal or permit its sale. A report recommending the expansion of decriminalization put forth by the Denver Psilocybin Review Panel in late 2021 could make the noncommercial exchange of mushrooms (e.g., sharing them with your friends) and communal use in private settings protected under the law as well.

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Shannon Hughes

“HE DIED WITHOUT HAVING HAD THAT RELIEF.”

Waiting for death is often more difficult than death itself.

The dying say psilocybin stems the suffering.

“WE ALL KNOW WE’RE GONNA DIE

TERMINOLOGY

one day,” she said, “but we don’t really understand that until a person in a white coat tells you.” Sitting in a chair at Denver’s Mercury Cafe, the thirtysomething brunette maintained her composure, her voice even and strong, as she explained to the assembled audience that two years before she’d been told she had incurable cancer.

Even as a licensed therapist, she didn’t know how to mentally reconcile the news that she wouldn’t get to see her children grow

up. Then, she said, she remembered reading research out of Johns Hopkins University that showed psilocybin-assisted therapy helped alleviate the existential crisis that comes with being told you have, in her case, 18 months to live.

The crowd at the Merc was full of hospice and palliative care doctors, psychiatry residents, licensed therapists, guides, and others who’d registered for the presentation put on by Fort Collins’ Nowak Society. Shannon Hughes co-founded the

DEMORALIZATION • an existential distress syndrome brought on by a terminal diagnosis that is often characterized by hopelessness, loss of meaning and purpose, and inability to cope. Dr. Stacy Fischer, an inpatient palliative care physician and researcher at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital, says the fear of death is one of the most challenging things her patients face. “Worse, we don’t have therapies to help with demoralization,” Fischer says.

“Antidepressants don’t work in this population.” That’s why she’s encouraged by the re-emergence of research into psilocybin. She’s so enthused by its potential she’s been collaborating with New York University on a funding request from the National Cancer Institute to execute a mid-stage trial with 200 patients split between Colorado and New York. The goal would be to explore psilocybin-assisted therapy on a diverse set of late-stage cancer patients.

“The [original] study was all older white adults who were highly educated,” Fischer says. “That’s not what we want. We want greater representation.”

Sarah Banks

End Game

five-year-old nonprofit that focuses on education about and access to psychedelic therapies in the wake of her 39-year-old husband’s death from colon cancer. “We looked into psilocybin for treating end-oflife anxiety and depression,” she says, “but it wasn’t accessible. He died without having had that relief, and I asked myself, Why the fuck don’t we have access to this stuff?

Her indignation led to a few small gatherings in 2017 and 2018, but recently—and despite the pandemic—hundreds of people have been showing up for the monthly meetings she says provide a space for dialogue and networking among those who “believe these medicines belong to the people.” On that night, the congregation was hushed as the thirtysomething therapist explained that she tried to find a clinical trial, but when she didn’t qualify she decided she didn’t care that it was illegal.

“I have cancer; what do I have to lose?” she said. “Yes, I’m a soccer mom and I live in the suburbs, but I’m doing this.”

She connected with a guide and has used psilocybin-assisted therapy to mentally reset a few times a year. Its antidepressant effects have been life-altering for her, lifting her mood, she says, for months at a time: “It feels like I’ve done a year’s worth of good therapy in one day.” She recognizes she’s very fortunate to be able to pay $800 per session and acknowledges not everyone agrees how to make psychedelic therapy more accessible without debasing Indigenous traditions or medicalizing it in a potentially unsavory way. But she also says finding a path forward is imperative. “As a professional, I know we need better tools to fight the immense mental health crisis we’re facing,” she said. As an everyday person facing her own mortality, she says the therapy has allowed her to find some peace and acceptance. “I processed a lot of things,” she said. “Psilocybin gives me a space to explore really deep fears and confront them.”

THE FUNGUS AMONG US

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? MACRODOSING

The Argument For: Macrodosing—that is, taking a large enough dose of psilocybin to trip (usually three grams or more of dried mushroom)—is the most effective therapeutic option if done with intention and with guidance. Only with large doses do people have the opportunity to experience long-lasting shifts in their beliefs and behaviors.

The Argument Against: If the set and setting are wrong, if there’s no intention, or if integration is ignored, a macrodose can be anxiety-inducing, scary, or downright traumatic. Another important note: For those with pre-existing serious mental health conditions, such as schizophrenia or acute suicidal ideation, a psilocybin trip can cause further destabilization.

MICRODOSING Yarygin/Getty Images (2)

The cases for macrodosing and microdosing.

The Argument For: Microdosing, or taking sub-perceptible doses (0.05 to 0.3 grams of dried mushrooms) of psilocybin on a fairly regular basis, is a relatively new notion. Proponents suggest upsides include less anxiety, better focus, more creativity, and increased open-mindedness without full-on ego dissolution. Plus, being able to get these benefits without having to block off six hours for an expensive guided trip with the right set and setting makes psilocybin more accessible to more people.

The Argument Against: Dosing can be tricky; there’s been limited research into the effectiveness, as well as into any deleterious effects; and some have suggested microdosing is akin to the gentrification of psychedelics, making their use more palatable to the mainstream while ignoring the science-backed value of macrodose journeys.

Home Grown

I decided to grow magic mushrooms in my Denver basement. It’s been an adventure.

MUSHROOMS GROW IN MY BACKYARD. They proliferate in the park near my house.

I see them lining trails in the high country. It seemed to me that, as living things go, mushrooms must not be all that fussy about where they sprout. And that’s mostly true.

Or, maybe more accurately, it’s not difficult to create the environmental conditions necessary for toadstools to fruit, even in the basement of your Denver home.

Of course, I didn’t want to grow buttons or bellas. I was hoping to nurture psilocybes, which decriminalization says I can do without worrying about going to jail. As one might imagine, though, ordering a mushroom grow kit for psychedelic mushrooms off Amazon isn’t possible, even if you have Prime. Instead, I would have to source the growing supplies separately from the spores, which, because they don’t contain psilocybin (only the mushroom flesh does), are actually legal in 47 states, including Colorado.

Finding most of the materials I needed required nothing more than a trip to Home Depot or a local nursery. But if you’d prefer something more turnkey, there are area purveyors who have all the gear, so long as you agree you are absolutely not growing psilocybes. For example, Denver’s Monster Mushroom Company, which leans hard into the trippy vibe but is very clear about the law, has a great all-in-one mushroom grow kit ($270) for cultivating, you know, whatever kind of mushroom you fancy.

Kit in hand, I then had to source my spores, the one-cell reproductive units that get busy to produce the fleshy part of a mushroom. This was the tricky part. Not because they’re difficult to find but because it’s not exactly clear which sellers are legit. (FYI: Several people in Denver’s psychedelic community mentioned Sporeworks.) Much like growing-supplies vendors, spore retailers are transparent that their products should not be germinated and may decline to sell to you if you even mention those intentions. If you play it cool, though, you can have a syringe of Psilocybe cubensis spores delivered to your door for less than $15.

At that point, it’s YouTube time. Type in “how to grow mushrooms,” and dozens of step-by-step videos pop up. Fair warning: It’s a long process and a bit of a science experiment. Your spores might not hook up. Your basement might be too chilly for optimal growth. You might not keep your tub moist enough. If all goes perfectly, you should have multiple flushes of fresh mushrooms in roughly nine weeks. If not, it might take longer—or you might have to start over. But, honestly, figuring it all out is half of the intrigue. The other half, of course, is sampling your harvest. m

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THIS

LAND YOUR THE TERRAIN NOW KNOWN AS COLORADO IS RICH WITH THE TRAILS, STORIES, TRADITIONS, AND KNOWLEDGE OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE LIVED HERE SINCE THE BEGINNING OF MEMORY. IT’S ALSO ETCHED WITH THE TRAUMA OF CENTURIES OF VIOLENT COLONIZATION OF INDIGENOUS INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES. THE CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE OF LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT AIMS TO RECKON WITH THIS PAST AND ATONE FOR HISTORICAL HARMS—BUT DOES IT WORK?

BY KATE SIBER I L L U S T R A T I O N S B Y M E R Y O U N G

LAND?

DURING THE LIMINAL TIME BETWEEN WINTER AND SPRING, THE UTES LISTEN FOR THUNDER. WHETHER IT’S A RUMBLING OR A ROAR, THE SKY’S FIRST SONG IS A SIGNAL: IT’S TIME TO PREPARE FOR THE BEAR DANCE. It began long ago, as Matthew J. Box, the Bear Dance Chief for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, tells the story. Two brothers went east into the mountains to hunt for days, maybe weeks. As they stood on a rocky cliff and peered into a valley, they noticed a female bear, just out of hibernation, dancing and scratching a tree as if in a mystical choreography. One brother descended into the meadow to live and be with the bear, while the other returned to assure the members of the tribe of the other’s safety. The bear taught the brother many things, including song, dance, and ways of living. “This was the time,” Box says, “when the people and the animals still spoke to each other.”

Eventually, the brother and the bear made plans to return home, and once they did they shared these learnings with the community. For as long as they can remember, before Spanish explorers first made a record of the dance in the 1500s, the Utes, known as the Nuu-ciu, or “the people,” in the Ute language, have embraced the rejuvenation of spring, celebrated the community, and paid respect to the spirit of the bear, which gave them the gift of healing themselves. Nowadays, the Bear Dance unfolds over four days around the last weekend in May. Some of the Ute dancers sew their own moccasins and decorate their own 108

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regalia with beadwork as they prepare—physically, mentally, and spiritually—for months. You, yourself, are invited, but not as a tourist. To come, you must participate.

In a corral made of juniper trees with an entrance looking east to greet the rising sun, dancers line up facing one another.

The hum of insects in the cottonwood trees, the deep, full sound of the singers, and the rasp of the growlers—special wooden instruments that are used only for this occasion—fill the air.

Everyone participates: teenagers and parents, elders and children. The Bear Dance uplifts and honors women, and a woman may choose her partner with a flick of her shawl. If you are inside the corral, the custom is you can’t refuse when asked. As the dancers step in and out, the fringes of the women’s shawls sway, floating over the land as if part earth, part air.

At the end of their dancing, when the people depart the Bear Dance grounds for the year, they leave a plume, if they have one, or another belonging on one of the juniper trees at the corral’s entrance as a symbol of all they are leaving behind—their grief, hardship, and troubles. As they walk away, they don’t look back.

