5280 Magazine April 2021s

THE DENVER MAGAZINE

LIVING SUSTAINABLY IN COLORADO

More than 20 ways to green up your everyday habits. PLUS: We asked local eco-experts about their efforts to save our state—and our planet. PAGE 72

The Pleasures & Perils Of Gardening On The Front Range PAGE 26

The Startling Medical Advances Spurred By COVID-19 PAGE 82

How Trinidad Became A Destination For Gender Confirmation Surgery

BY MARTIN J. SMITH

APRIL 2021 |

5280.com

Rediscover adventure

Chiricahua National Monument, Willcox Explore responsibly to preserve Arizona’s natural landscapes.

RediscoverAZ.com

FEATURES

A P R I L 2021

Solar panels at Denver International Airport

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The planet desperately needs us to go beyond recycling soda cans and washing laundry in cold water.

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How To Live More Sustainably in Colorado In honor of this month’s Earth Day, we checked in with Colorado’s eco-experts about their efforts to save the planet—and what you can do to make a bigger impact each day.

BY LINDSEY B. KING

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Come Together COVID-19 has forced local doctors, hospitals, and public health experts to collaborate in ways that would have been unimaginable before the pandemic. That cooperation could inspire advances in medicine for future generations of Coloradans.

BY SPENCER CAMPBELL

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Going To Trinidad

BY MARTIN J. SMITH

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Courtesy of Denver International Airport

The story of how one visionary doctor turned a small town in southern Colorado into the “sexchange capital of the world.”

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A P R I L 2 0 21

102

COMPASS 15 SCIENCE

A new book by Time magazine’s inaugural Kid of the Year will inspire your child’s inner scientist.

16 ENVIRONMENT

120

Former Idaho beauty queen Carolyn Pace traded her tiara for a truck three years ago and founded compost-collection service Wompost in Aurora.

18 CULTURE

EAT & DRINK

Nature-inspired works highlight LandMark, an outdoor art installation taking root in Lakewood and Arvada.

25 WHAT’S HOT

A culinary partnership blossoms at the Ginger Pig in Berkeley.

20 HEALTH

15

Inside Colorado’s deepening mental health crisis—and the state’s efforts to overhaul its broken system of care.

18

26 ESSAY

5280’s restaurant critic shares the tribulations and tasty triumphs of growing food on the Front Range.

BY SCOTT MOWBRAY

22 BUSINESS

102 DINING GUIDE

A business resource center in the Gunnison Valley known as ICELab keeps the many threads of economic development from knotting.

COLUMN 32 HEALTH CARE

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How historic racism and inequity in the health care system have undermined Colorado’s efforts to tend to communities of color during the COVID-19 pandemic.

BY ANGELA UFHEIL

BACKSTORY 120 BETTER TOGETHER

John Elway handed over his general manager duties without ever drafting his perfect quarterback. As a parting gift, we built him one—from pieces of some of his most notable signal callers.

ON THE COVER

Photo illustration

By C.J. Burton

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. © 2021 5280 Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Our extensive list of area restaurants, including contact information, cuisine categories, and neighborhood designations.

“I TRUSTED ORTHOCOLORADO HOSPITAL TO GET ME BACK TO RUNNING AGAIN.”

Kelly Spine Surgery 2019

Hi, I’m Kelly.

Raphael CourtoisBond, CST

I’m a busy woman! I work hard, and I’ve run more marathons than I can count. I don’t have time to slow down. So when back pain left me walking with a cane, I couldn’t wait around for things to get better. I trusted OrthoColorado Hospital to help. The world-class doctors and care team at OrthoColorado gave me my life back.

Now I’m working, hitting the gym, and running again – pain free.

At OrthoColorado Hospital, we are dedicated to providing orthopedic patients and their families a truly remarkable experience, and COVID-19 has not changed that. From the moment you enter our doors, your safety is our top concern. We are following CDC guidelines and have taken all the necessary steps to protect the wellbeing of our patients, staff, and visitors.

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Trust OrthoColorado Hospital to get you back to the life you love.

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A graduate degree in health care that takes you from class to career.

Be an advocate, decision-maker and innovative industry leader for the next generation of health care.

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Caleb Santiago Alvarado, C.J. Burton, Mark Matcho, Sarah Maxwell, Ryan Olbrysh, Dan Page, Chris Philpot, Joni Schrantz, Boris Séméniako

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SCIENCE CULTURE HEALTH BUSINESS 

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CoMPASS

Book Smarts

A new guide by Time magazine’s inaugural Kid of the Year will inspire your child’s inner scientist.

Blessed with a restless mind constantly looking for problems that need solving, Gitanjali Rao has become a renowned scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur—all before graduating high school. In 2017, moved by the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, the STEM School Highlands Ranch student invented Tethys, a portable device that uses nanotube technology to detect lead in drinking water.

Rao, along with three classmates, responded to recent increases in teen suicides by developing an artificial intelligence app called Kindly that’s intended to detect and prevent cyberbullying. Now the 15-year-old is developing a prototype to diagnose

PHOTOGRAPH

BY S H A R I F H A M Z A

APRIL 2021

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SCIENCE ENVIRONMENT

early-stage opioid addiction. All those achievements haven’t gone unnoticed: Named Time’s first Kid of the Year in December 2020, she released her second book, A Young Innovator’s Guide to STEM, on March 16. In it, Rao details the five-step process she uses to spot and then fix an issue, hopefully readying today’s Baby Einsteins for their generation’s big problem (or pandemic).

Before the book hit the shelves, 5280 caught up with the award-winning sophomore to talk practical ways parents and youngsters can flex a little gray together.

KICK ROCKS Start by leaning into your young ones’ interests. If they have an affinity for counting and sorting, encourage activities that put those skills in context by, for example, turning an ordinary hike into an expedition for rocks, leaves, or even bugs. At home, think of everyday chores they can do like sorting silverware or matching socks—activities that encourage identifying attributes such as size, color, textures, or shapes.

GET PHYSICAL Exploring how the heart functions through aerobic exercise is one way to introduce your kindergartner to the scientific method. Begin with a hypothesis: The body needs more oxygen when exercising. Then test it by taking a resting heart rate. (Hint: Place your kids’ first two fingers on their necks or wrists and count the beats for 15 seconds; multiply by four to calculate beats per minute.) Exert for 20 minutes, repeat the count, and watch them marvel at understanding that when they move faster, their hearts pump more oxygen-rich blood.

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LET THEM EAT CAKE One of Rao’s favorite pastimes—baking—is an amalgamation of complex cognitive skills and processes. “The whole goal of baking is to create a chemical reaction that [then] tastes awesome,” Rao says. In other words, making cupcakes can be a stealthy way to strengthen math skills and reading comprehension, not to mention handeye coordination from measuring and mixing ingredients. Challenge your tween by slicing a standard recipe in half.

Divide and conquer.

BUY RAO ’S BOOK Based on the processes Rao developed to take a solution from idea to reality, her book teaches kids how to observe, brainstorm, research, build, and communicate through fun and immersive techniques. The guide comes kid-tested and approved by tough critics: STEM School Highlands Ranch kindergartners, for whom Rao leads similar experiments that spark inquiry. “If I can do it,” the teenager says, “anyone can.”

—PHILIP CLAPHAM

PAY DIRT

As 2014’s Miss Boise, Carolyn Pace, now 30, used her public appearances to promote going green. But after moving to Aurora, she traded her tiara for a truck and founded Wompost in 2018 to make composting more accessible—and the benefits more tangible—for her neighbors. We break down her strategy here. —KAELYN LYNCH

53

Tons of greenhouse gas emissions in CO2 equivalents Wompost has kept from escaping into the atmosphere since the company launched. Yes, composting releases a little CO2, but it’s negligible compared to the potent greenhouse gases (like methane) landfills emit.

Plus, nutrient-dense compost improves soil, and, thus, plant health.

60

Gallons of compost each Wompost subscriber receives each year, enough to fill a four-by-eight-foot raised bed when mixed with topsoil. Seeing what food waste can become (and using it to grow vegetables), Pace says, motivates people to continue composting.

Shares also can be donated to community gardens.

153,568

Pounds of waste Wompost has diverted from landfills—the combined weight of five typical garbage trucks. Subscribers, who pay between $9 and $29 a month, receive a five- or 64-gallon bucket and compostable bags that they fill with food and yard debris. Pace and her team retrieve the waste weekly from curbs and apartment dweller–friendly drop-off points across Aurora, then bring it to a facility where it’s turned into nutrient-rich fertilizer.

1

Number of refurbished RTD buses Pace has converted into a compost education center and plant shop. Pace scored the 12-year-old behemoth from a fellow recycler, and while she hasn’t been able to host many events during the pandemic, she plans to open the bus for business outside Wompost’s 25th Avenue office and at farmers’ markets.

10

%

Wompost subscribers receiving reduced or free composting services through the company’s financial assistance program, which Pace started to ensure no one is priced out of environmental action.

She’ll expand the scholarships using part of a $158,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

From left: Courtesy of Post Hill Press; Halfpoint Images/Getty Images; Illustration by Sean Parsons

CONTINUED

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CULTURE

NATURAL SELECTION

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conveys nostalgia at Bear Creek Greenbelt Park; 3D ceramic ice chunks modeled from a disappearing glacier, by Mia Mulvey, at Coyote Gulch Park; and a “tree” built from wood charred by this past summer’s Colorado wildfires, by Tobias Fike, at Chester-Portsmouth Park. The Arvada exhibition starts on April 22, Earth Day (though some of its artists won’t unveil their pieces until June), and will remain in place for three years.

“Shelter” will reside at Kendrick Lake Park in Lakewood, where Roscina hopes passersby will mark its incongruity among the trees and xeriscaped garden and consider its meaning. After that, she’s curious to witness the ultimate muse, Mother Earth, respond to the piece. “I wonder if nature will start to take over,” Roscina says, “or if a bird might be tempted to move in.”

—SPENCER CAMPBELL

Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum (Eileen Roscina); Sarah Banks (sculpture)

Nature, it turns out, actually adores a vacuum. So, early in the pandemic, when stay-athome orders forced Coloradans to retreat inside, flora and fauna filled the city streets. Birdsong grew more distinct. Coyotes ran through neighborhoods. Car traffic stopped (or at least thinned).

“For the first time human noise was low enough that researchers could hear the inner machinations of the Earth,” Denver artist Kalliopi Monoyios says. “I thought: This is incredible.”

Inspired, Monoyios and fellow local artist Anna Kaye began planning what would become LandMark, an outdoor exhibition opening in Arvada and Lakewood this month. The show celebrates and investigates different aspects of the natural world with naturethemed work from two dozen local sculptors, photographers, and mixed-media artists in parks in the two suburbs.

“Shelter” (pictured at right), for example, is a 10-foot-tall, nestlike structure composed of thousands of woven willow branches. While its maker, Denver artist Eileen Roscina (pictured above), started work on the piece before the pandemic, she became intrigued by the concept of home as both comforting and constrictive during COVID-19. The light emanating from within, combined with its inviting natural material, elicits a feeling of safety. At the same time, the monolith’s hulking size and unwieldy shape are forbidding.

“Like it’s a cage,” Roscina says.

The six-month-long Lakewood portion of LandMark begins April 18, and will include a totemlike structure, by Jaime Molina, that

10 feet

Eileen Roscina’s imposing sculpture highlights LandMark, an outdoor art installation taking root in Lakewood and Arvada.