T H E S O U T H E R N U T E I N D I A N T R I B E hosts the Bear Dance in a corral 25 miles southwest of my home in Durango, and I’d like to be able to say that I have attended numerous times. The truth is that I only learned about it a couple of years ago when I picked up a newspaper, the Southern Ute Drum, in my local coffeeshop. As a transplant to Colorado from the East Coast and the daughter of a German father and Canadian mother with British roots, I was looking for resources to help me better understand the history of the land upon which I live and its original inhabitants, as well as contemporary Indigenous cultures and issues in the region, after a pivotal incident I had experienced the year before.

On a statewide road trip in February 2019, I headed to the Eastern Plains of Colorado to visit the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, a park that memorializes the day in 1864 when 675 Colorado volunteer soldiers brutally murdered more than 230 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of whom were women and children, and then paraded their remains through the streets of Denver. The 1865 Little Arkansas Treaty promised reparations to survivors, but, to this day, they have not been paid.

The trauma still echoes through the generations.

The park was established in 2007. Simple in layout, it encompasses a bluff, the sinuous curves of Sand Creek, and stately cottonwood stands—all land restored to its natural state from ranching and agricultural activities. It’s now a place for storytelling, prayer, grieving, and reflection. Even though it can be difficult to get to—a three-hour drive from Denver capped with a rattle down a dusty, washboard dirt road—people come from all over the world to learn, listen to stories told by rangers, walk trails through the grasslands, and pay respects.

Not unexpectedly, having time and space for reflection stirred up a cauldron of emotions in me. Later that day, I made my way to Denver, and, as I drove through the asphalt grid, I viewed the city with different eyes. Instead of only seeing the contemporary reality of buildings, roads, signs, and overpasses, I perceived it through the lens of time. In my mind’s eye, I saw the land’s past self superimposed on its current reality, as if an ever-present

ghost. The juxtaposition of the two scenes—the vast, undulating plains potent with tragedy and the modern monuments of concrete and glass— unsettled something deep within me.

My cursory schoolbook understanding morphed into a visceral feeling of despair. I wasn’t just thinking about colonization at a dispassionate remove but feeling it as an integral part of my own history, too. I felt ashamed: It was clear just how much I had been oblivious to a very important element of my own relationship to—and context within— the beloved land that I call home and the welfare of my neighbors.

Not long before that experience, I’d started to notice the ubiquity of land acknowledgments. Formally acknowledging land is originally an Indigenous practice, a gesture of gratitude, connection, and the expression of a respectful relationship with nature that dates back centuries, if not longer.

In settler communities—that is, nonNative communities—the custom has become more widespread within the past decade, first in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and now in the United States. At their simplest, land acknowledgments recognize the original inhabitants of the land upon which an individual or organization lives or works. This magazine’s office, for example, sits on the ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho and has also been home to the Ute, Kiowa, Lakota, Comanche, Shoshone, and Apache peoples. Land acknowledgments may also go further to recognize the impact and trauma of colonization, express gratitude for Indigenous stewardship of the land, and celebrate the resilience and contributions of Indigenous communities and individuals today.

Over the past five years, I have heard land acknowledgments read at the beginning of meetings. I have seen them on websites and in email signatures. Cities from Denver and Longmont to Tempe, Arizona, and Portland, Oregon, have adopted these statements in the past couple of years and now read them aloud before city council meetings. Universities post them on their websites. At Fort Lewis College, in Durango, an official reads a land acknowledgment before sporting events. It is also printed on class syllabi.

The ways in which I saw the practice in my professional and personal life made me both curious and uneasy. Making Indigenous presence more visible seemed like a good exercise, but the statements often felt like Band-Aids on gaping, centuries-deep wounds. It felt as if there was so much left unsaid, and so much left undone. Some have indeed criticized the practice as performative or perfunctory. Still, I wondered if land acknowledgments could be a gateway into deeper understanding that could then form the basis of beneficial action. And, if so, how?

D U R A N G O A N D T H E S U R R O U N D I N G Four Corners region, where I have lived for 17 years, is layered deeply with the intersecting stories of human beings. According to the Utes, many of whom reside on reservations in southwestern Colorado and northeastern Utah, their people have lived here since the beginning of time.

Within their ancestral lands and hunting grounds—which stretch from the mountains and canyons of Utah, all the way across Colorado, into the Oklahoma Panhandle, and down into the deserts of northern New Mexico—the remnants of Bear Dance corrals grace the land. Among the mountains of Colorado’s Western Slope, wickiups, conical dwellings made of boughs, and migratory trails remain in the backcountry, some dating to the late 1800s—well past the establishment of reservations, suggesting that the Ute people defiantly stayed on their land despite attempts

by European settlers to forcibly remove them.

Many others who moved away centuries ago retain deep ties to this land. The Hopi, who have lived in 12 villages on three mesas in northeastern Arizona since time immemorial, can trace some of their clans back through the greater Durango area. Petroglyphs related to migration dot the walls of canyons in the Four Corners region. After centuries-old buried Native remains and objects have resurfaced during construction projects in the community, the Hopi have claimed and repatriated them.

The Navajos’ ancestral lands extend through the Four Corners area to the peaks just outside of Durango, and Pueblo communities—such as the Laguna, Acoma, Zuni, and Rio Grande—all currently in New Mexico, also chart the activities of their ancestors nearby. For many who currently reside here, APRIL 2022

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IS THIS LAND YOUR LAND?

as well as those who no longer do, the land bears a gossamer web of ancestral connections.

“My personal perspective is, this is home,” says TJ Atsye, speaking of the area around Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado.

Atsye is a Laguna Pueblo tribal member and former Mesa Verde National Park employee who created and voiced the park’s audio driving tour. “Just because we no longer live here does not mean that we have lost that connection,” she says. “This is considered home. You come to visit it. You come to give prayer offerings.

You come to see and reconnect with home and the ancient ones.”

There are different ways to know history and heritage, and in the way I have been taught, dates, periods, categories, and bullet points are the norm. Many people have come to understand history and heritage through different means, such as story, ceremony, and relationship. When I decided to learn more about the land and its people, I didn’t know where to begin, and sometimes different ways of knowing were at odds with one another. Western archaeologists, for example, believe the Utes arrived here in the 1600s, based on physical evidence, but the Utes themselves say they’ve been here for far longer. As people who traveled in relationship to the flow of the seasons, they left scant impacts on the land.

I’m not sure how to reconcile these things, but maybe on some level, they don’t need reconciliation, because they reflect different aspects or interpretations of the same story. Or, perhaps, they will be reconciled in the future as more research and details come to light.

The more I discovered, the more I began to see the land on which I live through different and illuminating lenses. The names I have always known and used for certain landmarks, for example, are not the only names that belong to these places. Dibé Ntsaa, which rises in imposing glory in the La Plata Mountains west of Durango, is one of the sacred mountains that define the ancestral lands of the Navajo, the Diné in the Navajo language. I have always known it to be Hesperus Mountain. Within Hopitutskwa, the Four Corners region the Hopi have lived on and traveled through over the centuries, the Yotavayu river flows through the sage flats and canyons not far from where I now live. I have always known the river by the name Spanish explorers gave it: the San Juan.

I also gained insight on the ways in which I’d had blinders on. When I first moved to Durango, in 2005, the history of the previous century and a half was impossible to miss. As with many Colorado mountain towns, the community’s biggest industry, tourism, is built on a celebration of the rowdy newcomers who streamed in during the 19th century in search of quick fortune and new beginnings. They were largely of European descent but also included Black Americans, Mexicans, and Chinese. Learning about the wild tales of prospectors and miners, cowboys and cowgirls, barroom shootouts and backroom brothels may seem innocuous, but the primacy and valorization of the recent past in the town’s mythology seemed to invite and ingrain, at least for non-Native people like me, a certain kind of cultural amnesia.

On a subconscious level, one could conceive of the land before

“JUST BECAUSE WE NO LONGER LIVE HERE DOES NOT MEAN THAT

WE HAVE LOST THAT CONNECTION. THIS IS CONSIDERED HOME. YOU COME TO VISIT IT. YOU COME TO GIVE PRAYER OFFERINGS.” The recent unearthing of 23,000-year-old fossilized human footprints in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park, for instance, begins to align Western research with the stories that Indigenous elders have kept safe for millennia through oral tradition.

As I undertook the process of filling in the gaps in my education, I explored resources that are publicly available and paid for professionally guided tours. In addition to speaking with many Native people who live and work near my Durango home, I watched videos and read histories on tribal websites. I leafed through tribal newspapers, went to art exhibits, and pored over history books. I perused the work of organizations supporting Indigenous sovereignty, culture, and rights, and I scanned social media for news and events. I scrolled through a fourth-grade school curriculum on Ute history, culture, and contemporary issues. Seeking road maps, I also read the land acknowledgments of local organizations, which invariably turned up more questions than answers.

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colonization as a kind of tabula rasa, effectively erasing the living presence of the people who have been here for as long as they can remember and have never left.

L A S T FA L L , I B U R I E D M Y S E L F in archaeological records and books

at the Animas Museum a few blocks from my house and persuaded a local archaeologist, Mona Charles, to have lunch with me. I learned that people have likely been here, whether living or passing through, since the last glaciers receded up the valley at least 10,000 years ago. Projectile points found in the area date to between 10,000 and 5,500 B.C.E., and there’s evidence that people who lived centuries ago picked up these even more ancient projectile points and either used them or perhaps collected them as curiosities.

Different groups of humans have always interacted with one another through both space and time. In hidden caves that

overlook a trail I often hike in Falls Creek, amateur archaeologists in the 1930s discovered mummies, jewelry, sandals, and various possessions belonging to people who lived some 2,000 years ago. A few blocks from my home, a gravel pit turned up an entire village that dates to the 820s. It’s now an apartment complex.

“Some people say you can’t dig anywhere without finding something,” Susan Jones, a board member for the Animas Museum, told me one day this past fall. Durango old-timers, she said, remember bicycling around kivas in the Crestview neighborhood decades ago as new houses were springing up.

Other residents remember finding arrowheads and pottery in an ancestral Pueblo village that was destroyed with the construction of a prominent water tower on Animas Mountain, which I can see from my living room window.

If the region’s history had once felt distant, it now felt living and breathing.