HEALTH

State Of Mind

Inside Colorado’s deepening mental health crisis—and the state’s efforts to overhaul its broken system of care.

Brittany Kochar, 31, weathered the first six to eight months of the pandemic fairly well. But as time dragged on, the Littleton resident, who in 2019 was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after her sister was murdered, began to feel the isolation eroding her mental health.

Toward the end of 2020, Kochar’s anxiety, frustration, and PTSD increased—and they’ve only intensified in the new year. “Recently, I felt a lot like this isn’t really living, this is just surviving,” Kochar says. “And it’s exhausting.”

The torrent of stressful events we’ve endured during the past year—the pandemic, but also a contentious election, the reckoning over systemic racism, and devastating wildfires—is so unprecedented that experts struggle to say how, exactly, this tumultuous period may impact our mental health over the long term. But early indicators are not good. Since COVID-19 shuttered the state in March 2020, the average number of calls per month to the Colorado Crisis Services hotline has increased by about 32 percent.

Unfortunately, many struggle to access care, and finding treatment is likely to become more difficult.

Pre-COVID-19, 56 percent of Coloradans who needed mental health support were not getting it, says Vincent Atchity, president and CEO of Mental Health Colorado, a Denver-based advocacy group. Then, stigma and the effort it took to find a qualified provider were some of the biggest challenges. Now, the system of care is “strained because the need is greater than ever,” Atchity says.

Further complicating the issue is the state’s fragmented behavioral health bureaucracy. A Colorado Department of Human Services (DHS) task force reported that funding is spread across at least 10 different departments and over 75 programs; some counties receive substance-use prevention money from as many as four agencies, and others don’t get any additional dollars. “There’s inconsistency across the state in efforts,” says Robert Werthwein, director of Colorado’s Office of Behavioral Health (OBH). As a result, certain Coloradans—including people of color, immigrants, rural residents, children, people with disabilities, veterans, and those in the criminal justice system—are more likely to have difficulty obtaining quality care, according to a recent OBH assessment.

To make matters worse, OBH’s Community Behavioral Health division budget was slashed by nearly 10 percent of what was expected in 2020-’21 because of the pandemic’s effect on the economy. Although the cuts were largely offset by funding from the federal CARES Act and other federal grants, the division lost new, anticipated money when bills under consideration in the 2020 state legislative session were amended to remove funding.

Still, there is hope: The state released a blueprint last September for reforming CARE IN A CRISIS If you or someone its behavioral health system, and the efforts—which include creating a centralized you know needs administration, initially under DHS, and building a robust system to better serve help, call Colorado Crisis Services at uninsured Coloradans and others unable to afford care—are already underway. The 1-844-493-8255 or text TALK to 38255. state’s rough goal over the next six to 18 months is to complete portions of the first

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phase in its three-part reform, which includes expanding tele-behavioral health services, pinpointing new funding sources, and establishing Colorado’s centralized command.

In the meantime, residents like Kochar continue to cope with the emotional toll of this era the best they can. There are moments when Kochar feels so overwhelmed that she just wants to sleep all day, but she forges ahead by thinking about small things that excite her, like gardening season. Like many, Kochar hopes she will feel better come spring. —JENNY MCCOY

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BUSINESS

Guidelines

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we grow an area’s outdoor recreation industry. Thankfully, in the Gunnison Valley, a business resource center known as ICELab keeps the many threads of economic development from knotting. —ANGELA UFHEIL

ICELAB

To fill the void left in the Gunnison Valley’s economy by the shrinking coal industry, Western Colorado University (WCU) used an Economic Development Administration grant to launch this hub for outdoor innovation, which has co-working space, private offices, and a coffee shop, in 2016. ICELab’s goal? Stabilize the valley by making it a magnet for adventure entrepreneurs and students.

CREATED

THE ACCELERATORS

PARTNERED WITH

WESTERN COLORADO UNIVERSITY

ICELab operates out of a renovated WCU gymnasium, and the university covers the business center’s operating expenses.

In return, students can use ICELab’s many resources—a recording studio and digital photo lab, for example—and attend workshops and talks given by adventure icons, such as climbing legend Tommy Caldwell.

THE INDUSTRY

John Norton, the Gunnison–Crested Butte Tourism and Prosperity Partnership’s executive director, says the businesses ICELab supports help diversify the valley’s economy, make the county more attractive to visitors, and spark new partnerships.

OUTDOOR INDUSTRY MBA BLISTER

An eight-year-old website delivering brutally honest reviews about skiing, climbing, and biking gear and apparel, Crested Butte–based Blister saw its business grow after one of ICELab’s regional accelerators helped streamline its marketing.

HUSTLE BIKE LABS

Craig Payne, inventor of a magnetic clip-in bike pedal, plans to move Hustle Bike Labs from Texas to Gunnison because of the support he says he got from the community.

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CAMPFIRE RANCH

Campfire Ranch, founded by an ICELab member and WCU Outdoor Industry MBA grad, draws adventure novices to its campground in the Gunnison Valley: Its team teaches visitors basic camping skills, like building a fire, and provides all the gear they need.

Participants in WCU’s three-yearold master’s program focus on “Patagonia, not Pepsi,” says program director Scott Borden, and work closely with ICELab businesses, which offer internships and mentor students on final projects, including launching companies of their own—such as Campfire Ranch.

BENEFITED FROM

REGIONAL ACCELERATOR GRAD

CREATED

NATIONAL ACCELERATOR GRAD

CREATED

BEACON GUIDEBOOKS

From its offices in ICELab, Beacon publishes books that detail backcountry terrain and safety. “It grew rapidly because people wanted to be far apart during the pandemic,” David Assad, ICELab’s director, says.

Clockwise from top: Dave Kozlowski/Courtesy of Western Colorado University; Courtesy of Beacon Guidebooks; Getty Images; Courtesy of Tripp Hurt; Courtesy of Tanner Whitefords

ICELab runs three accelerator programs. Two work with emerging talent in the valley, and a third, the Moosejaw Outdoor Accelerator, begins in April and invites brands from across the country to spend five weeks in Gunnison growing their companies. Business pros—such as Jim Oates, retired president of global advertising firm Leo Burnett Co.—serve as mentors, and all founders keep their equity.

Maria Albuja-Cruz, MD Associate Professor, Endocrine Surgery

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EAT DRINK &

The Insiders A culinary partnership blossoms at the Ginger Pig in Berkeley.

“Owning a restaurant during a pandemic is way harder than being a divorce attorney,” quips lawyer-turned-chef Natascha Hess, who opened Berkeley’s the Ginger Pig six months ago. After four years of operating the Ginger Pig food truck and a year at a stall inside Boulder’s Rosetta Hall, Hess and partner (and former Rosetta neighbor and mentor) Carrie Baird are thrilled to spread out in their own 2,000-square-foot space. Hess’ initial Asian street food menu was based on her years in Beijing as a student and the foods her host mother, Nalu, taught her to make. Hess and Baird’s collaboration, however, has made the Ginger Pig’s current roster more playful and tastier than ever. Hess’ classic Sichuan eggplant and char siu remains on the menu, but Baird has created a killer cheeseburger fried rice, and together they’ve added a version of Vietnamese mì xào toi, in which noodles, shrimp, and broccoli are bathed in butter, fish sauce, and gobs of garlic. It’s all delicious fun, anchored by a serious goal. Says Hess: “Our hope for 2021 is to still be here in 2022.”—DENISE MICKELSEN

(From left) Chef-partners Natascha Hess and Carrie Baird of the Ginger Pig P H O T O G R A P H BY J O N I S C H R A N T Z

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Late Bloomer

5280’s restaurant critic shares the tribulations and tasty triumphs of growing food on Colorado’s Front Range.

BY SCOTT MOWBRAY

Spring is here, and so the beautiful struggle that is Front Range vegetable gardening begins again.

For me, in a house on a wind-pounded hill east of Boulder, it starts tenderly and optimistically, as it must, with tiny seedlings sprouting under the 6400 Kelvin grow lights in my basement.

Then the campaign moves outdoors and progresses, like some sort of Kübler-Ross grief exercise, through the stages of hope, fear, heartbreak, renunciation, and, finally, acceptance, as the proud harvest commences, yielding heirloom tomatoes and weird cucumbers which, factoring everything in, cost me somewhere between 35 and infinity dollars per pound.

When you don’t rely on the food you grow for survival, gardening is a civvy’s way to intimately experience nature’s violence without too much being on the line. There is always news to report, and you return to the kitchen with details of the latest attack by a gang of starlings, the start of a campaign against spider mites with a soap-based insecticide, or the need for terror tactics such as the deployment of dried pigs’ blood on the ground to frighten the nervous bunnies.

Each development requires more intel. Some new blight assaults your tomatoes, and off to Google you go, because the wisdom of both crowds and experts is there, along with all the temptations of the military-vegetable complex: fungicides and bug killers (because you must admit that when an entire crop is threatened, you’re tempted to go nuclear with something made by Dow); specialized assault weapons, such as that lovely 14-inch Wilcox All-Pro 202S trowel you’ve been lusting after; and the endless temptations of the long-tail supply chain, especially the heirloom seed company rarities that, before planting season begins, make it seem like a very good idea to grow a 100-pound melon gourd that cooks “like zucchini” or a stripy heirloom tomato that, in my garden, tasted like the tears of the saddest farmer.

Know this: You are the last creature on the food chain who will make any claim on your labor.

You are planting for the rabbits and birds, for the fungi and bugs, and you must be generous with their share as a prophylactic against hypertension. You will be on the alert for “unseasonal” weather, because unseasonal in Colorado is another word for inevitable. If there’s not late frost, then there’s early frost; if not golf-ball-size hail, then winds that rip your pea trellises out of the earth and fling them toward the fence.

In my field of operations, I am general and grunt, so you’d think I’d be a fanatic for tactics and intelligence. Not so. For a reason that will require Jungian analysis, I cling to the naïve method of the

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optimist, planting lots and hoping for the best. My research tends to be of the rear-view-mirror variety, as in, “What’s this white stuff on my squash leaves?”

(Answer: powdery mildew.)

And by the time I learn about the treacherous Golovinomyces orontii, it’s too late. The canopy leaves of the acorn and butternut plants have wilted away, exposing sensitive fruit to the punishing sun. The squash die like a vampire forced into a tanning bed. Better luck next year, buddies. And, important note to self: Don’t plant squash in the same place next year, because Golovinomyces orontii overwinters to rise again!

Speaking of UV peril, did I click the few keystrokes required to research the I L L U S T R AT I O N BY M A R K M AT C H O

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importance of hardening off seedlings after sprouting them under my gentle grow lights? I did not. Hardening is a multistage process meant to gradually introduce indoor plants to the harsh rays of the sun. I knew that my lights approximated the sun’s spectrum, but I did not know this is like saying that a birthday candle gives off the same type of heat as the Cameron Peak Fire.

Unaware, I took my babies outside and immediately transplanted them to a raised bed devoted entirely to growing the sacred red fruit of the marinara and the caprese.

(Two other beds are reserved for riffraff like squash, radishes, and carrots.) I could not hear the tomato seedlings’ screams and so, a few days later, had to toss the ruined plants into the compost bin, where a family of resident voles—having tunneled up from the ground into a paradise of rotting splendor—gave me their little version of the middle finger.

Another blunder along the gardening learning curve was to forget my fifth-grade math concerning volume. For example, let’s say the decorative red pebbly stuff around your raised garden beds is washed away in a biblical storm of rain and hail, and you decide to replace it with a brick path. Let’s also stipulate that you opt to do the work yourself. Did you know that the weight of the compacted clay you have to remove with a pickax to dig a trench that is just a few inches deep could total 3.6 metric tons? You do if you consult the wet-clay weight/volume calculator online. That’s not a part of my rear-view-mirror approach, however.

When we moved from the town of Louisville to semirural Boulder County, we were not warned that water in the latter is priced as if it were fine wine. The property has an insanely complicated irrigation system whose control panel may have been designed by agents of Kim Jong Un to destroy the last shreds of our national sense of common purpose. Even now, after five years here, I dread a task as simple as changing the sprinkling time.

Nor did the system set off any alarm messages when I accidently programmed it to water all 17 zones of my parched yard at 2 o’clock in the morning, a duplicate watering that sent our monthly utility bill into the same price arena as a first-class plane ticket to the Plant Hunters’ Fair at Whittington Castle in Shropshire, England.

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ColoradoParent.com Find out new ways to replace screen time.

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DO N’T MIS S THIS! YOU C A N NOW R E A D TH E FU LL ISSU E O F C OL OR A DO PA R E NT ONL I NE .

It’s those Brits, of course, who are to blame for much of the prelapsarian gauze that shrouds the fantasy of home gardening. Just check out Gardeners’ World, a BBC program that dates to 1968. There is nothing more soothing and reassuring than Gardeners’ World; all problems are solved and all things tend toward the beautiful—until it occurs to you that it doesn’t hurt to have greenhouses, worldclass expertise, 2,000 years of planting successes, and a climate that inspired Shakespeare to call England “…This other Eden, demi-paradise / This fortress built by Nature for herself.”

Over here in Hardiness Zone 5B, it is also a paradise, but one with topsoil that hides a subterranean thistle-weed root system that may have inspired The Matrix.

And by late summer, the air in my yard will be thick with incoming: millions of seeds that have taken flight from the thistly hill above us. It’s pure Whac-A-Mole out there, weed-wise, and the veggie beds are prime targets for new settlement. I’m tempted to use something organic this year, like Agent Orange.

By now, you may have concluded that I don’t like vegetable gardening. Not true: I love it, and during quarantine had the time to really get schooled. The heirloom tomatoes were a disaster, but I produced 150 pounds of Early Girls and Big Boys, grown from cheap seeds purchased at Lowe’s. We had two weeks of the sweetest English peas, and a carrot the size of a hiking boot. But as any gardener knows, it is never just Find our Dining Guide, about the harvest. Gardenan extensive ing is about the campaign, list of area the battle, and the humrestaurants, on page 102 bling bliss of feeling like and online at a fool, naked before the 5280.com/ restaurants. armies of nature. m

Courtesy of the author

The author grew these specimens last year, clearly claiming victory in 2020’s Battle of the Carrot.

2021

H E A LT H CA R E

BY A N G E L A U F H E I L

Broken Trust

How historic racism and inequity in the health care system have undermined Colorado’s efforts to tend to communities of color during COVID-19.

T

errence Hughes was seven, maybe eight, years old when he fell out of a cherry tree near his home in Toledo, Ohio, around 1973. Hughes’ uncle rushed him to the emergency room, where X-rays revealed a severe wrist fracture. The doctor, who was white, told his young, Black patient, “This is gonna hurt.” He then roughly grabbed Hughes’ wrist and squeezed it, hard, to reset the bones. “I thought I was going to hit the ceiling,” Hughes says.

About a decade later, Hughes joined the U.S. Air Force just as his wisdom teeth began poking through his gums. The military’s dentist, who was white, examined Hughes and filed them down. When the pain returned, Hughes visited a civilian dentist, who explained wisdom teeth needed to be removed from the root and sent Hughes to an oral surgeon to properly extract them.

Then, in 2002, the veteran woke up one morning in his Denver home, feeling as if someone were wringing out his quadricep muscle like a wet towel. His wife, Rachel, drove

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him to the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center emergency room. The doctor he saw told Hughes to take ibuprofen, but didn’t take any diagnostic scans. Hughes returned to the medical center three more times as the pain and swelling grew. Again, the doctors didn’t scan the leg and simply recommended ibuprofen. Four days after the pain began, and unable to move his leg, Hughes went to University of Colorado Hospital (UCH). There, a doctor quickly diagnosed a torn quad and called the VA to set up an emergency surgery for Hughes.

By that third encounter, Hughes knew what was happening. “I’m referring to implicit bias,” he says. “I’m referring to—how do I want to put it—a subconscious thought about a person or a group of people that will affect the way you treat them as a patient.”

YOU’D BE HARD-PRESSED, Jeff Fard says, to find a Black person without horror stories akin to the ones Hughes tells.

Fard is the founder and executive director of Brother Jeff ’s

P H O T O I L L U S T R AT I O N BY RYA N O L B RY S H

through july 18

Yves Saint Laurent, Paris. Dress. Haute Couture Fall-Winter 1967, Look 30 Silk cigaline by BUCOL (textile house), Lyon, France, with bead and ostrich feather embellishment by Vermont (embroidery house), Paris. Cecilia Peck Voll Collection.

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Additional support is provided by Bridget and John Grier, the generous donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign, and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine and CBS4. The Denver Art Museum is grateful for the generous funding of the textile art and fashion department by the Avenir Foundation and Nancy Lake Benson.

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nect 5280 with leadership at the CDPHE for this story.) Erin Brown, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Michael Hancock and the head of the two-year-old Office of Social Equity and Innovation, expressed a similar sentiment: “A bright light was shined on disparities when COVID-19 occurred,” she told 5280.

For community advocates and researchers, this is old news. “This is not something we discovered with COVID,” says Matthew Wynia, a bioethicist at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus. Illnesses have historically hit communities of color hardest—Black people were more likely to die of influenza during the 1918 pandemic, for example, and in 2006, the CDC con-

COVID-19 patient Terrence Hughes is released from the VA hospital on May 6, 2020.

firmed that between 2001 and 2004, most diagnosed cases of HIV/AIDS were among Black Americans. (The threat is most potent for Black queer men; in 2016, the CDC predicted that half of Black men who have sex with men would be diagnosed with HIV if trends continued unabated.) BIPOC individuals were hospitalized with H1N1 flu more often than white people in 2009, as well.

Decades of studies help to document this disparity, Wynia says, and Hunsaker-Ryan herself outlined some of those factors in the CDPHE press release from April 13. “There have been generations of institutionalized barriers to things like preventive medical care, healthy food, safe and stable housing, quality education, reliable transportation, and clean air,” she said in the statement.

“Research shows that these types of factors are the most predictive of health outcomes.”

Those variables contribute to higher rates of pre-existing conditions that correlate with

worse COVID-19 outcomes. In 2019, 11.6 percent of Indigenous Coloradans, 10.6 percent of Hispanic Coloradans, and 9.6 percent of Black Coloradans reported having diabetes, compared with six percent of white Coloradans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Indigenous, Black, and Hispanic Centennial Staters also had higher rates of hypertension and heart disease that year.

Many of these conditions can be partially explained by a lack of access to health care: More white Coloradans have health insurance than any other racial or ethnic group, for example. But many advocates in Colorado also agree that what takes place within the health care system has contributed to the problem. “We have a history that goes back in this country,” Hughes says, “of Black and brown people’s pain being ignored.”

HARRIET WASHINGTON details that history in her 2006 book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. One man, called John Brown after his escape from slavery in Georgia, told the story of Dr. Thomas Hamilton’s “treatments,” which occurred in the early 1800s and involved blistering Brown “to ascertain how deep my black skin went.”

The falsehood that Black people have thicker skin, Washington says, was peddled by many white doctors in the 19th century, helping enslavers justify slavery on the grounds that Black people were inherently different—tougher and better suited for hard labor—than whites. Those ideas persist today: In 2016, more than 11 percent of U.S. medical students believed Black people felt less pain than whites.

Such baseless beliefs came into play as certain medical disciplines were developed.

During the 19th century, Dr. James Marion Sims, known as “the father of American gynecology,” experimented heavily on the enslaved women who fell under his “care,” Washington writes. His assistants held down Black women as he cut into their genitalia, then sutured them closed, in his quest to find a treatment for vesicovaginal fistulas. (These tears occur between the wall of the vagina and the bladder, causing painful incontinence, and are often the result of malnutrition and improper use of forceps during labor. An assistant of Sims, however, said that the doctor sometimes created the tears in Black women himself.) Sims didn’t give the women anesthesia and repeated the erroneous assertion that Black people “did not feel pain in the same way as whites.”

Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Cultural Center in Five Points, a neighborhood gathering place for Black Denverites and a launchpad for one of Fard’s life goals: reducing the HIV/AIDS epidemic’s disproportionate impact on Black Americans, an issue he’s advised the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on.

Fard has seen the way implicit bias plays out at doctor’s offices and in hospitals. A nurse may come off as cold, or a doctor may express doubt when a Black woman describes her pain level. “There’s a lack of trust, where a person might not feel comfortable explaining what they’re going through,” Fard says. “So a medical provider may not be picking up on cues of pain.”

This dynamic explains, in part, the way many Coloradans view our health care system. In a 2020 survey administered by the Colorado Health Foundation that polled a representative sample of Centennial Staters, 49 percent said they believed Black Coloradans are more likely to receive poor quality or inadequate health care compared with white Coloradans. Studies show that those who believe they’ve been treated unfairly in a health care setting may forgo further interactions with the system: A new report from the Colorado Health Institute, a nonpartisan research group, found that more than five percent of Coloradans passed up care to avoid this risk.

The COVID-19 pandemic is only the latest, and most acute, demonstration of health care inequities in America. On April 13, 2020, the CDPHE released its first round of race and ethnicity data for COVID-19. Black Coloradans made up seven percent of cases, despite representing just under four percent of the Centennial State’s population. Hispanic Coloradans, who represent 21 percent of the Centennial State’s population, had contracted 28 percent of cases. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, just 0.1 percent of the population, made up 0.6 percent of cases—and 1.6 percent of deaths. Unfortunately, the data were—and remain—incomplete, because 25 percent of those early cases did not include information on race and ethnicity when they were reported to the state.

The press release that accompanied these statistics included a quote from Jill Hunsaker-Ryan, the executive director of CDPHE: “There is much to be learned from this disaster, and the uneven effects of COVID-19 on different communities will perhaps be one of the most profound lessons.” (The department’s media team declined to con-

H E A LT H CA R E Ultimately, Sims discovered a treatment for fistulas. The Black women he tortured were rarely acknowledged, and Sims often described them as willing subjects.

The terrorizing of patients of color didn’t end with Sims. Doctors forcibly sterilized Black women through most of the 1900s (a practice also used on one-third of women in Puerto Rico in the 1930s through 1970s; immigrant women in ICE detention centers were sterilized, too, according to a 2020 whistleblower). Researchers tested the impacts of radiation and hormone injections on majority Black cohorts. According to Washington’s book, U.S. scientists administered unapproved doses of an experimental measles vaccine to mostly Black and Latino children in Los Angeles as recently as 1991, even after the injections killed hundreds of children in other countries, like Senegal.

In perhaps the most infamous example of medical malfeasance against Black Americans, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the U.S. Public Health Service didn’t inform 399 Black men in Macon County, Alabama, that they’d caught the bacterial infection.

Instead, the researchers observed how the disease impacted them for 40 years without

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intervening, even when a treatment, penicillin, was approved. Those men unknowingly passed syphilis to their partners, who often gave birth to children with the disease.