Based on the sheer number of archaeological sites and pit houses found in Durango and its immediate vicinity, archaeologists believe the population boomed and thousands of people lived here in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Durango was literally built on top of the vast remnants of multiple civilizations that had started to become smaller starting sometime in the 13th century.

How did I not know this? “Nobody does,” Jones told me.

“Durango doesn’t want you to know.” While some conscientious contractors and landowners willingly arrange for archaeological surveys on new sites, there are no local regulations governing archaeological discoveries on private land. Since the 1880s and continuing through today, settlers have quite literally paved over the evidence of both past and more contemporary occupation in the name of a certain kind of progress.

History doesn’t conform to tidy narratives, and within the interwoven stories of individuals, families, and peoples who have lived in Colorado, there are tales of friendship and betrayal; fruitful trading and merciless raids; and greed, brutality, and altruism. But the systematic deceit and injustice embedded within multiple treaties between the United States and tribal leaders and the cumulative impact of the trauma of colonization are well-documented.

As white settlers devoured more and more land in the 19th century, new treaties supplanted the word of prior treaties, continually shrinking the territories of Native people through broken promises. In the same treaty that promised reparations to the survivors of the Sand Creek Massacre, for example, the Cheyenne and Arapaho were banished from their homelands in Colorado. The Brunot Agreement of 1874 coerced the Utes into opening the snowy bastion of the San Juan Mountains to

settlement and mining. They were subsequently forced onto reservations that represented a sliver of their homelands and compelled into a foreign way of life that threatened to destroy the people’s bond to the land and the natural world, which had always provided food, medicine, and spiritual sustenance.

Perhaps most important, the process of colonization is not over. For many Native Americans, it is experienced in the present tense. Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk, a former Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council member, currently serves as the cross-cultural programs manager for the Montezuma Land Conservancy and is working to reconnect tribal members with the land. She recalls that her father was part of one of the last groups of Ute Mountain Utes taken from their families and forced to assimilate through boarding schools—and that the grief and loss is continuing.

“He experienced the negative impacts of forcibly being told not to speak your language or sing your songs or play your music and things like that in the school and was forcibly taught English,” she says. “He said, you know, one of the things we don’t realize is the way we live, the way we talk, the language we speak in isn’t our language. The systems that we live in, this world we live in, really isn’t the world that our elders and ancestors lived in. It’s not the life, the process, the way we brought food to our people, and how we interacted with one another. The way we’re doing things right now is in the process of colonization.

I am who I am today talking to you all because this is how I was forcibly educated to speak, and this is how I’m sharing. In CONTINUED ON PAGE 126 my world, it wouldn’t be like this.”

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Couture Colorado Special Adver tising Section

WEDDINGS and CELEBRATIONS GUIDE 2022

It is an honor to share the wedding of Governor Jared Polis and First Gentleman Marlon Reis.

It is the first same-sex marriage of a sitting United States governor.

THESE TWO MET IN SEPTEMBER OF 2003 IN A CHATROOM and agreed to meet the next day at The Boulder Bookstore, followed by lunch at Nabil’s which Jared had recently opened on Pearl Street in Boulder.

Seventeen years later in 2020, Jared proposed to Marlon.

C O N T I N U E R E A D I N G O N PA G E 1 1 4

Check out the full interview at couturecolorado.com/realweddings/polis

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PHOTO CREDIT: CASSIDY BROOK

2 0 2 2 W E DDI NG S & CE LE BRA TIONS GUIDE During these 17 years of dating,

Yom Kippur—the most sacred day on

there was still a lot of change

the Jewish calendar, observed around

happening with marriage equality

the world by a day-long period of

and acceptance. It wasn’t until 2015

fasting—it was important to them that

for the historic ruling of Obergfell v.

they provide a truly wonderful meal.

Hodges requiring all states to grant

The wedding meal was prepared by

same-sex marriages and recognize

Chef Chloe Coscarelli. Coscarelli

same-sex marriages granted in other

was the first vegan chef to capture

states. Covid hit in 2020 and both

the top prize on Food Network’s

Jared and Marlon fell ill with the

Cupcake Wars.

virus. A week into the infection, Marlon had to be hospitalized.

As he left for the hospital, Jared proposed. The pandemic put things in perspective for the couple and made them realize that there is no better time than the present.

The al fresco reception featured classic white linens, gorgeous white and yellow florals, and hand-drawn place cards with animal species

Special Adver tising Section

TOP 5 WEDDING TRENDS We got the scoop for 2022 wedding trends! Make your wedding a success with these top five trends from timesaving save-the-dates to wedding registries.

native to Colorado. The couple feels blessed to live in a place so rich with treasures of the natural world, and they feel it is important to do their part to protect the planet for future generations, so Heather Dwight, the wedding planner, ensured that their wedding was a zero waste affair. •

1

Virtual Save the Date

With Covid, even wedding invitations have gone virtual. It is no longer a taboo to send your save-the-dates over email. In fact, it can be a major lifesaver, allowing real time communication with your guests.

2

Classic Weddings

With the help of the hit show Bridgerton, traditional classic weddings are trending in 2022. And, yes, this means pearls are back.

3

Satellite bars are a simple way to spice up your reception. Say yes to a tequila tasting bar, DIY mimosa bar, spiked lemonade bar, candy bar, cigar rolling bar…the possibilities are endless.

Jared and Marlon were married at the Mary Rippon Theater and Shakespeare Gardens at University of Colorado which holds a deep personal significance to their family. The couple’s 10-year-old son composed the procession music, and their beloved pup, Gia, served as an official witness—her pawprint is proudly displayed on the marriage certificate!

Given that the couple were married on their 18th Anniversary—a sacred number in Judaism, representing

PLANNING + DESIGN | Calluna Events callunaevents.com | @callunaevents PHOTOGRAPHY | Jocelyn Augustino jocelynaugustino.com @photosbyjocelyn FLORALS | The Perfect Petal theperfectpetal.com | @theperfectpetal PLACE CARDS, TABLE NAMES + MENUS Lana’s Shop | lanasshop.com | @lanasshop CATERING | Chef Chloe Coscarelli chefchloe.com | @chefchloe

‘Life’—and that it happened to fall on 114

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Multiple and Specialty Bars

W E D D I N G S & C E L E B R A T I O N S G U I D E // April 2022

4

Experiential Wedding Registries

Choose life experiences over material goods with an experiential registry.

Really, you can register for snorkeling and a ski trip.

5

Earthy, Nature-Inspired Palettes

Move over cool gray. Weddings, just like interior design, are featuring warmer earthy tones.

2022 W EDDINGS & C EL EBRATIONS GUID E

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2 0 2 2 W E DDI NG S & CE LE BRA TIONS GUIDE

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Your

Big Day

weekend Mountain weddings just 75 miles from Denver.

Photo Credit: Dani Cowan Photography

Located 15 Minutes from Winter Park, CO | (970) 726-3773 | devilsthumbranch.com

DINING GUIDE $

U N D E R $ 10

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$ 26 A N D H I G H E R.

Brutø

SYMBOL KEY Indicates a restaurant featured in 5280 for the first time (though not necessarily a restaurant that has just opened).

A A5

$$$$

Downtown / International At the Wolf’s Tailor’s sister restaurant at the Dairy Block, executive chef Michael Diaz de Leon highlights heritage grains and other local ingredients with a menu of fresh-baked breads, wood-fired proteins, and vegetable-forward dishes.

Reservations accepted. 1801 Blake St., 720-3252195. Lunch, Dinner

C

$$$$

Downtown / Steak House The team behind Forget Me Not and Tap and Burger offers a refreshing chophouse experience in a delightfully funky bar and dining room. Reservations accepted. 1600 15th St., 303-623-0534. Dinner Acreage by Stem Ciders

$$

Lafayette / Seasonal Stem Ciders’ ciderhouse and eatery pairs its drinks with house-grown produce and sustainable sourcing. Reservations accepted for parties of nine or more. 1380 Horizon Ave., Lafayette, 720-443-3007. Lunch, Dinner

Apple Blossom

$$

Downtown / Seasonal At this seasonally focused eatery inside the Hyatt Centric Downtown Denver, siblings Paul and Aileen Reilly serve American comforts. Don’t miss the decadently rich and crispy chicken-fried duck livers. Reservations accepted.

822 18th St., 303-301-8999. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

Avelina

$$$$

Downtown / American This upscale LoDo restaurant offers a sleek atmosphere and beautifully composed plates with worldly flavors. Sample the roasted Icelandic cod or wagyu beef carpaccio.

Reservations accepted. 1550 17th St., Ste. 120, 720-904-6711. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

Bellota

RiNo / Mexican Chef Manny Barella cooks elevated regional Mexican fare inspired by his Monterrey childhood inside the Source. Don’t miss the fried quesadilla de requeson. Reservations accepted. The Source, 3350 Brighton Blvd., 720-542-3721. Lunch, Dinner

Brasserie Brixton

$$

$$$

Cole / French Pair the likes of steak frites, pâté with house-baked sourdough, and other comforting French specialties with a glass of wine at this romantic neighborhood bistro. Reservations accepted.

3701 N. Williams St., 720-617-7911. Dinner, Brunch

APRIL 2022

Cantina Loca

$$

LoHi / Mexican Dana Rodriguez’s LoHi taqueria invites diners to connect over plates of tacos, snacks, and drinks infused with her own line of Doña Loca agave spirits. Reservations accepted. 2890 Zuni St., 303-284-6738. Dinner Cart-Driver

RiNo / Pizza Inspired by Italy’s roadside cafes, Cart-Driver slings oysters, wood-fired pizzas, and Prosecco on tap. Also try the Highland location.

Reservations accepted. 2500 Larimer St., 303-292-3553. Dinner

Cattivella

$$

D Dio Mio

$$

Dry Storage

$$

RiNo / Italian One thing you can count on at Alexander Figura, Spencer White, and Lulu Clair’s fast-casual Italian eatery: perfect pasta. Try the cacio e pepe or the squid ink fusilli with blue crab.

The house-made sourdough is heavenly. Reservations accepted for parties of eight or more. 3264 Larimer St., 303-562-1965. Dinner

Boulder / Cafe Savor coffee and carbs at this cafe and grain mill. An exquisite selection of pastries, breads, and sandwiches are made from scratch daily. Reservations not accepted. 3601 Arapahoe Ave., Boulder, 720-420-0918. Breakfast, Lunch

E

$$$

Central Park / Italian Chef Elise Wiggins offers rustic, wood-fired Italian fare from a sprawling chef’s counter. Go for the mouthwatering seasonal pizzas and fresh pastas. Reservations accepted. 10195 E. 29th Dr., Ste. 110, 303-645-3779. Dinner Chez Maggy

brasserie inside the Thompson Hotel. Reservations accepted. 1616 Market St., 720-794-9544. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

$$

Downtown / French Acclaimed chef Ludo Lefebvre plates up Colorado-inspired French classics at this

Early Bird

Westminster / American This all-day breakfast eatery offers a bevy of local ingredients. Offerings include open-faced omelets and crème brûlée French toast. Also try the Greenwood Village location. Reservations not accepted. 11940 Bradburn Blvd., Westminster, 303-469-9641.

Breakfast, Lunch, Brunch

$

DELICIOUS ROOTS

B

118 5 2 8 0

$ 16 T O $ 25

Visit our online listings at 5280.com/ restaurants.

Rocky Hunter and David Grant are getting Denverites hooked on vegetables, one plate at a time. The chefs opened Gladys inside Edgewater Public Market last November to serve vegan riffs on comfort food favorites. Try the Reuben sandwich, a masterpiece of celery root “pastrami,” tangy chicory sauerkraut, and horseradish crème fraîche on toasted marble rye that is even more crave-worthy than the meaty original.

Sarah Banks

PRICE KEY

(Average Entrée)

Want More Dining Options?

DINING GUIDE El Noa Noa

$$

Lincoln Park / Mexican Sample traditional Mexican food alongside top-notch margaritas at this quaint and colorful local favorite. Reservations not accepted. 722 Santa Fe Dr., 303-623-9968. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

El Tepehuan

$

Englewood / Mexican This relocated Englewood restaurant has been serving its brand of authentic and affordable Mexican food for more than 40 years. Stop by for the huevos rancheros or carne asada. Reservations accepted. 3495 S. Broadway, Englewood, 303-781-0243. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Arvada / American Arvada’s first food hall is home to eight dining concepts and Chef Kitchen, a supper club featuring a rotating roster of chefs.15177 Candelas Parkway, Arvada, 419-349-7468. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner French 75

$$

G Gaetano’s

Gladys

$$$

$

Aurora / Ethiopian At this cheery cafe, pastry chefowner Hiwot Solomon serves Ethiopian breakfast plates and pastries. Reservations not accepted.

10782 E. Iliff Ave, Aurora, 720-949-1703. Breakfast

$$

Berkeley / Pizza Craft pizza and local brews are this spot’s forte. Load up your pie with toppings such as blackberry barbecue sauce and pickled jalapeños. Reservations not accepted. 3920 Tennyson St., 303-477-7000. Lunch, Dinner

I

$$

Edgewater / American This food stall inside Edgewater Public Market serves plant-based comforts such as a rotating seasonal beans and grains dish and a carnivore-converting celery-root Reuben sandwich. Reservations not accepted. 5505 W. 20th Ave., Ste. 116, Edgewater. Lunch, Dinner Gyu-Kaku Japanese BBQ Dining

HiRa Cafe & Patisserie

Hops & Pie

$$$$

Downtown / French Mizuna’s younger, more casual sibling features approachable French bistro fare. Visit for the newly revamped happy hour to enjoy $1 pours of Prosecco and Miller High Life and $4 bottomless truffle fries. Reservations accepted.

717 17th St., Ste. B, 303-405-7575. Lunch, Dinner

H

$$$$

Country Club / New American James Beard Award–winning chef Alex Seidel’s small-but-mighty kitchen focuses on seasonal dishes that are big on flavor. Many of the ingredients come straight from Seidel’s farm. Diners flock for the pasta carbonara.

Reservations accepted. 1313 E. Sixth Ave., 303-831-1962. Dinner

Highland / Italian This comfy neighborhood eatery features old-school favorites, such as chicken Parmesan. Reservations accepted. 3760 Tejon St., 303-455-9852. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

F Freedom Street Social

Fruition Restaurant

Il Posto

$$$$

RiNo / Italian Sample Andrea Frizzi’s imaginative Italian cuisine in sleek, urban environs. Don’t miss the decadent seasonal risotto. Reservations accepted. 2601 Larimer St., 303-394-0100.

Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

$$$

Downtown / Japanese This Japan-based chain boasts tabletop grills on which diners cook proteins and slings noodles, rice dishes, and appetizers like tuna poke nachos. Reservations accepted. 1998 18th St., 720-726-4068. Lunch, Dinner

Imperial Chinese

$$$

Baker / Chinese This stalwart offers Cantonese, Mandarin, and Sichuan food in an elegant setting.

Reservations accepted. 431 S. Broadway, 303-698-2800. Lunch, Dinner

INST

>D >D an e

Timeless days, extraordinary adventures.

- Cli - Cli

You You

Thi VisitQuesta.com

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DINING GUIDE

J J’s Noodles Star Thai 2

Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar

$

Westwood / Thai This traditional Thai spot has developed a cult following over the years. Regulars gravitate toward the rib-sticking comforts of tom yum soup, drunken noodles, and pad thai, but savvy diners can find less familiar fare such as tod mun (fried, ground catfish mixed with curry paste and chopped string bean) or pineapple fried rice.

Reservations not accepted. 945 S. Federal Blvd., 303-922-5495. Lunch, Dinner

Jerusalem Restaurant

K

$$$

Downtown / Seafood Enjoy sustainable seafood in an upbeat atmosphere. Specialties include the raw oyster bar and seasonally composed plates. Multiple locations. Reservations accepted. 1539 17th St., 303-292-5767. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

$$

University / Middle Eastern You can’t beat this spot’s tasty, affordable, and traditional Middle Eastern fare, which includes tender gyros, silky baba ghanoush, and crispy sambusas. Don’t miss the tender spring lamb shanks. Reservations accepted. 1890 E. Evans Ave., 303-777-8828. Lunch, Dinner

Karma Asian

$$

Speer / Asian Go out to this trendy eatery to sample a variety of Asian tapas (such as toothsome spicy edamame), or get more bang for your buck with the Thai Bang Bang Chicken and Shrimp. Reservations not accepted. 22 S. Broadway, 303-871-0167.

Lunch, Dinner

The Kitchen

$$$

Downtown / American Seasonally inspired classics, an excellent craft cocktail, beer, and wine menu, and warm hospitality are the draws at the Kitchen. Also try the Boulder location. Reservations accepted.

1520 16th St., 303-623-3127. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

L La Loteria

$

Speer / Mexican Former food truck La Loteria’s brick-and-mortar shop serves up fresh Mexican dishes inspired by chef/owner Edgar Silvestre’s family recipes. Reservations not accepted. 42 S. Broadway St., 720-389-9055. Lunch, Dinner

Leven Deli Co.

$$

Golden Triangle / Deli Classic deli meets California cool at this brightly lit breakfast and lunch spot. Get a taste of the mouthwatering, house-made pastrami on this spot’s famous Reuben sandwich or go for a fresh and crisp Lil’ Gems salad. Reservations not accepted. 123 W. 12th Ave., 303-325-5691.

Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Locanda Del Borgo

$$$

LoHi Steakbar

$$$

Los Cabos

$$$

Hilltop / Italian This modern setting offers authentic house-made pasta and entrées cooked on a woodburning grill. Reservations accepted. 5575 E. Third Ave., 303-388-0282. Lunch, Dinner

Highland / American Steak is an obvious favorite at this casual bar, but you can find burgers, chicken, and fish on the menu, too. Try a specialty cocktail, like a Moscow mule or a lavender ‘75. Reservations accepted. 3200 Tejon St., 303-927-6334. Dinner

Downtown / Peruvian This cozy eatery serves Peruvian specialties with Cantonese and Spanish influences. Don’t miss the rotisserie chicken.

Reservations accepted. 1525 Champa St., 303-595-3232. Lunch, Dinner

M Mehak India’s Aroma

$$

Cherry Creek / Indian There’s not a buffet in sight at this upscale Indian restaurant, where everything from chicken korma to lamb vindaloo is on the menu.

Don’t miss the lamb pasanda, tender meat swimming in a cashew, coconut, and almond curry sauce.

Reservations accepted. 250 Steele St., Ste. 100, 720-638-9350. Lunch, Dinner

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Shared Moment, 9”x 12”, oil on canvas © Karen Roehl

Rwesterno inspiration ehl

Represented By: TieRRa MaR GalleRy 225 Canyon Rd, SanTa Fe, nM 87501 www.TieRRaMaRGalleRy.CoM kaRenRoehl.CoM

DINING GUIDE Mercantile Dining & Provision

Mono Mono Korean Fried Chicken

$$

Downtown / Korean Savor crispy Korean fried chicken wings along with sides like kimchi and pickled daikon and starters like gochujang-slathered spicy rice cakes at this industrial eatery. Also try the Congress Park location. Reservations not accepted.

1550 Blake St., 720-379-6567. Lunch, Dinner

N Narrative

O

$$$

Downtown / New American Award-winning chef Alex Seidel offers contemporary farm-to-table fare, including pasta dishes and family-style plates for the table. Reservations accepted. Union Station, 1701 Wynkoop St., Ste. 155, 720-460-3733.

Lunch, Dinner

Olive & Finch

$$

Osteria Marco

$$$

City Park West / International This spot serves artisan sandwiches, soups, salads, and house-made pastries made daily. Also try the Cherry Creek location. Reservations not accepted. 1552 E. 17th Ave., 303-832-8663. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Downtown / Italian This casual tavern features deep-set wooden booths and a spacious bar. The menu lists approachable eats, such as house-made mozzarella and rustic pizzas. Reservations accepted.

1453 Larimer St., 303-534-5855. Lunch, Dinner

P

$$$

Cherry Creek / American Enjoy gussied-up American favorites, such as shrimp and grits with Tabasco butter. Visit for brunch and enjoy the BLT toast. Reservations accepted. 222 Milwaukee St., 720-571-8080. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

New Saigon

The Ponti

$$

Athmar Park / Vietnamese This spot serves an extensive menu featuring delicious rice paper wraps, banh mi sandwiches, pho noodle soup, seafood dishes, rice bowls, and more. Reservations accepted. 630 S. Federal Blvd., 303-936-4954. Lunch, Dinner

The volcano fried rice is a must-try. Reservations not accepted. 12201 E. Mississippi Ave., Ste. 123B, Aurora, 303-364-1287. Lunch, Dinner

$$$

Golden Triangle / American Chef Jennifer Jasinski of Rioja and Stoic & Genuine serves up light, fresh lunch fare at this fine-dining restauraunt inside the Denver Art Museum. Reservations accepted. 100 W. 14th Ave., 720-913-2761. Lunch The Porklet

$$

Aurora / Asian This fast-casual spot in a shopping center excels at producing renditions of katsu (fried cutlets encrusted in light, flaky panko breadcrumbs).