“There’s no way you can be a minority patient, understand that history, and not worry about the quality of care you might be getting,” Wynia says. Hughes, who is the pastor of Denver’s New Covenant Christian Church/Alpha Omega Ministries, has heard that concern from his parishioners, who say they aren’t sure they’ll receive proper health care if they go to the hospital with COVID-19 symptoms. (Health care workers still disregard Black patients’ pain more than whites’—even Black children are less likely to receive pain medication than their white counterparts.) They’re also worried about the vaccine’s safety—61 percent of Black respondents said they would get the COVID-19 vaccine in a March Pew Research study, compared with about 70 percent of Hispanic and white respondents.

“Everyone should be treated equally, with the best evidence, the best advice,” Hughes says. “Right now, we’re failing in that. We’ve been failing in that, and we’re continuing to fail in that.”

IN FEBRUARY OF LAST YEAR, Hughes began feeling faint and short of breath. He checked in to the VA hospital in Aurora on March 9, 2020.

The news of Hughes’ hospitalization captured media attention: The well-known social justice advocate, nicknamed “Big T,” was the first COVID-19 case at the VA hospital. He was also campaigning to represent District 7 in the Colorado House of Representatives. His candidacy came to an end, though, as his fight with the coronavirus escalated. His doctors at the VA’s intensive care unit (ICU) put him in a medically induced coma, where he stayed for seven weeks as well-wishes poured in to his wife, who had also been diagnosed with COVID19 and was quarantining at home.

Hughes recovered and returned home in May, and he credits the excellent care he says he received at the VA. But he wonders about the Coloradans who weren’t met with that same compassion and focus—or who never trusted the system enough to ask for help in the first place. m

Angela Ufheil is 5280’s associate editor.

Email her at letters@5280.com.

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ANIMAL WELFARE WILD ANIMAL SANCTUARY Over the course of 23 years, Becca Miceli has cared for and treated over 1000 Lions, Tigers, Bears, Wolves, and other large carnivores at The Wild Animal Sanctuary, a non-profit located 30 miles outside of Denver. As the Chief Science and Animal Welfare Officer, Becca finds herself every day having the opportunity to make a heartfelt difference in the lives of rescued animals. From utilizing her vast knowledge to assist in domestic or international animal rescues, to managing a full-time animal care staff, everything she does is with the sole purpose of ensuring that each rescued animal is given the best possible care to help them live a long, happy, and exceedingly healthy life at the Sanctuary.

This is no easy feat—The Wild Animal Sanctuary is the largest and oldest carnivore sanctuary in the world with more than 600 current rescued animals that all came from horrific exploitative, neglectful, or abusive situations. Her experience makes Becca one of the foremost large carnivore medical experts in the country and somebody who has dedicated her life to the betterment of animal welfare. For Becca, this work feeds her heart and soul...and as silly or as backwards as it may sound, her proudest moments when working with these rescued animals is when they decide that they do not need you anymore…when they are surrounded by their companions, able to make their own choices, express their likes and dislikes, and live peacefully within their large acreage habitats—to be truly free.

(303) 536-0118 2999 County Road 53, Keenesburg

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URBAN MATTRESS “Over the top customer service happens when you know the people you’re taking care of are your neighbors.” With two bright and spacious local showrooms and 5 more nationwide, you would never guess that in 1989 a converted gas station off of I-25 and 58th avenue and $5,000 cash is where the company got its roots.

At the age of 19, Billy Williams arrived in Denver with only the knowledge passed down from his father, a mattress tradesman as well, and a young entrepreneur’s grit. Now, over 30 years later, Urban Mattress has become one of the leading innovators in sleep. Designing and manufacturing all products here in Colorado, and white glove delivery all across the front range, the core of Urban Mattress comes from the structure of being a family business. There is a strong sense of pride and tradition in the company, and it carries through to their products.

When you walk into Urban Mattress, you will be greeted

by Billy, one of his daughters, or his youngest son, William.

There is an easy, comfortable, and calm energy in the atmosphere that sets the store apart. The commission driven salesman that you will find at most stores is nowhere in sight. Instead, the company is family owned and operated, so from the consultation process in the showroom, to the caring and careful delivery team, the service is exceptional.

“This company is our legacy. Every day when we get to demonstrate what our Dad has worked for and created, we feel like we are a part of something special. Great products and an important story of hard work, passion and success.

It is our job to carry that commitment and honesty through to every customer we meet. Our goal is perfection. We’re almost there.”

DENVER (303) 953-2992 1485 S. Colorado Boulevard, Suite 400 Denver, CO 80222 BOULDER (303) 440-0288 2830 Arapahoe Avenue Boulder, CO 80303

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CLEAN INDOOR AIR TIM BROOKS, President of LOHMILLER & COMPANY Since 1990, Lohmiller & Company has been supplying local contractors with heating and cooling equipment to keep people comfortable indoors no matter what each Colorado season brings.

For President Tim Brooks, navigating ever-changing seasons is not an issue. Having started his career as a part-time A/C delivery driver, Tim has held every type of position possible throughout his 35+ years in the industry. His depth of experience and personal objective to help individuals and companies achieve their goals has kept Lohmiller & Company at the forefront of indoor comfort needs.

“Today, comfort is not just temperature, it’s the confidence of knowing we have clean air to breathe,” says Brooks. “We have always been cautious about what we drink, but until recently, not conscious of what we’re breathing. Indoor air pollution is a significant problem in most homes and buildings.”

Always striving to be successful by doing good, Brooks states: “It is comforting to know that we have brought cleaner, healthier air to buildings of all shapes and sizes—from stadiums, to theatres, to homes. During these difficult times, we have been able to deliver piece of mind to thousands of individuals by giving them confidence that the indoor air they are breathing is safer.”

It’s the season to honor the “V” (ventilation) in HVAC. Tim’s goal is to continue to create awareness that we are breathing polluted indoor air when we don’t have to be. There are many Indoor Air Quality solutions for removing mold, bacteria, and pathogens from our air. There is an affordable option for any type of building or home.

(303) 825-4328 4800 Osage St. #100 Denver, CO 80221

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S PECIAL

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JEFF ENGELMAN, CFP®

S H E L LY S C H E L L , C D FA ®

PETER GAIDE

R YA N W E L L S

REAL PEOPLE, GIVING REAL ADVICE, TAILORED AROUND YOUR NEEDS ERIC MAASKE

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AMY SHROFF, AIF®

FINANCIAL PLANNING + WEALTH MANAGEMENT PRISM FINANCIAL STRATEGIES PRISM Financial Strategies is a thought-led, independent financial advisory firm unlike any others you may know.

PRISM’s professionals each have an average 20 years of experience—that and the varied market conditions we’ve navigated gives us knowledge. The solutions we bring to our clients are rooted in the best thinking of today with an eye toward tomorrow—that makes us relevant. And, because no one client is like any other, our advice is always bespoke—in short, we’re totally “you-focused”.

ROBERT SINGLE

But we’re more than just a team of skilled independent financial professionals. We’re real people, giving real advice, tailored around your needs.

We serve individuals and institutions in multiple markets, but we’re Denver based, and proud of it. We live in your community, probably shop at the same stores as you, ski the same mountains, have children that go to the same school as yours, and eat at your favorite restaurants.

So why do clients rely on us to keep their assets protected from risk and put to work for continued growth? In a single word, trust. Trust that we’ll always put their interests first.

Trust in our philosophy that managing money is a great responsibility. Trust that we’ll do the right thing always. Trust is PRISM’s lodestar; it’s what has guided us our entire careers.

TOM GONNELLA

At PRISM, every client is valuable, every relationship important, and every goal you have is our goal, too. If financial peace of mind is important to you, we invite you to join us for a free consultation.

(720) 458-6841 | contact@prismfinancialstrategies.com

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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. By devoting our entire practice to family law, 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.

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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, P.C. (303) 622-5502 1125 17th Street, Suite 450, Denver, CO 80202

harrisfamilylaw.com

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INTERIOR DESIGN Keia McSwain,

BLACK INTERIOR DESIGNERS NETWORK (404) 468-5791

blackinteriordesignersnetwork.com

Keia McSwain is president of the Black Interior Designers Network and principal designer of Kimberly + Cameron Interiors. The Black Interior Designers Network, 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 McSwain stepped up to the role of president to further elevate and serve designers of color nationwide, from her home base of Denver, CO. With the goal of ultimately closing the opportunity and income gap of the minority community, McSwain works with interior designers, manufacturers and media entities to showcase the breadth of black interior designers’ creativity, influence and professional contributions. The result is a robust, supportive community of over 200 members (and growing!) who are breaking glass ceilings in the design industry. In the past year, McSwain has fostered national media campaigns and the industry’s first-ever all-black digital designer showhouse, capturing the attention of millions of design aficionados across North America and beyond.

McSwain’s dedication to promoting diversity is changing the dynamic of the interior design industry in a profoundly positive way!

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MARKETING

Aimee Meester and her team at Madison Taylor Marketing provide comprehensive, high-level strategy and solutions paired with enterprise-level tools and technologies to deliver on marketing actions.

In 2008, Aimee started Madison Taylor Marketing to provide better marketing solutions and agency partnerships. There was no grand mission statement, no elaborate business plans, or dreams of an IPO, just a few people with a passion to alleviate the frustration of working with a marketing agency.

Today, Aimee serves as the CEO and lead visionary, though she is affectionately referred to internally as the Chief Marketing Aficionado.

The agency’s reputation as a preeminent marketing partner was earned over the last decade by delivering wide-ranging marketing solutions with integrity, expertise, and professionalism. Aimee measures the agency’s success in part by the love and passion her internal team manifests in their day-to-day work, a priority reflected in the honor of being named one of Denver Business Journal’s Best Places to Work in 2020, but also by whether every single client views

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the agency as a vital partner in their success. Demonstrating tangible evidence of results that directly align with strategic client goals and initiatives, no matter how the agency has had to innovate to make it happen, is one of the key ways Madison Taylor Marketing has differentiated in a crowded space.

“We operate differently than other agencies. What we do may not be different on its face—but the way we deliver is what sets us apart,” says Aimee. “As a collective, we are dedicated to understanding client needs and pursuing customized strategies and aligned metrics of success. This is my commitment to our clients. You see it in our reviews and hear it when you talk to our clients.”

MADISON TAYLOR MARKETING 5613 DTC Pkwy., Ste. 120, Greenwood Village, CO 80111

madisontaylormarketing.com | (303) 500-3265

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FINE JEWELRY Joy & Troy Thollot,

THOLLOT & CO. (303) 280-3374 3790 E. 104th Avenue Thornton, CO 80233

thollotjewelers.com

In 2019, Joy and Troy Thollot, the local husband and wife duo behind Thollot & Co. jewelry, began the adventure of expanding their showroom into an experiential shop where locals could peruse fine jewelry in a space without the stifling pressure of a high dollar purchase. “Jewelry stores are intimidating,” Joy Thollot says. “We want to settle our customer’s spirit before, during, and after their shopping experience.” Cue the warm, easy-going Colorado craft brewery scene connection.

Customers can “bar hop” around the store—comfortably coasting from the custom design bar to the jewelry repair bar to the bridal bar. And, if a customer wants a more active role in the jewelry process, they’ll trek to the casting bar, offering a more handson ring-making experience. The Pour Your Heart into It™ casting bar allows individuals or couples the opportunity to pour the liquid metal directly into the ring’s mold.