Plates by the Pound BBQ

Q Que Bueno Suerte

Quiero Arepas

$$

Platt Park / Latin American Venezuelan corn flatbreads, or arepas, are on the menu. Our favorite is the La Havana, a take on a Cuban sandwich, featuring slow-roasted pork loin, ham, and local Muenster with a creamy mayo-mustard-pickle sauce. Reservations not accepted. 1859 S. Pearl St., 720-432-4205. Lunch, Dinner

for your next home project.

Home PLUS HOW TO REDUCE YOUR HOME'S IMPACT ON THE ENVIRONMENT

F E B R UA RY/M A R C H 2 0 2 2

THE RENOVATION ISSUE

A DIY devotee reveals her clever design hacks

Elevated living in the Mile High City.

Visit 5280Home.com or Zinio.com to subscribe.

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$$$

Platt Park / Latin American The menu at this vibrant restaurant offers familiar items like tacos and fajitas as well as upscale, regionally inspired Mexican fare.

Try the pulpo a la parrilla (grilled citrus-garlic octopus with huitlacoche-butter sauce) or the achiote roasted pheasant. Reservations accepted. 1518 S. Pearl St., 720-642-7322. Dinner

Ideas and inspiration

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$$

Aurora / Barbecue Aaron Gonerway offers tender ribs, juicy pulled pork, and plump kielbasa in a takeout-only storefront in Aurora. Arrive early on Saturdays to claim your meats before they sell out.

Reservations not accepted. 11601 E. Montview Blvd., Aurora, 720-697-0082. Lunch, Dinner

MAKE A

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DINING GUIDE

R Randall’s

Thai Pot Cafe

Cole / Southern This neighborhood restaurant serves up comforting Southern fare with a side of warm hospitality. Try the comforting fried catfish dinner. Reservations not accepted. 3349 York St., 720-400-7648. Lunch, Dinner

Restaurant Olivia

$$

True Food Kitchen

$$$$

Washington Park / Italian This cozy-yet-modern neighborhood spot from the team behind Bistro Georgette specializes in fresh pastas and Italian classics like chicken marsala. Reservations accepted.

290 S. Downing St., 303-999-0395. Dinner

Rioja

Shanghai Kitchen

$$

Greenwood Village / Asian The extensive menu at this welcoming eatery features traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai dishes. Try one of the chef’s specialty dishes, such as the fiery fish in hot chile oil or tender Shanghai-style braised pork belly cooked in sweet and savory spices. Reservations not accepted. 4940 S. Yosemite St., Greenwood Village, 303-290-6666. Lunch, Dinner

Spuntino

Sushi Den

$$$

Platt Park / Japanese Sushi Den offers fresh, vibrant seafood flown in twice a week from Japan and a hip, lively scene. Sit at the bar and watch the sushi chefs, led by Toshihiro Kizaki, as they work their artistry.

Reservations accepted for five or more, except Friday and Saturday. 1487 S. Pearl St., 303-7770826. Lunch, Dinner

T Tavernetta

X $$

Golden / Mexican Enjoy cooked-to-order burritos, tacos, and alambres (skillet dishes) made with recipes inspired by Walter Meza’s childhood in Mexico.

Reservations not accepted. 715 Washington Ave., Golden, 303-215-3436. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Y Yahya’s Mediterranean Grill & Pastries

$$

Yak and Yeti

$$

City Park West / Mediterranean This family-run restaurant serves hummus, grilled kebabs, and fromscratch sweets. Reservations not accepted. 2207 E. Colfax Ave., 720-532-8746. Lunch, Dinner

$

Edgewater / Thai Spicy dishes and a chef straight from Thailand make for an authentic, if mouthtingling, dining experience. Try the green curry.

Reservations accepted. 5228 W. 25th Ave., Edgewater, 303-233-3345. Lunch, Dinner

Vert Kitchen

Westminster / Indian This local favorite serves traditional Indian and Nepalese cuisine. Multiple locations. Reservations accepted. 9000 Yukon St., 303-426-1976. Lunch, Dinner YumCha

V $$

Washington Park West / French Salads and sandwiches (think skirt steak with arugula and walnut mustard) dot the menu at this European-influenced cafe. Reservations not accepted. 704 S. Pearl St., 303-997-5941. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

Vital Root

$$

Downtown / Asian From restaurateur Lon Symensma of ChoLon and LeRoux comes a dim sum house and noodle bar serving staples like xiao long bao and steamed pork dumplings. Reservations accepted. 1520 16th St., 720-638-8179.

Lunch, Dinner

Z $

Berkeley / American Justin Cucci’s fourth eatery focuses on quick, healthy food. Grab a seat in the airy space and nosh on creative, wholesome fare such as chilled carrot-ginger soup or a veggie dosa.

Reservations not accepted. 3915 Tennyson St., 303-474-4131. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Zeppelin Station

$$

Zomo

$$

RiNo / International This industrial-chic food hall is home to eight globally inspired food and drink vendors. 3501 Wazee St., 720-460-1978.

Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

Englewood / Asian Alysia Davey and Ryan Anderson serve family recipes inspired by their Vietnamese and Chinese roots at this cozy South Broadway eatery. Reservations accepted. 3457 S. Broadway, Englewood, 720-739-8882. Lunch, Dinner

W Water Grill

$$

Downtown / Pub Enjoy fresh beer and pub favorites such as corn and poblano chowder at one of Denver’s original brewpubs. Reservations accepted.

1634 18th St., 303-297-2700. Lunch, Dinner

$$$

US Thai Cafe

$$$$

Downtown / Italian The team behind Boulder’s Frasca Food and Wine offers the same attention to detail and hospitality at this more casual Denver restaurant. The charming space is home to dishes from across Italy and a deep wine list.

Reservations accepted. 1889 16th St., 720-6051889. Lunch, Dinner

APRIL 2022

$$$$

Lone Tree / Indian This cozy restaurant serves classic and contemporary seasonal dishes from regions across India, including a great selection of vegetarian specialties. Reservations accepted. 8505 Park Meadows Center Dr., Ste. 2184A, Lone Tree, 720-536-8565. Lunch, Dinner

$$$

Highland / Italian Enjoy the locally sourced menu at this Italian-inspired, husband-and-wife-owned spot. Try the seasonal pasta or any dish with Southern Indian influences. Don’t miss the house-made gelato for dessert. Reservations accepted. 2639 W. 32nd Ave., 303-433-0949. Dinner

$$$$

Sunnyside / Contemporary Kelly Whitaker fuses Asian and Italian at this hip Sunnyside eatery. The results, such as 7X brisket braised in dashi and red wine, are unique and delicious. Reservations accepted. 4058 Tejon St., 720-456-6507. Dinner

Xicamiti La Taquería

Curtis Park / Japanese James Beard Award– winning chef Tyson Cole combines unexpected flavors for his unique take on Japanese food.

Reservations accepted. 2500 Lawrence St., 303-444-1922. Dinner

Urban Village Grill

S

124 5 2 8 0

U Uchi Denver

The Wolf’s Tailor

Wynkoop Brewing Company $$

Cherry Creek / Health The menu at this healthfocused spot features nutrient-dense foods such as kale and quinoa as well as fresh juices. Reservations not accepted. 2800 E. Second Ave., Ste. 101, 720-509-7661. Lunch, Dinner

$$$$

Downtown / Mediterranean James Beard Award– winning chef Jennifer Jasinski creates high-end Mediterranean-influenced cuisine. Don’t miss Jasinski’s handmade pastas, which include a stellar artichoke tortellini with white truffle brodo and queso de mano. Reservations accepted. 1431 Larimer St., 303-820-2282. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

$

Virginia Village / Asian Try a variety of curries, noodle bowls, soups, salads, and coconut-infused desserts at this cozy Thai restaurant. The drunken noodles with eggplant are a favorite. Reservations accepted. 1350 S. Colorado Blvd., Ste. 191, 303-693-6200. Lunch, Dinner

$$

Downtown / Seafood Fresh seafood is flown in daily to this chic restaurant specializing in seasonal shellfish and raw bar offerings. Reservations accepted. 1691 Market St., 303-727-5711. Dinner

These listings are in no way related to advertising in 5280. If you find that a restaurant differs significantly from the information in its listing or your favorite restaurant is missing from the Dining Guide, please let us know. Write us at 5280 Publishing, Inc., 1675 Larimer St., Suite 675, Denver, CO 80202 or dining@5280.com.

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IS THIS LAND YOUR LAND?

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 111

W H E T H E R U N D E R T A K E N I N D I V I D U A L LY or on an institutional or governmental level, land acknowledgments are delicate and often fraught. As they proliferate in universities, nonprofits, governments, businesses, and on social media, the practice is coming under increasing scrutiny.

This past October, the Association of Indigenous Anthropologists (AIA) officially requested that the American Anthropological Association pause the practice of land acknowledgments. In an editorial published that month in YES! Magazine, a trio of anthropology professors involved with the AIA—Elisa Sobo, Michael Lambert, and Valerie Lambert—argued that contemporary land acknowledgments can spread false information and harmful narratives, reinforcing the idea that the land no longer belongs to Indigenous peoples and minimizing the

profundity of the trauma. At Microsoft’s Ignite conference in November, a host began by recognizing that the company’s campus has been home to the “Sammamish, Duwamish, Snoqualmie, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, Snohomish, Tulalip, and other coast Salish peoples” and that they are still there.

Critics derided the casual and confusing wording—did they still live among the office buildings?—and the lack of any substantive recognition of the connection between past and present, the trauma of colonization, and the need for redress.

“Because non-Indigenous people are generally unaware of this trauma, land acknowledgments are often heard by Indigenous peoples as the denial of that trauma,” Sobo, Lambert, and Lambert wrote. “This perspective is reinforced by a tendency to cast Indigenous peoples as part of prehistory, suggesting that the trauma of dispossession, if it happened at all, did not happen to real or wholly human people.” It’s essential, they say, to both tell the unvarnished truth and ensure that words are backed up by action.