After becoming GIA graduate gemologists, The Thollots moved to Colorado, grew their jewelry repair business from a single bedroom to a 16th Street Mall workshop, and created one of “America’s Coolest Stores for 2020” according to a judged-panel from Instore Magazine.

And if everything goes well, the Thollot duo, the staff, and their customers will all end up at the social bar to enjoy another handcrafted treasure from Thollot & Co.—one of their house-recipe, private label brews, like the Double Diamond IPA, Platinum Blond, and El Diente Golden Lager. Cheers!

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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.”

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

There is something for all ages: the latest movies, video game consoles, and a multimedia iPad bar. The expert staff walks each child through his or her first 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. Our entire staff has been vaccinated for COVID-19 and we’ve added air purification systems to provide safe care during the pandemic. Parents can relax knowing Sunrise aims

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to accommodate any family’s busy schedule and offers convenient after school appointments and select Saturdays. Sunrise Pediatric Dentistry believes strongly in giving back to the community and is involved in a variety of philanthropic organizations. Dr. Crespi is a Board Member for Kids In Need of Dentistry, a nonprofit in Colorado that helps thousands of children receive dental care whose families are unable to afford treatment.

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.

SUNRISE PEDIATRIC DENTISTRY 3650 East 1st Avenue, Suite 301, Denver, CO 80206

sunrisepedsdentistry.com | (720) 660-2467

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

i-ORTHO.COM

Dr. Anil J. Idiculla (Dr. I) and Dr. Danielle E. DeLand (Dr. Danielle) are the powerhouse pair behind creating beautiful smiles at i-Orthodontics. Together, they build confidence and change lives as they believe everyone should Live Life Smiling™.

With credence that every person deserves the confidence that comes with a beautiful smile, Dr. I and Dr. Danielle personally customize your braces and Invisalign smile journey with the most progressive and advanced technology.

Proud to be one of Denver’s Elite Top Invisalign Diamond Plus Providers, i-Orthodontics has established themselves as industry leaders through their dedication to providing an unforgettable experience and achieving quality results with their patients.

On building relationships with patients, Dr. Danielle explains, “I love the meaningful relationships I get to build with patients! There is so much joy and happiness shared as we travel their smile journey together. Even after treatment, I’m always here for them.”

Come discover how you, too, can Live Life Smiling™.

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TYPE 1 DIABETES CHILDREN’S DIABETES FOUNDATION (303) 863-1200 3025 S. Parker Road, Suite 110 Aurora, CO 80014

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Most people with type 1 diabetes are diagnosed in childhood or adolescence. Steve Lucas, philanthropist and CEO of iCIMS, was diagnosed at 25. When he lamented, “why me?”, his wife, Shelley, replied, “why not you?” While neither knew how to handle this new challenge in their lives, she knew they could find those who could.

That’s where Children’s Diabetes Foundation (CDF) came in. Shelley joined and eventually became the president of the Guild of the Children’s Diabetes Foundation, introducing Steve to the Foundation and the work it does for those, like him, living with type 1 diabetes.

Children’s Diabetes Foundation is the fundraising arm of the Barbara Davis Center (BDC) and focuses on patient support, diabetes research, and public awareness.

It is a world-class center with top doctors, cutting-edge research, and passionate patient care teams. CDF is able to supplement programs and funds to improve every patient’s life.

Steve has served on the board of, volunteered with, and supported CDF for years. He takes most joy in mentoring youth with diabetes, helping them to get on track and learn to manage their diabetes. Steve insists he would never trade those experiences for not having type 1 diabetes. He believes living with and managing a chronic illness forces one to empathize in ways one may not have otherwise. It is with that empathy that he is able to share his personal knowledge of managing his chronic illness, the network of those that can offer support through Children’s Diabetes Foundation and the BDC, and the hope that anyone can have a life well-lived with type 1 diabetes.

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LUXURY REAL ESTATE DENVER’S TOP TEAM Jacci Geiger, Mary Jones, Wendy Glazer, and Sana Wood (303) 881-3514 215 Saint Paul Street, #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 their clients’ testimonials and continued friendships long after the transactions are over. 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 four 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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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 has accomplished this goal to provide the best quality dentistry through making personal connections with each patient, demonstrating empathy and compassion, and exceeding expectations in customer service.

Dr. Kutis has been awarded Top Dentist recognitions in both Chicago, where she practiced briefly, and Denver by 5280 magazine, Colorado Parent magazine, and the International Association of Dentistry. She is also proud to be a Dawson Scholar and Spear Faculty Club Member.

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

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dentistry practices in Colorado. Additionally, Dr. Kutis is an educator for the Pacific Aesthetic Continuum, which is a live patient course that is dedicated to teaching full mouth reconstruction and veneers.

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 Ave., Ste 100, Littleton, CO 80127

bluesagedental.com | (720) 924-4849

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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 by 100 employees during the pandemic to keep up with the needs of Denver’s most vulnerable.

In 2019-2020, the Mission provided 689,718 meals, 386,219 nights of shelter, graduated 113 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 we’ve been faithfully serving, thanks to the support of our caring Denver community, for 129 years.

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HOME FINANCING COMMERCE BANK

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 f rom 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.

Chris Flanders

Megan Wiegand

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

(303) 214-5423 commercebank.com/ chrisflanders

(303) 214-5433 commercebank.com/ meganwiegand

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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CONTEMPORARY JEWELRY With a 20-year background as a bench jeweler and custom jewelry designer, Carol Ferguson established Element 79 Contemporary Jewelry in Cherry Creek four years ago with the goal of creating a unique atmosphere in which to shop for collectible, contemporary jewelry.

Located in the casual yet premier shopping destination of Cherry Creek, E79 takes its name from the 79th number on the periodic table, gold. It is a fun, relaxed environment where customers can discover personal, hand-fabricated, imaginative jewelry with no intimidation and no pressure. Customers can learn about the designers and the unique aesthetic each brings to the art of personal adornment. “Handmade

jewelry is special because it allows the wearer to feel the connection to the maker. It’s jewelry with soul,” says Carol.

With a full schedule this year of designer trunk shows both in-store and online, E79 is bringing the most current and original designers on the fine contemporary jewelry scene to Denver. They also have Denver’s finest bridal salon with a fulltime specialist to guide you through the process of picking out your perfect wedding ring. Carol says, “We also hope to continue our events this summer with the E79 Music Series and other outdoor events to further engage the community!”

Named the Editors Choice for Jewelry and the Face of Contemporary Jewelry by 5280 magazine three years running, E79’s stylish jewelry lines are for every man and woman, regardless of style and influence.

ELEMENT 79 300 Fillmore Street, Denver, CO 80206

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PERSONAL INJURY LITIGATION

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.

BURG SIMPSON ELDREDGE HERSH & JARDINE

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 for 2021, and a Rising Star by Colorado Super Lawyers every year for the past 9 years.

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A dedicated advocate for those who have been harmed by the carelessness of others, Stephen Burg has a long-standing 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.

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INDIAN CUISINE Originally from Chandigarh—the capital of the northern Indian states of Punjab and Haryana—Simeran moved to Denver, CO, at a young age with his family. Simeran has always had a passion for work. While in Manual High School, Simeran insisted upon keeping a full-time job at a local drug store. After completing high school, Simeran was determined to fulfill his dreams. His dream was to bring the vibrant, exotic taste and culture of India to his community. After convincing his parents to give him a loan, combined with all his savings from his years of hard work, he was able to fulfill those dreams and open Little India Restaurant in 1998… and the rest is history.

Not only is Little India locally owned and operated, it is the result of the blood, sweat and tears of Simeran. He is still grateful and happy to share his love of exquisite Indian cuisine with the residents and visitors

of Denver. Since 1998, 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 in and enjoy at this exotic eatery.

There are currently three locations, one on South Downing St, the Original on 6th. Ave.. The newest of the locations is in the beautiful heart of the West Highlands, with a warming and comforting atmosphere. Simeran has plans to open a fourth location and bring the wonderful flavors of India to the Central Park neighborhood.

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

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LOCAL DESIGN BUILD 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

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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.

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

factordesignbuild.com

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HAIR SCIENCE HAIR SCIENCES CENTER OF COLORADO (303) 694-9381 5445 DTC Parkway, Suite 1015 Greenwood Village, CO 80111

hairsciencescenter.com

James A. Harris, MD, FISHRS, FACS, is an internationally renowned hair transplant surgeon, researcher and innovator in the field of hair restoration. He is the Founder and Medical Director of the Hair Sciences Center of Colorado.

The clinic specializes in state-of-the-art medical and surgical treatments of hair loss for men and women including: hairlines, receding temples, crowns, overall thinning, balding, sideburns, beards, mustaches and eyebrows. Dr. Harris’ focus on patient advocacy and quality of care is the foundation of his work.

He was the lead consulting physician on the development of the ARTAS™ robot and the only physician offering No-Shave FUE (Follicular Unit Extraction) in Colorado. This technique is so advanced that less than 5% of physicians world-wide who perform FUE offer this option.

Dr. Harris is a published author, teacher and lecturer. He pioneered and patented advanced methods of hair restoration, and has received the highest award for significant clinical contributions to the field of hair restoration, given annually to one innovator from around the globe. He is passionate about helping people and believes that everyone deserves to have a good hair day.

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Children in Colorado who go hungry daily would fill our ballpark

Amp the Cause works with over 55 beneficiary organizations to improve the lives of Colorado’s

It’s time to play hard ball against hunger.

Step up and donate to Fill the Void.

Fill the Void provides food-insecure families with $250 grocery gift cards, which give children and their families food to eat.

Donate today at FilltheVoidColorado.org children and families. To learn more about Amp the Cause and our programs visit ampthecause.org

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HOW TO LIVE MORE

SUSTAINABLY

IN COLORADO

The planet desperately needs us to go beyond recycling soda cans and washing laundry in cold water. In honor of this month’s Earth Day, we checked in with Colorado’s eco-experts about their efforts to save the planet and what you can do to make a bigger impact each day.

BY LINDSEY B. KING

not so long ago, when “we had to be careful of saying the phrase ‘climate change,’ ” Kellie Falbo says. The founder and executive director of the Fort Collins–based Sustainable Living Association explains, however, that those days are mostly behind us.

“Just looking at this past year’s fires in Colorado as an example,” Falbo says, “people understand that it’s not normal. Knowing that Coloradans get it, how do we help them shift their behaviors toward what we call sustainability?”

Popularized in the late 1980s, “sustainability” is a buzzword with staying power. In the simplest terms, it means balancing human needs with the health of the natural environment.

Most climatologists agree the increase in global temperature, the decrease in ice sheets, the rise in sea levels, and the increased frequency and ferocity of hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and drought clearly illustrate that humans are not living in harmony with their surroundings. It is,

DOING YOUR PART

Turn off the

THE BASICS

If you aren’t already performing these easy tasks to live a more sustainable life, start today.

Run your dishwasher only when it’s full

Turn off the lights when you leave a room 74

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Recycle glass

and plastic containers, aluminum cans, cardboard, newspapers, and paper products

water while you’re brushing your teeth

Reduce (even

just a little bit!) your consumption of beef

Always carry reusable totes to avoid singleuse plastic bags

Walk, bike,

or use public transit for trips one mile or less— transportation is the secondlargest emitter of greenhouse gases in Colorado

Use cold water to wash your laundry and linedry your clothes when possible

Replace

inefficient incandescent lightbulbs with efficient LEDs

Install an

energy-saving thermostat

Shorten your

shower from the typical eight minutes to five minutes to save six gallons of heated water

Stop buying

bottled water; use a refillable bottle instead

Unplug elec-

tronics when they’re not in use

Previous spread: Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images.

This page, from top: Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images; Getty Images

THERE WAS A TIME,

in short, Dr. Seuss’ tale of The Lorax brought to life—and on a global scale.

The enormity of the problem can understandably spur shrugs of indifference. After all, it can be difficult to see how Coloradans’ daily habits could possibly lead to noticeable progress on climate change, no matter how many plastic straws they eschew. Elizabeth Babcock understands.

As a manager at the city of Denver’s newly created Office of Climate Action, Sustainability, and Resiliency, Babcock says individual actions are critical to sustainable living, but also believes systemic change is the real key to saving the planet. “People want to do the right thing,” Babcock says.

“But it’s not always about a choice. Sometimes there’s not easy access to public transit. Sometimes the sustainable option is too expensive. Asking people to make everyday changes is important, but one of the most impactful things they can do is support policy decisions that make it easier for everyone to make sustainable choices.”

In just the past several years, the passage of landmark climate change legislation (see: the Climate Action Plan to Reduce Pollution) and several voter-approved initiatives (see: Denver Green Roof Initiative 300 and Denver Ballot Measure 2A) suggest Colorado has reached an inflection point.

People like Falbo say we need to harness the momentum to force a big push—in renewable energy production, transportation, and waste—in order to do our part to keep the planet at a livable, thrivable temperature.

Make no mistake, though: It will take a next-level effort by the state, municipalities, businesses, nonprofits, public utilities, and, yes, you to deliver the measurable change our state and ultimately our planet need.

SUSTAINABILITY IN COLORADO

DOING YOUR PART

DOING THEIR PART

REDISTRIBUTING THE EXCESS

We Don’t Waste, an 11-year-old, Denver-based food recovery nonprofit, wants to put edible goods into hungry bellies, not into landfills. 5280 asked founder Arlan Preblud, a foodie who turned his query about what restaurants did with their unused comestibles into a mission, to break down the numbers behind our food waste problem and his win-win organization.

WASTE NOT

It’s (past) time to get over composting’s PR problems.

~50%

Percentage of food distributed by We Don’t Waste that is produce—items that are too often missing from the diets of those who struggle to put food on the table each day.

161

Local food donors— farms, wholesalers, distributors, caterers, restaurants—who give their excess products to We Don’t Waste.

36 MILLION Pounds of food Preblud’s nonprofit has kept out of landfills since 2009.

Credits From left: Tk Sarah Banks; Christian Dahlhaus/Getty Images

145 MILLION Servings of food We Don’t Waste has donated since its inception.

63 MILLION

Pounds of greenhouse gases We Don’t Waste has prevented from entering the Earth’s atmosphere since 2009—roughly equivalent to keeping 6,200 vehicles off the road for a year.

40%

Percentage of food produced in the United States that is thrown away, much of it into landfills.

~7

Days a container of unopened milk can last beyond the “sell by” or “best by” date. “Those dates,” Preblud says, “are a marketing campaign to get people to buy more product. If it smells fine and tastes fine, it likely is fine. We get product that’s past grocers’ made-up dates and feed those in need.”

300%

Percentage increase in demand seen by Preblud’s nonprofit since the beginning of the pandemic.

“People who might not normally come to us are coming now,” he says. “They’ve lost their jobs or had their pay cut, and they’re hungry. We have to protect them.”

You know those infomercials that have you reaching for your checkbook to help save abandoned pets or kids with cancer—all for less than $1 a day?

Yeah, they’ve worked on us, too. That’s why the city’s Denver Composts program should probably consider a new outreach campaign: Help save the planet for only 32 cents a day.

Nearly 50 percent of what Denver residents send to landfills each year is actually compostable. Knowing that, the city implemented a pilot composting program in 2008 and, as of 2017, expanded the service to all singlefamily homes in the Mile High City. That means diverting organic material from the landfill—where anaerobic decomposition creates loads of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas—is as easy as throwing food scraps, yard clippings, and most paper products into a bin, and dragging it out for collection once a week. Yet only 15 percent of eligible households are currently participating.

The lack of engagement likely can be attributed to several factors. The first is cost. As opposed to the city’s free trash and recycling services, residents must sign up and pay $29.25 per quarter for composting. The second is the alleged smell, which really isn’t any different than the, uh, aroma coming from your trash can. Finally, the program’s small marketing budget means that many Denverites simply don’t know the program is available.

That’s a huge bummer for the environment because households that composted generated roughly 17 fewer pounds of landfill-destined garbage every week than those that didn’t.

If every single-family home in Denver composted, 156 million pounds of organic material each year would be diverted. That certainly seems worth 32 cents a day. denvergov.org/gogreen APRIL 2021

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DOING THEIR PART

THE WHOLE PACKAGE

The Sustainable Living Association’s Leadership Program arms influencers with a well-rounded environmental education.

DOING YOUR PART

PLASTICS BAN 2.0

Coloradans can support rebooted anti-plastics legislation at the Capitol.

In 2019, Denver City Council approved a 10-cent fee for single-use plastic bags that was set to begin in July 2020. Implementation was delayed by the pandemic. But that lag was not the only blow to local sustainability efforts in 2020: Three state bills that targeted plastics failed to become law.

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Fortunately, 2021 is a new year—and a new chance to regulate the (mostly) nonrecyclable, nonbiodegradable materials. At press time, Representatives Alex Valdez and Lisa Cutter and Senator Julie Gonzales were planning to introduce a bill in early March combining the best parts of 2020’s bills. This new bill would allow local governments to ban certain plastics plus prohibit food establishments from using Styrofoam containers for takeout and restrict restaurants from providing some single-use plastics.

“We haven’t attacked solid pollution,” Valdez says. “It’s time.”

Sanchez says, “and it’s helped me move my career with HP beyond packaging.

I’m now moving toward a job in the built environment realm, helping our buildings in more than 170 countries be more sustainable. Part of the reason I could do that was having completed the SLA program.” sustainablelivingassociation.org

Not everyone agrees. Some business owners say the changes will be costly. Some lawmakers are concerned about government intrusion into business. Big-box grocers are nervous about a patchwork of regulations among municipalities, which they say could make compliance difficult. That is why, Valdez says, two things are critical. One, legislation must take businesses into account. And two, citizens need to get involved. “Our process of creating laws is public,” he says. “Come to the Capitol and testify.” Or, he adds, call or email legislators directly.

From top: Courtesy of Jacob Sanchez; Getty Images

Jacob Sanchez had a problem. As an environmental engineer on HP’s Fort Collins sustainability team, he was responsible for evaluating the eco-friendliness of the company’s packaging components—and nonbiodegradable polystyrene (read: Styrofoam) had become material non grata. “Customers hated it, regulators had begun targeting it, our competitors were abandoning it,” Sanchez (pictured) says, “but it’s a cheap, lightweight, good-at-its-job material for shipping everything from monitors to printers.” The 28-year-old wasn’t sure he could persuade the 55,000-person company to ditch the foam. That is, until he signed on for the Sustainable Living Association’s (SLA) Leadership Program in 2018.

An eight-month, $950 commitment, the online training meets once a week for 90 minutes. “Companies are hearing from their clients that they want to see sustainability as a core tenet of businesses,” says SLA founder Kellie Falbo. “We bring in sustainability-focused organizations—like Patagonia and Ducks Unlimited—to present to our participants to inspire them.” But inspiration isn’t the only goal of the program. In addition to giving attendees a broad education in things like renewable energy production, waste reduction, and water conservation, SLA wants them to understand the so-called triple bottom line, an economic theory that holds that companies should focus not on one bottom line but on three: profit, people, and the planet. “Getting exposure to the idea of the triple bottom line was really important,” Sanchez says. “It helped to understand that the feel-good parts of sustainability also have business implications.”

Sanchez must have been an A-plus student, because upon completion of the course he helped shift HP’s packaging strategy to meet a goal of 75 percent reduction in single-use plastics by 2025. “It took time and lots of conversations, but it was a big achievement,”

SUSTAINABILITY IN COLORADO

DOING YOUR PART

Sounds simple, but the most effective way to reduce waste is by not making unnecessary new products in the first place. Use our abridged guide to reducing, reusing, and repurposing all kinds of things in Denver.

Zero Market

LET’S SAY YOU…

BUT…

YOU SHOULD CONSIDER…

Credits Tkof Zero Market Courtesy

WHICH…

A LITTLE R&R&R

Have an impressive collection of miscellaneous arts and crafts supplies

Need a coffee table to match your home’s rustic-farmhouse aesthetic

Have a fetish for designer jeans

Need to find a housewarming gift for your friends who just moved to the ’burbs

Are tired of all the plastic tubes and bottles—of toothpaste, shampoo, lotion, olive oil—you use once and then throw away

You just don’t have room for the hodgepodge of canvases, glitter, buttons, and ribbons anymore

Buying from Pottery Barn seems so profligate (not to mention spendy!)

You lost a ton of weight during the pandemic (as if!) and your fancy denim doesn’t fit anymore

You hate buying something generic that’s probably shipped from 6,000 miles away via a fossil-fuel-burning cargo plane

You don’t really know how to avoid the waste

Donating your trove to ReCreative Denver, recreativedenver.org

Browsing the selection of upcycled, reclaimed wood furniture at Salvage Design Center, salvagedesign center.com

Taking your gently used Hudsons, 7 For All Mankinds, and Rag & Bones to Déjà Blue, goodwillcolorado.org

Perusing the handcrafted wares—like a clock created using a vintage 45—made from repurposed materials at Revampt, revamptgoods.com

Shopping at Zero Market, located at the Stanley Marketplace and at the Edgewater Public Market, thezeromarket.com

Is a nonprofit dedicated to promoting creativity, community, and environmental stewardship through creative reuse and arts education

Specializes in reclaimed lumber, antique doors, and vintage hardware, and does so with a mission to “preserve the past while protecting the planet for our future”

Is a Goodwillowned, secondhand store in Cherry Creek North that generally stocks more designer duds than the average Goodwill location

Sources many of its nifty gifts, home decor items, and furniture from Colorado artisans skilled at making other people’s trash into shiny new treasures

Helps you avoid disposables by letting you buy many products in bulk using only reusable, recyclable, or compostable containers

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DOING YOUR PART

RAISE THE ROOF

The real estate atop our homes and garages seems like an awful waste of space—until you let Andy Creath green it up for you.

We rarely expend much mental bandwidth on the state of our roofs unless they recently took a beating in a hailstorm. But maybe we should. According to a 2014 study from Climate Central, an independent climate change research organization, Denver had the third-worst urban heat island effect of the 60 cities it studied. The urban heat island effect is a phenomenon in which pavement, concrete, and other heat-trapping materials lead to warmer temperatures in urban centers than in nearby rural areas. In Denver, that can mean up to a 23-degree difference between downtown and, say, the edges of the Eastern Plains.

For sauna lovers, that might sound absolutely dreamy; however, urbanization combined with climate change could begin to cook our cities in ways that stress energy resources, imperil economies, and jeopardize human health—particularly in low-income areas and in communities of color, which are disproportionately affected by climate change.