Some proponents of land acknowledgment say it can help issues facing Native Americans seep into the broader culture,

spurring action in ways that can’t be precisely tracked. In other instances, land acknowledgments have more tangibly led to change. In October 2020, Jamie Torres, a representative on Denver’s City Council who had listened to land acknowledgments in her own social gatherings for years, introduced the practice to the council’s weekly meetings. “I wanted it to become a reminder, each time we gather on Monday, that this is what we center on,” she says.

“This is something that we feel is important in our daily work, even if you don’t work with Indigenous communities on a regular basis…. And then, beyond that, these land acknowledgments can’t just be lip service.

There’s always got to be the question: What does that inspire? And what does it inform?

And how do things change?”

Within a couple of months of adopting the land acknowledgment, the parks and recreation department approached Torres with an idea. The city of Denver owns two bison herds—one in Genesee and one in Daniels Park, in Sedalia—and every year the department auctions off animals to manage population numbers. Instead of selling them to private entities, what if they passed them

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IS THIS LAND YOUR LAND? along to tribes? In 2021, they delivered the animals to the Cheyenne and Arapaho of Oklahoma, and the department plans to give them to tribal communities from now on.

There’s a synergy, Torres told me, between recognition, deepening awareness, and the capacity for meaningful action on an institutional level and an individual level.

There is no one path that leads from the words of a land acknowledgment to action that serves Native communities, and numerous organizations and individuals throughout Colorado are trying new ways to move forward. Montezuma Land Conservancy (MLC), a land trust in southwest Colorado, considered adopting a land acknowledgment but wanted to embody it more fully in practice. The organization’s leadership realized that they first needed to develop trust and deepen relationships with tribal members, and they had a powerful tool for connection: the land itself.

This past summer, MLC, along with members of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe and the Telluride Institute, co-sponsored Native and other underrepresented youth on

other. “It’s not always just acknowledging the Indigenous people who were there before the settlers and the miners and that group of people,” she says. “It’s about acknowledging the life that was out on the land, and that could be anything from the animals to the plants—all the life that has happened beyond human existence.” LopezWhiteskunk has a dream of re-creating portions of the region’s Ute trail system, which used to take people from the valleys to the mountains and back again with the flow of the seasons. People who come from all over the world to hike and ski these peaks would not only see the vistas but also understand the context in which they find themselves, including the historical and living presence of the Utes and the importance of the animals and plants.

In addition to the work of organizations, individuals in Colorado and beyond are experimenting with new steps toward healing and reparation. While researching her family history, retired education professor and activist Christine Sleeter discovered that an inheritance she had received from her

belong to him, so, in 2018, he became the first person to officially return land to the Ute Indian Tribe.

S O M E N AT I V E I N D I V I D U A L S and communities

question the very premise that portions of the Earth can be claimed for oneself and the merit of perpetuating a system that divides it in this way. “The elders don’t believe you can own land,” says Rickey Hayes, a Ute Mountain Ute guide who took me on a tour through the Ute Mountain Tribal Park on the western flank of Mesa Verde National Park. “We keep it for our children and grandchildren. We’re just here for a while.”

Hayes is a born storyteller and speaks in poetic loops and refrains, returning to the same themes and symbols. During our exploration of Lion Canyon one hot afternoon this past August, I noticed the way he moved through the landscape and the ancient buildings, dating to about 1145, with mindful respect for the people who came before. The Ute Mountain Tribal Park encompasses the structural remnants of Pueblo communities that have since relo-

“IT’S NOT ALWAYS JUST ACKNOWLEDGING THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE WHO WERE THERE BEFORE THE SETTLERS AND THE MINERS....

IT’S ABOUT ACKNOWLEDGING THE LIFE THAT WAS OUT ON THE LAND.” a two-week trip that was aimed at helping them connect to the land through science and recreation. The organization is building a trail that will showcase native plants and Ute culture and hopes to have interpretive panels in as many as four languages (Ute, Diné, Spanish, and English) at Fozzie’s Farm, the organization’s educational center in Lewis.

In October, Lopez-Whiteskunk led a storytelling gathering in which Ute elders and various community leaders came together over their mutual love of this place, shared stories and visions for caring for the land, enjoyed flute music, and feasted on Indigenous foods together.

Lopez-Whiteskunk has a more expansive vision of what land acknowledgment should and could be—not as a backwardlooking apology but as a recognition that the land contains much more than human history and that our own healing and the health of the Earth are wrapped up in each

grandmother originally stemmed from the sale of land that had been stolen from the Utes and then homesteaded by her greatgrandparents. Sleeter decided the money didn’t rightfully belong to her and, in 2017, wrote a $250,000 check to the Ute Indian Tribe, headquartered in Utah. The tribe used it to help build a school. “I intentionally framed what I wanted to do as ‘returning what was stolen,’ however, rather as than [sic] giving the Tribe a donation,” she wrote about the project. “That framing also put the spotlight on the injustice of settler colonialism rather than the ‘generosity’ of the donor.”

Other people have returned private land directly to tribes across the country. After purchasing 2.51 acres in Costilla County in southern Colorado, a plumber named Rich Snyder found signs of Ute habitation and experienced a powerful dream about the Indigenous presence on the land.

Upon reflection, he believed the tract didn’t

cated—people who, Hayes tells me, the Utes used to raid. As we gingerly stepped around magnificent kivas and marveled at multistory masonry dwellings in solitude, Hayes made offerings of water to the ancient ones and said prayers in Ute. One time, I asked him what he’d said.

“I pray for your family and all your relatives,” he said.

“Are you speaking to the people who once lived here?” I asked.

“Everybody,” he said. “Past, present, and future.”

Across the region and beyond, people of different Indigenous heritages talk about the thinnest of veils between past and present.

Karen Wilde, the former tribal liaison for the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, has spoken of hearing distant drumming in the trees and feeling the presence of the spirits of those who perished there.

Contemporary Pueblo people say the spirits APRIL 2022

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IS THIS LAND YOUR LAND? of the ancestors still walk among the piñon and juniper trees and the thousand-year-old homes and ceremonial buildings perched on the imposing hill of Chimney Rock National Monument in southwest Colorado.

“For many years, these places have been called ruins or places that were abandoned or moved on from,” says Curtis Quam of the Pueblo of Zuni, according to an interpretive panel at Chimney Rock. “But in our view, these places are still alive. Our ancestors are still here. It’s all of our heritage. It’s our history. It makes us who we are.”

In a 1979 essay, Leslie Marmon Silko, a writer who grew up in the Pueblo of Laguna, suggests that those who have passed on, those who are not yet born, and living people all dwell on this land and that storytelling is a way of being together. “When Aunt Susie told her stories,” she writes, “she would tell a younger child to go open the door so that our esteemed predecessors might bring in their gifts to us. ‘They are out there,’ Aunt Susie would say. ‘Let them come in. They’re here with us within the stories.’ ” Box, the Bear Dance Chief for the Southern Utes, learned the special stories and songs of the tradition from his grandfather, Eddie “Red Ute” Box Sr., who served as the Bear Dance Chief for the community more than half a century ago. While the original story remains the same, much has changed since then. There are actually more people who attend the Bear Dance now, people from all over the world. And, more than ever, participants embrace what Box calls the physics of it—the ineffable, mysterious alchemy in which song, story, community, ceremony, presence, and the power of human feet moving together over ancient soil come together and open the door for healing. The practices the she-bear gave the people, Box says, were a gift of creation in the name of healthy community, celebration, strength, and rejuvenation, a gift that reverberates through time. All the dancers, as they converge with one another and the land itself, are part of the continuation of the story.

“I’m not sure what the Bear Dance looks like 50 years from now, but I can see that the physics part of it is magnificent,” Box says. “It could be incredible as far as what it provides to individuals, to families, to communities, and to the world. I see everybody getting something from this, as it was intended as a gift to mankind to become healthy and stronger and be in harmony with the world and creation—and each other.” m

128

Kate Siber is a freelance writer based in Durango.

Email feedback to letters@5280.com.

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Featuring

COLORADO HOMES The property information herein is derived from various sources that may include, but not be limited to, county records and the Multiple Listing Service, and it may include approximations. Although the information is believed to be accurate, it is not warranted and you should not rely upon it without personal verification. Affiliated real estate agents are independent contractor sales associates, not employees. ©2022 Coldwell Banker. All Rights Reserved. Coldwell Banker and the Coldwell Banker logos are trademarks of Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC. The Coldwell Banker® System is comprised of company owned offices which are owned by a subsidiary of Realogy Brokerage Group LLC and franchised offices which are independently owned and operated. The Coldwell Banker System fully supports the principles of the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Opportunity Act.

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HANDSOME GENESEE HOME / MAIN LEVEL LIVING 25428 FOOTHILLS DRIVE N | GOLDEN | $1,895,000 4BR/4BA home w/5,000 SQFT & 4-car garage! Renovated home backs to open space with far reaching views. The foyer accesses 2 luxurious owner’s suites. Massive gas rock fireplace anchors the great room. Chef’s kitchen has Amish crafted Alder cabinetry, high end appliances & pantry. Formal dining opens to a spectacular year-round outdoor living room.

Office loft, family room & 2nd office.

Ann Donley 303.903.2046 anndonley1@gmail.com TheDonleyGroup.com

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guiding you home since 1906

REMARKABLE BLEND IN THIS METICULOUSLY NEW HOME 1080 IVY STREET | DENVER | $1,600,000 Meticulous new construction 5BR/4BA home sits on a cul-de-sac bordering Mayfair Park. Chef’s kitchen welcomes you in w/oversized quartz island, gas range & floating shelves.

Open & bright main level living is perfect for entertaining, fire up the glass stone fireplace & relax w/built in wet bar. Second level has an oversized primary suite w/gas fireplace, coffee bar & spa like en-suite bathroom.

Lea Rogers 303.523.4716 leasellshomes@learogers.com

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DENVER | $1,200,000 Well-kept luxury condo in the heart of Cherry Creek with mountain views above the tree-tops. Beautiful 2BR/2BA condo in the Portico building offers top-of-the-line amenities that include secure access, 2 pools, hot tub, spa & more. Master suite w/fireplace, balcony, 5pc bath & walk-in closet.