Denverites can help nudge the thermometer down by greening their homes’ rooftops, which is where Green Roofs of Colorado comes in. Founded by former Environmental Protection Agency worker Andy Creath in 2007, Green Roofs of Colorado designs,

LAYERING A green roof typically has a waterproof membrane, a root barrier, a drainage layer, filter fabric, and a band of growing media (aka specially designed soil) all layered “kinda like lasagna,” Creath says. The vegetation rests atop all of the layers.

Creath generally works with a homeowner’s architect to make sure the roof can support the additional weight.

STRUCTURAL CONSIDERATIONS Not every house can accommodate a green roof without some changes to account for weight and/or sloped roofing. This hypothetical house has flat surfaces—as opposed to angled ones—perfect for planting. “A lot of people install green roofs when they’re already having to put on a new roof after a hailstorm,”Creath says. “And sometimes, because they often have gentler angles, it’s easier to put a green roof on your garage as opposed to your house.”

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Illustration by Chris Philpot

FLORA Creath selects plants for their hardiness, their ability to weather extreme heat and cold, and their capacity to thrive without much water. “Of course, plants being pretty is a big thing, too,” he says. “I want colorful flowers, plants with different heights, plants that bloom at different times, and grasses that move with the wind.” Creath likes South African ice plants because they spread easily as ground cover and have many varieties and colors of flowers. Yellow penstemons are a great lowwater plant. Creath also uses blue grama grass, native to Colorado, for height and visual interest.

installs, and maintains roofs on residential and commercial buildings across the state, including at the Denver Botanic Gardens and the Clyfford Still Museum.

“An 800-square-foot residential green roof isn’t going to have the impact of a 25,000-square-foot commercial roof,” Creath says, “but if 20 houses do it, it certainly adds up.” Plus, Creath explains, green roofs—basic versions of which cost roughly $25 per square foot, not including potentially necessary structural changes— help with energy efficiency in the indoor areas below them, offer space to grow your own food, detain stormwater, clean the air, increase habitat and biodiversity, and, in a satisfying twist, actually protect your roof from hail damage. Below, Creath helps us detail some of the fundamentals of green roofing. greenroofsco.com

SUSTAINABILITY IN COLORADO

DOING THEIR PART

TRY, TRY AGAIN Denver’s 2017 Green Roof Ordinance was remade into the Green Buildings Ordinance in 2018. This is what that looks like now.

In 2017, after voters authorized the Green Roof Initiative, we all assumed we’d start seeing green oases remaking the Denver skyline.

We were wrong. That’s because the folks who ran the initiative made a few miscalculations about the feasibility of building owners being able to install heavy green roofs.

“Green roofs were not the perfect solution to everything,” says Green Roofs of Colorado’s Andy Creath, a technical adviser for the initiative. “We came up with a compromise.”

That accord changed the Green Roof Ordinance into the Green Buildings Ordinance (GBO) in 2018.

By most accounts, the revamp made it easier for commercial structure owners to address climate change by offering compliance options beyond green roofs that increase energy efficiency and decrease the urban heat island effect. Buildings subject to the GBO* must install a cool roof— designed to reflect sunlight and absorb less heat—plus choose one other compliance option. By giving owners/builders a variety of options to choose from, says Denver

GREEN SPENDING

In November, Denverites approved raising the local sales and use tax by 0.25 percentage points to create a Climate Protection Fund, which is now overseen by the new Office of Climate Action, Sustainability, and Resiliency (CASR). Six months later, we look at the types of projects the estimated $40 million annual pool likely will support.

Allowable Use: Increased investments in solar power, battery storage, and other renewable energy tech

Credits From left: Tk Courtesy of McGregor Square; Courtesy of Denver International Airport

McGregor Square’s green space

Community Planning and Development’s Amanda Weston, “Projects are achieving the environmental benefits we hoped for with the initial Green Roofs Initiative.”

In fact, roughly 145 projects are underway or have been completed since the GBO went into effect. That means new and existing buildings around town are decreasing their environmental impacts with on-site renewable energy systems; by decreasing energy consumption; by buying off-site renewable energy; by paying into a green building fund; by obtaining green building certification; by enrolling in the GBO’s Energy Program; and, of course, with on-site green spaces, even if they’re not on the roof. *The GBO generally applies to new buildings or additions 25,000 square feet or larger, and to existing buildings 25,000 square feet or larger that are replacing their roofs.

Possible Project: 15-megawatt solar arrays on city-owned facilities Primary Purpose: The new installations would provide renewable energy to city buildings, which will help Denver reach its goal of 100 percent renewable electricity communitywide by 2030.

Secondary Benefit: These solar arrays will divert roughly 20 percent of the energy they create to surrounding communities as a part of Xcel Energy’s community solar program.

Allowable Use: Services that provide affordable, clean, safe, and reliable transportation choices, like walking, biking, mass transit, and electric vehicles (EV) Possible Project: Increase access to EV car shares in low-income communities Primary Purpose: In 2019, nonprofit Colorado CarShare started providing EV car shares to mixed-income communities.

CASR has provided support for vehicles and charging stations with funding from the CARES Act, but plans to use the Climate Protection Fund to expand the program, which provides subsidized memberships so lower-income individuals can make ecoconscious choices.

Secondary Benefit: With RTD decreasing service, expanding this project exposes more people to the upsides of car sharing.

Allowable Use: Upgrade the energy efficiency of homes, offices, and industry to reduce carbon footprints, utility bills, and indoor air pollution Possible Project: Funding the electrification of low-income homes Primary Purpose: In lowincome communities, where residents are more often renters, leaky gas appliances lead to higher utility bills. Natural gas is also a fossil fuel that, inhaled, can cause respiratory illness.

CASR hopes to replace appliances in affected areas.

Secondary Benefit: Supplanting natural gas appliances with electric versions means the appliances are hooking into Xcel’s grid, which is already using more than 30 percent renewable energy.

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DOING THEIR PART

UTILITY PLAYER

Xcel Energy–Colorado president Alice Jackson says her organization is multitasking, problem-solving, and adapting so it can meet its climate-change goals.

Here’s what she wants you to know.

“OUR JOURNEY toward more renewable energy started in

2004, when Colorado passed the first voter-led Renewable Energy Standard in the nation, requiring electricity providers to obtain a minimum percentage of their power from renewable energy sources. We needed to hit 30 percent renewables on our grid by 2020. We hit that in 2019.”

“ON OUR WAY to being 80 percent renewable by 2030, we have

plans to be at 55 percent or higher by 2025. We are building new solar arrays. We are retiring coal plants early. But how do we get to zero carbon by 2050? We’re not sure yet.”

“EVERYONE WANTS more renewables, but at Xcel we have to

balance affordability and reliability. Customers would not like it if their bills doubled or the lights suddenly went out. Right now, it’s about a mix of carbon-free resources on the system and then backfilling with fossil fuels when we need to.”

“THE DIFFICULTY with renewables is that they are variable. The

wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine.

This is where battery storage comes into the conversation.

The newer lithium-ion batteries are much improved, and battery storage has a place, but there are physical and technological limitations. Right now, we can store energy for many hours. Post-2030, we need longer-duration batteries. We have to be able to store energy we get from the wind, which whips up in the spring, to use during peak summer energy use. We need universities and private industry to work on better batteries.”

“THE ECONOMICS of renewable energy are always changing. When we first added wind in

1998, it cost about 6.9 cents per kilowatt hour. In 2018, that was down to 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour. Solar was 21 cents in 2007, but it’s now down to 2.5 cents. Coal, for comparison, has been [on average] 2.5 cents for the past decade. So wind and solar are now economic.

Battery power is not there yet, but we’re investing in it.”

Yes, most of us are Xcel customers. But you still have the ability to choose what type of energy you use.

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WINDSOURCE

This program allows customers to purchase renewable energy in 100-kilowatt-hour blocks, which cost $1.50 each. For the average home that uses 900 kilowatt hours per month, the increase in your energy bill would be $13.50 per month to be fully Windsource powered. Right now, wind accounts for 25 percent of Xcel’s renewable energy portfolio, but the more demand there is, the more supply Xcel will be able to provide.

SOLAR REWARDS COMMUNITY

Without having to install solar panels on your roof, you can still buy solar energy for your home through a third-party community garden. To harness the sun’s rays for your house, you’ll choose from Xcel’s list of approved operators (who must have a solar array in the same county in which you live); they will help you with paperwork and manage your participation. Once you’ve subscribed to a solar garden, you will receive a credit on your monthly electric bill from Xcel.

From top: Courtesy of Xcel Energy; Getty Images (2)

NEW POWER GENERATION

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process of replacing all customers’ meters with new meters that can help us tell our customers how they’re using energy in real time. Right now, we can only do that once a month. With the new meters, we will have a great opportunity to interact with our users to, say, send a signal when we’re experiencing peak use with high-carbon intensity.”

Ask Xcel About…

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“BEGINNING IN JUNE, we will begin the

SUSTAINABILITY IN COLORADO

Rivian’s R1S SUV

DOING YOUR PART

UP YOUR EV IQ

The more you know about electric vehicles, the more comfortable you’ll be with buying one.

RANGE ANXIETY

Not so long ago, EVs could only go 30 to 40 miles on a charge. Many of today’s models can go 200- or 300plus miles without having to plug in.

AVAILABLE OUTLETS

Fans of EVs say there is a misconception that charging stations are few and far between. In Denver, there are about 600 ports. Statewide, there are 3,845.

CHARGE!

DOING THEIR PART

THE ELECTRIC SLIDE

From left: Courtesy of Rivian; Getty Images

Both Denver and the state of Colorado are working to ensure we can get here, there, and everywhere in zero-emissions vehicles.

The Toyota Prius. The Tesla Roadster. The Chevy Volt. The Nissan LEAF. Until roughly 2012, these were consumers’ only real options for low- or zero-emissions vehicles (ZEV). Since then, automakers have been adding to that list, but they had little incentive to put new electric vehicle (EV) models on local lots. That changed in 2019, when Colorado adopted ZEV standards. “The standards will have a real impact on what carmakers make available here,” says Mike Salisbury, transportation energy lead for Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability, and Resiliency.

“I’m not knocking the LEAF, but not everyone wants a hatchback. Coloradans want SUVs.” With Colorado’s ZEV standards requiring that at least five percent of automakers’ vehicles for sale be electric by 2023, carmakers will want to put their most desirable models in front of Coloradans. Furthermore, in 2020, Governor Jared Polis signed legislation allowing manufacturers that don’t have existing local dealer franchises—like Rivian and Fisker—to sell EVs directly to Colorado consumers. All of this, Salisbury says, should help Colorado reach its goal of increasing the number of light-duty EVs from 32,904 now to 940,000 by 2030. Still, there are obstacles to overcome. “A lot of people still don’t know how an EV works,” Salisbury says.

“We have to educate people. And we have to get the charging infrastructure in place.”

For the uninitiated, EVs function by plugging into a charging station. An EV stores electricity in a rechargeable battery that powers an electric motor. There’s no need for liquid fossil fuel and therefore no greenhouse gas emissions coming from the tailpipe. There is a need, however, for more public places to recharge EV cars.

Since 2018, the Colorado Energy Office has been expanding its Electric Vehicle FastCharging Corridors project, the completion of which will ostensibly allow Coloradans to drive anywhere in the state in an EV. As of December 2020, seven of the anticipated 34 fee-based charging stations were online, with six more in the construction phase. The remaining 21 have spring construction dates. Denver boasts 35 free public charging stations, with 12 more slated to open this year. And new building codes now require builders to incorporate EV-readiness into most new construction. “Older homes will have to upgrade their electrical panels,” Salisbury says. “And we’ll have to help people who only use street parking at their homes.”