Wendy Weil 303.668.3773 | wendy.weil@coloradohomes.com | WendyWeil.cbintouch.com Brandon Miller 303.990.0702 | brandonsellsco@gmail.com | BrandonSellsCO.com

MEAD | $1,050,000 Urban convenience and rural lifestyle with 2.75 Acres, 4 bed, 3 bath, quiet neighborhood with all paved roads. This home will meet the needs of many different lifestyles. Equally great indoor and outdoor living w/fully fenced pasture, 1,328 Sq Ft outbuilding, agricultural zoning, no HOA, Unincorporated Mead, RV and extra parking.

Theresa Lane 720.938.2390 4tslane@gmail.com | TheresaLane.cbintouch.com

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guiding you home since 1906

PINE | $995,000 Fantastic, updated mountain home awaits you in a prime location. Great room w/wood stove & deck access. Main room flows into dining area & kitchen.

Main floor suite w/dual closets & en suite bath. The outdoor decks span the entire south side of the house and offer amazing tranquility with Elk Creek babbling across the road.

Salesa Hancock 720.818.0456 salesa.hancock@coloradohomes.com | SalesaSellsHomes.com

LAKEWOOD | $890,000 SOLD - Beautiful Applewood 4BR/3BA home situated in the foothills. Spectacular views of the front range & Maple Grove Reservoir. Designer kitchen w/soft close cabinetry, gas range & French door refrigerator. Updated bathrooms. Exterior features mature trees, ponds, gazebo & various outdoor seating areas.

Walk out basement was designed w/entertaining area & library. Private enclosed workshop.

Maura Putnik 303.882.5653 mputnikre@gmail.com | MauraSoldMine.com

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ENGLEWOOD | $875,000 Welcome to this wonderful home nestled the desirable Cherry Creek vista community! 4br/3ba home. Completely remodeled kitchen w/white cabinetry, high-end counters, new appliances and a breakfast nook. Upper-level w/3 bedrooms, including the primary suite w/an en-suite bath. Complete w/a finished basement and a private, fenced yard.

Jennifer Bub 303.253.4969 jennifer.bub@coloradohomes.com | JenniferBubRealEstate.com

PINE | Price Upon Request Private gated entry welcomes you to this beautiful 5-acre woodland retreat complete with 2 ponds, stream and waterfall. 4BR/3BA open concept home w/spectacular views. Gourmet kitchen w/island, custom bar & breakfast nook. Master bedroom suite w/wood beams, walk-in closets & 5pc remodeled bathroom. Welcome home to paradise!

Dawn Zalfa 720.495.1225 dawn.zalfa@coloradohomes.com | DZsellsRE.com

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LOUISVILLE | $1,475,000 SOLD- 4BR/4BA home w/mountain views. Open floor plan features a living & dining room, kitchen w/granite counters & repainted cabinets, family room w/fireplace & newly finished basement.

BOULDER | $1,250,000 Updated 5BR/2BA backs to open space w/stunning landscaping & Flatiron views! Open floor plan features hardwood floors, updated kitchen, new bathroom, newer windows & wood fireplace.

The Sartell Bliss Team 720.771.9345 bethanysartell@gmail.com | SartellBlissTeam.com

Kimberly Dunning 303.588.6037 kim@kimdunning.com | KimDunning.com

COLORADO SPRINGS | $765,000 5br/4ba, 4,000+ sqft home. Family room w/a fireplace. Kitchen w/new granite counters and tile backsplash, an island, a pantry and a nook.

Primary bedroom w/a 5-piece bath and walk-in closet. Complete w/a finished basement, backyard and 3-car garage.

CASTLE PINES | $750,000 3BR/3BA home sits on one the largest lots w/green space all around.

Kitchen w/new slab granite countertops & backsplash. Family room & eating nook flow together seamlessly. Formal dining room, spacious office & fully finished basement w/rec area.

Rob Thompson 719.337.7254 rob.thompson@coloradohomes.com | RobThompsonHomes.com

Julie Thelander 303.520.2308 julie.thelander@cbrealty.com | JulieThelander.cbintouch.com

AURORA | $750,000 Wonderful 4BR/3BA home features a living & formal dining room, family room w/gas fireplace, eat-in kitchen, private office & primary suite w/en-suite 5-piece primary bathroom. Enjoy the manicured fenced yard w/large deck & gorgeous mountain views.

LONGMONT | $659,000 3br/2ba home. Great room w/a gas fireplace. Kitchen w/granite island, breakfast bar, gas range and SS appliances. Primary suite w/a 5-piece bath and walk-in closet. Basement is ready for your future expansion.

Fenced backyard and a 2-car garage.

Jennifer Bub 303.253.4969 jennifer.bub@coloradohomes.com | JenniferBubRealEstate.com

Michelle A. Nelson 303.748.5247 michelle.nelson@coloradohomes.com | NelsonDreamHomes.com

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LONGMONT | $650,000 Immaculate 4BR/4BA home in the Fox Meadows community. Newer upper carpeting & kitchen w/42-inch cabinets & tile floor. Great room w/fireplace. Central Air. Full finished basement.

THORNTON | $635,000 3br/2.5ba home w/living room, dining room, open kitchen and family room. Study w/built ins. Upstairs w/2 2ndary bedrooms, full bath and primary bedroom w/walk-in closet and 5-piece bath. Enjoy an unfinished basement. Close to shopping and dining.

Kelly Gargulak 720.908.0953 kelly.gargulak@cbrealty.com | KellyGargulak.cbintouch.com

Nicole Wolf 303.898.5816 nicole.wolf@cbrealty.com | WolfFamilyRe.com

AURORA | $615,000 Beautiful 3BR/2BA south facing ranch style home offers custom finishes & luxury vinyl flooring. Open floorplan features a kitchen w/ dark cabinets, granite counters & pantry & family room w/fireplace.

Oversized 9,000 SQFT corner lot w/3-car garage.

ARVADA | $580,000 Comfy classic all brick ranch 4BR/3BA has been updated throughout boasting a contemporary dining area, kitchen w/granite countertops, glass backsplash, white cabinets, pantry & stainless appliances. Recently finished basement w/bedroom & bath.

Colleen Teitelbaum 303.668.8186 teitelbaumcolleen@gmail.com | CocoTeitel.com

CB Realty -Tolbert and Rutz 303.895.9493 Geri.Rutz@ColoradoHomes.com | MyNewColoradoHome.com

PEYTON | $550,000 4br/3.5ba home. Family room w/a gas fireplace. Kitchen w/granite counters, SS appliances and an island. Primary retreat w/a 5-piece bath and walk-in closet. Basement w/a rec room, a bedroom, a 3/4 bath and storage area. Complete w/a 2-car garage.

DENVER | Price Upon Request Incredible former model 2BR/3BA townhome close to Central Park!

Family room w/wide open ceilings. Open kitchen w/island & bar seating. Private patio overlooks the community greenspace. Primary suite w/walk-in closet, private balcony & 5pc bathroom.

Jill and Greg Svenson 303.522.0631 jill@jillgreg.com | JillAndGregHomes.com

AK Riley 720.289.2929 ak@kadenverhomes.com | KADenverHomes.com

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CASTLE ROCK | $497,000 2 Story/3br/3ba home in The Meadows. Family rm w/gas fireplace.

Kitchen w/SS appliances, dining nook and a pantry. Upstairs has a primary suite and bath ensuite w/a walk-in closet, 2 guest bedrooms and guest bath. Large fenced yard and 2-car garage.

LITTLETON | Price Upon Request Updated ranch home in the highly coveted Roxborough Village.

Nestled in a quaint cul-de-sac, charming 2BR/2BA features an open floor plan, gas fireplace, laminate flooring, upgraded kitchen appliances, master suite, huge sunroom, 3-car garage & deck.

Jennifer Hebert 303.929.9044 jennifer.hebert@coloradohomes.com | JenniferHebertProperties.com

Daniel DeBacco 720.955.6111 Dan.DeBacco@ColoradoHomes.com | DeBaccoProperties.com

DENVER | Price Upon Request Beautiful 3BR/3BA townhome w/2-car garage in Green Valley Ranch has an open-concept floorplan featuring soaring ceilings, gourmet kitchen w/dark cabinets, stone counters & ss appliances & primary bedroom w/spa-like en suite & walk-in closet.

MORRISON | $440,000 3BR/1BA turnkey home features a large, bright open main level w/laminate flooring, fresh paint, & kitchen w/new counters. Upstairs discover a spacious primary bedroom with walk-in closet & updated full bath. New deck in the fully fenced backyard.

Sean Closset 720.308.7505 seanclosset@gmail.com | SeanSellsColorado.com

Allison Damico 720.639.0974 allison.damico@coloradohomes.com | AllisonDamico.com

DENVER | Price Upon Request 4BR/3BA home has many excellent features & community amenities.

Including hardwood floors, kitchen w/great cabinet space, dining room, living room w/gas fireplace & oversized primary bedroom w/high ceilings, walk-in closet & en suite bathroom.

WHEAT RIDGE | $425,000 Charming 3BR/1BA brick ranch in a fantastic location featuring abundant natural light, a coved ceiling & quaint carpeting. All appliances in the kitchen will remain in the home including W/D. Fully fenced yard, attached 1-car garage & RV parking.

LaDawn Sperling 303.710.5817 ladawn.sperling@coloradohomes.com | LaDawnSperling.com

LaDawn Sperling 303.710.5817 ladawn.sperling@coloradohomes.com | LaDawnSperling.com

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ARVADA | $425,000 Beautiful 2BR/2BA condo has stunning laminate plank flooring, dining room, 3-sided gas fireplace & kitchen w/granite counters, walk-in pantry, Blanco sink & recently updated appliances. Primary bedroom w/walk-in closet & bath. Private balcony patio.

AURORA | $399,999 Gorgeous 2BR/2BA remodel resides in the Cherry Creek School District featuring new solid oak flooring. Brand new windows & remodeled kitchen w/quartz countertops, new European cabinetry & brand new hardware. 1,304 SQFT of urban contemporary!

LaDawn Sperling 303.710.5817 ladawn.sperling@coloradohomes.com | LaDawnSperling.com

Leigh Weilert 316.648.2814 leigh.weilert@cbrealty.com | LeighWeilert.cbintouch.com

DENVER | Price Upon Request Updated 2BR/2BA condo has incredible views! Open floor plan w/oversized dining area & expansive gourmet kitchen w/SS appliances, 42” cabinets, solid surface counters, decorative backsplash & tile floors. Both bathrooms are upgraded/updated. Balcony.

BAILEY | $325,000 Tons of sun on 35 acres w/views of Pike National Forest & Rampart Range. Lots of wildlife. The ultimate of privacy in this gated community.

Deeded access to the North Fork of the South Platte River for world class fishing, hiking, camping & kayaking.

Alice Downie 303.520.0277 alice.downie@coloradohomes.com | AliceDownie.com

Walter Huber 720.300.8071 walter.huber@coloradohomes.com | WalterHuber.cbintouch.com

LIVERMORE | $285,000 35 acres of beauty, character & resources! Pristinely clean trailer w/electricity, deck, well, huge shop, & cell service. Large, flat area in combination with rock outcroppings, mountains, trees, flowers and wildlife. Home? Weekend getaway? AirBnB?

DENVER | $269,900 Recently remodeled 1br/1ba unit w/freshly painted rooms, new windows and new flooring and newer appliances. Exterior updates include a newly resurfaced roof and a partial sewer line replacement in 2020. The backyard includes a custom privacy fence.

Christina Larson 970.443.4111 You.re.Home777@gmail.com | DiamondHomesACutAbove.com

Kari Goddard 720.437.9755 kari.goddard@coloradohomes.com | KariGoddardHomes.com

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guiding you home since 1906

BOULDER | $1,149,000

AURORA | $950,000

BROOMFIELD | $934,600

Updated 3BR/2BA gem w/1,430 SQFT & 2-car garage backs to HOA Beautiful 5BR/5BA home in Southshore overlooking Aurora 4br/2.5ba Powderhorn model. Kitchen w/granite counters, stainless open space w/Flatiron views. Updated kitchen w/Maple cabinets, Reservoir. Finished basement and 3-car garage. Located near appliances, island and breakfast nook. Primary suite w/5-piece bath. granite countertops, deck, bamboo floors & stone fireplace. E-470, Southlands shopping/restaurants and Cherry Creek schools.

Complete w/a finished basement and covered patio.

Kimberly Dunning 303.588.6037

Kylie Rupert 303.842.8205

Dylan Lario 303.931.3039

AURORA | $738,000

LAKEWOOD | $695,000

COLORADO SPRINGS | $625,000

Gorgeous 4BR/4BA offers a living & dining room, kitchen w/quartz counters & subway tile, family room w/fireplace, primary bedroom w/2 walk-in closets & 5pc bath & finished basement.

4br/4ba townhome. Main level w/1br, 1ba & 2-car garage. 2nd floor w/kitchen, dining room, living room, 1/2ba & deck. Next floor w/primary suite + 2br & 1ba. Complete w/rooftop deck.

4br/3ba home w/2 gas fireplaces. Primary suite w/walk-in closet and a huge walk-in shower. Basement w/a rec room and wet bar.

Complete w/3-car garage, composite deck and expanded patio.

Eric Tack 303.295.2000

Scott Beville 303.905.6872

Ashley Candler 530.228.8004

CENTENNIAL | $540,000

DENVER | Price Upon Request

BOULDER | Price Upon Request

Spacious 3BR/2.5BA turn-key 2-story on a large lot. Eat-in kitchen w/granite counters, kitchen island w/breakfast bar, and a butler's pantry. Mountain views. Sold for $625,000.

Sweet mid-century all brick 4BR/2BA home has an open floor plan including a great room w/wood-burning fireplace, dining room & kitchen with new ss appliances & breakfast bar.

Updated 2BR/2BA condo near CU campus & Boulder Creek trail system. End unit condo is open & bright w/white kitchen cabinets, SS appliances, granite counters, newer furnace & fireplace.

Dan D. Gerlock 720.326.8100

Debbie Cooper-George 303.944.8494

Debbie Cooper-George 303.944.8494

DENVER | $450,000

ARVADA | $430,000

THORNTON | $424,900

Light & spacious 2BR/2BA condo features sweeping mountain & city views. 2 exclusive parking spaces. Large west-facing balcony.

Updated w/new carpeting, fresh paint & recessed lighting.

Ground floor 3BR/3BA end unit w/mountain views! Open concept living/dining rm w/fireplace & balcony. Chef's kitchen w/maple glazed cabinets, solid slab granite counters & SS appliances.

Sun-filled, south facing 3BR/2BA ranch w/attached garage.

Open kitchen w/SS appliances, breakfast bar & eating space.

Deck, gazebo & storage shed in fenced yard. Remodeled in 2014.

Michael Kornelsen 303.918.8910

Julie Thelander 303.520.2308

Joni Jagger 303.437.3046

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FOUNTAIN | $409,900

THORNTON | $400,000

CONIFER | $399,000

Fantastic 3BR/3BA updated home backs to open space. Open living room w/vaulted ceilings & fireplace. Newly renovated kitchen w/coffee bar, oak cabinets & subway tile backsplash.

Modern 2BR/3BA townhome w/1,216 SQFT. Open floor plan w/tall ceilings, living room, dining area & kitchen w/granite counters.

Wood tone floors. Private back patio area & 2-car garage.

Lot 5 is a 10-acre parcel located just off Highway 285 in Conifer's premier Richmond Hill community, Piano Meadows. Offers paved roads w/easy access to all amenities, yet very private.

Jon Zimmerman 719.377.8921

Lori Vialpando 303.324.5731

Linda McConnell CMAS- SRES -CLHMS 303.718.7945

BOULDER | $375,000

PENROSE | $370,000

WESTMINSTER | $365,000

Great location at 20th & Broadway! Flatirons & City Light views.

Ranch 3BR/2BA home on 1.69 acres with south-facing living room, Amenities include a "fob" entry, swimming pool, open roof top area, dining room w/covered patio access & kitchen w/gas range & & private storage. Reserved underground parking! pantry. 3 outbuildings, one w/220v power. Dog run & shelter.

Newly remodeled 2BR/2BA townhome with attached garage offers a kitchen w/quartz, Shaker cabinets, new appliances, breakfast bar, dining area & great room w/fireplace.

Jillian Fowler 303.884.2032 Tom Fowler 303.956.2575

Jennifer Montoya 719.232.3397

Lynn Hodges 303.913.0166

DENVER | Price Upon Request

WESTMINSTER | $280,000

CONIFER | $279,500

1BR/1BA Rowhouse-style condo features a private front door entry, original hardwood floors, detached 2-car garage, & patio.

Kitchen w/SS appliances & granite tile counters.

Cozy 2BR/2BA condo offers 840 SQFT w/fireplace, eating space & updated kitchen w/new cabinets, quartz counters & ss appliances.

Full bath has all new fixtures, vanity & tile.

Subdividable 3.8-acres of land about 45 minutes from Denver. The land backs to a private ranch & zoned MR-3 & placed in a location with access to electric & natural gas lines.

Mena Moran 303.322.1117 Alison Kaufman 203.981.4337

Lori Vialpando 303.324.5731

Walter Huber 720.300.8071

DENVER | $259,900

WHEAT RIDGE | $240,000

AURORA | $185,000

Updated 1BR/1BA unit in a prime location w/hardwoods, open floor 2br/2ba condo in an excellent location. Primary bedroom w/an plan, bedroom w/new carpet, kitchen w/maple cabinets, granite tile en-suite bath vanity area and walk-in closet. Enjoy a newer in-unit counters, SS appliances, dining area & living room. washer and dryer. Complete w/reserved parking.

Amazing home is a lovely open concept studio with plenty of natural light including an open, pass-through kitchen, fireplace, walk-in closet, in-unit washer & dryer & private patio.

Chriss Bond 720.771.7369

Brock Schwarz 702.402.0904

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Derrek Patrick 720.987.5271

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DENVER to

DUBAI

With 96,000 sales associates in 2,900 offices across 40 countries and territories, the Coldwell Banker brand is a name people know and ®

trust, worldwide. No matter where your real estate journey takes you, we’re here wherever you are. Contact us today and put the strength of our name behind you.

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04.30.2022

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BACKSTORY Dream Reader

What your cryptic sleepy-time scenes really mean.

MOUNTAINS Symbols mean different things to different people, but peaks often represent obstacles. The questions to ask yourself upon waking are: What real-life impediment does the mountain embody? and, In the dream, are you scaling the hill, or are you stuck? An even more common dream about the natural world is an avalanche (or tidal wave) wiping out a town—the archetypal premonition for impending disaster.

14 4 5 2 8 0

While COVID-19 has made most of our physical lives smaller, it appears to have made our dream lives bigger. A March 2020 poll found that a third of Americans experienced greater dream recall, and, as COVID-19 dragged on, people began describing ever more vibrant visions. “As a dream ‘event,’ the pandemic is unprecedented,” reported Scientific American. That doesn’t surprise Deborah Bryon, who holds a doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of Denver and is chair of the dream exam (think: the bar exam for dream interpreters) for certifying prospective members of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. “Dreams can be a way that we try to metabolize and work through things,” Bryon says— and, boy, have the past two years delivered some serious baggage. To start the unpacking, we asked Bryon to help us make sense of common symbols that might be appearing in your slumber. —SPENCER CAMPBELL

CHILDHOOD HOME Issues from when you were a kid may be bubbling to the surface in these dreams. Sometimes, children don’t have the tools to process trauma, so they bury their feelings until they are equipped to deal with them—like now, when you’re an adult. An enjoyable dream or just a specific memory, however, could be your psyche saying, Hey, remember what fun was like?

STRANGE BEDFELLOW Just because you become, uh, romantic with someone in dreams doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got the hots for them. “It’s more about integration,” Bryon says. In other words, you are assuming the traits of your dreamtime bae. If your hookup is loyal, for example, maybe your subconscious believes you are maturing into a more faithful friend. If they’re selfish, though, it’s probably time to check yourself.

BEARS Dogs tend to embody something personally important to you. Cats personify your intuition.

Bears, meanwhile, can signify protection: A grizzly guarding you may signify that your ego is strong. A bear attack, on the other hand, could be a sign you’re not advocating enough for yourself.

SKI BUM Remember: Every aspect of a dream—from the characters to the animals to the inanimate objects— represents you. If you’re straight-laced and organized, then the presence of a ski bum could reflect the need to relax. On the other end of the spectrum, an accountant might visit at night to convince you to bring some order to your chaotic life.

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY M A RY H A A S DY K

APRIL 2022

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