Selling the public on the merits of EVs while simultaneously building a robust infrastructure to meet a hypothetical future need is going to take time and effort. “But it’s all happening,” Salisbury says. “It’s happening right now.”

There are three levels of charging stations. Level 1 is your typical pluginto-the-wall charger that supplies three to five miles of range per hour. Most public stations are Level 2, which generate 10 to 20 miles per hour. DC Fast-Charging Stations, which are trying to replicate the gas station experience, can fill up a battery completely in 30 to 60 minutes.

ALL THE OPTIONS

Although a full suite of EV models hasn’t been available in Colorado until, well, any day now, carmakers from Ford to Porsche manufacture EVs with four-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, high clearance, and luxury finishes. You can find hatchbacks, sedans, minivans, SUVs, and even a pickup truck (due in 2021 from Rivian).

STICKER PRICES

The upfront price of a new electric vehicle is still higher than that of an equivalent gas-powered one. However, a 2018 study found the average annual cost of operating an EV in the United States is $485, while a gas-powered car runs $1,117. Also: You may be eligible for federal and/or state tax credits for buying or leasing an EV. EMISSIONS INSPECTION

An analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund found that by 2030 Colorado’s clean cars program could reduce climate pollution by 2.7 million metric tons. Yes, EVs take their energy from the local electric grid—which is fed by 65 percent nonrenewable energy—but as Xcel continues to add renewables to its grid, EVs will become even greener. m APRIL 2021

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COVID-19 has forced local doctors, hospitals, and public health experts to collaborate in ways that would have been unimaginable before the pandemic.

That cooperation could inspire startling advances in medicine for future generations of Coloradans.

COME TOGETHER

BY SPENCER CAMPBELL

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SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

The Colorado health care industry hopes to turn pandemic-necessitated partnerships into a new golden age of medicine.

at Denver Health, Dr. Ivor Douglas knows better than most how devastating a toll COVID-19 has taken. “We’ve lost 400,000 people, which is as many Americans as were lost in the Second World War,” he says. (The number topped 520,000 in early March.) “And we’ve done it in a year.”

At the same time, Douglas understands that the unwelcome arrival of the novel coronavirus presents an opportunity to advance health care at an unprecedented rate. “Absolutely it’s going to have long-term effects on human health and scientific discovery,” Douglas says. He believes such rapid progress will occur because, well, he’s seen it happen.

For about 20 years, Denver Health has been treating acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)—when fluid builds up in the tiny air sacs in the lungs, limiting the air they can hold—by rotating ventilated patients from lying on their backs to the prone position, on their stomachs, for prolonged periods of time. Although the practice seems counterintuitive (doesn’t breathing on your stomach appear constrictive?), Denver

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Health and other hospitals believed the practice increased oxygen levels while decreasing ventilatorinduced lung injuries. But because there hadn’t been a consensus on the effectiveness of the procedure, and it’s cumbersome to move intubated patients from supine to prone (three to six people are required), few hospitals regularly performed the technique.

Then COVID-19 began causing ARDS in severe cases. A number of studies promptly affirmed that “proning” such patients was a potentially life-saving decision.

Further, research co-authored by Douglas lent credence to the safety of prolonged proning, in which

Moving ventilated patients into the prone position can be a laborious task, which is part of the reason why so many providers eschewed the practice before COVID-19.

patients remain in the position for days at a time—more than 20 in some cases. Once the pandemic is over, doctors around the world will use that information to treat people suffering from ARDS caused by bacterial pneumonia or viral influenza.

Similar COVID-19-spawned symbioses are not rare in Colorado. Rival health systems have banded together; thousands of patients have donated their DNA to scientific research; and specialists have rebuilt relationships with community doctors. While the trauma of COVID-19 will endure for years, its lessons could inspire benefits that last for generations.

THE AVERAGE AMOUNT A PRONE PATIENT’S ABILITY TO TRANSFER OXYGEN AND CARBON DIOXIDE INTO AND OUT OF THE LUNGS INCREASES, AS OPPOSED TO WHEN IN THE SUPINE POSITION.

Previous spread: Chernetskaya/Dreamstime. This page: Go Nakamura/Getty Images

the medical director of the A sMedical Intensive Care Unit



IN NETWORK

COME TOGE T HER

THE FOUR P’S OF THE PANDEMIC How the rival networks worked together to ensure Coloradans got the care they needed during COVID-19.

When confusion reigned, Colorado’s largest health care providers united to chart a course through the pandemic.

COVID-19 first W hen arrived in the United

States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that Americans who weren’t sick didn’t need to wear masks. Back then, even experts didn’t understand the best ways to combat the disease. “No one knew what was going on,” says Dr. JP Valin, chief clinical officer at SCL Health, and that includes the health care providers of Colorado’s seven largest hospital networks. “So we just said, ‘Let’s work on this together,’ ” Valin says. Physician executives of SCL Health, UCHealth, HealthOne, Centura Health, Denver Health, Boulder Community Health, and Banner Health began meeting virtually every weekday (and some weekends) to share data, discuss best practices, and manage the local distribution of personal protective equipment.

By the end of July, the networks had collaboratively cared for 98 percent of the COVID-19-related hospitalizations in Colorado, and according to a study about the partnership published in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst, they boasted lower mortality, lengths of stay, and mechanical ventilation rates than the national averages. The collaboration later became a model for other states. “We can’t lose this after the fact,” Valin says. “This is something special, and we’ve done some really cool things.”

Illustrations

by Dan Page

PERSPECTIVE: Before the state instituted a COVID-19 tracking system, the partnership recognized early outbreaks. In March and April 2020, Banner began seeing a spike in positive tests in Weld County.

When UCHealth’s hospitals in Weld reported a similar flare-up, they traced the surge to patients’ employer: the JBS USA Greeley beef plant. The group notified the state and county, which closed the plant (although a Denver Post story questioned the speed with which Weld responded).

PARTNERSHIP: When hospitals were allowed to perform elective surgeries again in late April, SCL Health developed an algorithm to assess the health of incoming patients, and it shared this with the other systems.

“So every patient in the state of Colorado who was getting an elective procedure followed that exact same protocol,” Valin says, “rather than patients and doctors being confused [about precautions], or one hospital being safer than another. We wanted there to be confidence in all of us.”

PATIENT ADVOCACY: Many hospitals and clinics in rural areas are affiliated with a larger provider— but some are not, and more than 60 percent of U.S. rural hospitals don’t have a single ICU bed. So the collaborative worked through the Colorado Hospital Association to set up partnerships between rural hospitals and larger ones. The relationships included dispensing advice and accepting patients if they required emergency care. “In 48 hours,” Valin says, “we were able to quell a lot of unease” in rural areas.

PEER SUPPORT: An unexpected benefit of the partnership was the partnership itself. Physician executives are often isolated from their peers (both from other doctors and other C-suite suits). Through working with execs at other systems, they enjoyed support, workforce development ideas, and, in late August, a happy hour. “We went to the Lowry Beer Garden, where it’s all these picnic tables,” Valin says. “There was a lot of trust generated very quickly because we could say, ‘We’re doing the right thing.’ ” APRIL 2021

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BRIDGING THE DIVIDE

EVEN BIGGER DATA

Children’s Hospital Colorado’s virtual town halls became a must-listen for a pediatric community that needed healing. most of Children’s Hospital F orColorado’s 113 years, community

doctors tended to the facility’s patients.

But as the economics of medicine changed, fewer physicians could afford to leave their practices to spend time at the hospital. Specialists became primary caregivers for inpatients. As a result, says Dr. David Brumbaugh, chief medical officer of Children’s, the hospital’s relationship with the local pediatric community grew distant. Then COVID-19 struck. To help terrified local doctors who needed concrete answers, Children’s began hosting virtual town halls. Eventually, about 500 providers began tuning in on Thursday nights to listen to Children’s docs review the latest science. The fringe benefit: The town halls began to rebuild the connection between the hospital and community providers. We spoke with some of Children’s most avid weekly audience members to hear how.

Dr. David Brooks Valley View Hospital, Glenwood Springs “We reached out to Dr. Sean O’Leary [a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Children’s] and he presented a Zoom conference [on virtual learning] to about 200 people in the Roaring Fork Valley. After that, pediatricians here helped reestablish in-person learning.

I’m not sure we would have progressed to that point without the town halls.”

Dr. Sharon Sagel Southeast Denver Pediatrics “At the beginning you felt like this very small fish in this really big pond. How do we practice? We felt like we were reinventing the wheel every day. And then all of a sudden you’re connected to a whole community of pediatricians who are all in the same situation. I don’t know what the future will look like, but I think there is this sense that we’re all better when we work together.”

Dr. Sharisse Arnold Rehring Kaiser Permanente, Denver “I think I personally received several face shields from Children’s in the mail because I didn’t have any, and I wasn’t sure we were going to get them at Kaiser Permanente. We did, but Children’s Hospital didn’t ask any questions except, ‘What’s your address?’ ”

Dr. Matt Dorighi Cherry Creek Pediatrics “These town halls have certainly created the environment where you have that confidence to do new things, like telehealth. It’s such a great format for getting information on new ideas. It’ll be interesting to see what topics they shift to after the pandemic. But it’s been a really efficient way to affect change in the community.”

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Thanks to the telehealth boom, UCHealth’s Biobank connected with more patients than ever.

Children’s Hospital Colorado doctors began hosting virtual town halls to share the latest COVID-19 research with physicians across the country.

Personalized medicine—also called precision or individualized medicine—tailors treatment to the specific indicators locked away in our unique DNA (and other molecules). The discipline could help improve the outcomes of pharmacology and even predict future diseases, such as breast cancer, based on cellular variances.

In order for personalized medicine to work, however, it needs data. Lots of data. The more DNA collected, the more connections that can be made.

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus’ Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine launched its Biobank in 2016 to become the repository of such info for UCHealth.

It has since signed up more than 173,000 patients—but owes its biggest surge in outreach to COVID-19.

Biobank asks UCHealth patients to participate through the system’s online patient portal, My Health Connection. Before the pandemic, though, fewer than half of the network’s patients used the portal to, say, schedule appointments. When the pandemic forced UCHealth to switch primarily to telehealth visits, patients were suddenly required to use their portals—and, thus, interact with the Biobank consent form.

“We’ve actually been able to reach out to more potential volunteers for the Biobank than we ever could have done before,” says Kathleen Barnes, director of the center. Which means a global pandemic could play a part in helping make Coloradans healthier than they’ve ever been before.

From left: Courtesy of Children’s Hospital Colorado; Illustration by Dan Page

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ALONE TIME

The pandemic has felt particularly isolating to new parents. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Caleb Santiago Alvarado

August 2020, three months I nbefore she was due, Aliesa Pope-

Hodge gave birth to her second son, Reign, at the Medical Center of Aurora. Weighing one pound and eight ounces, Reign was immediately placed on a ventilation system that filled his underdeveloped lungs with about 360 breaths per minute.

“He looked like he was vibrating,” Pope-Hodge says. She estimates she got to see Reign for 20 seconds before hospital staff ushered the baby into an ambulance for the 10-mile trip to Presbyterian/St. Luke’s (PSL) Medical Center’s newborn intensive care unit (NICU), a Denver facility qualified to serve the most acutely ill infants.

There, Pope-Hodge and her husband, Diamond Taylor, donned masks, scrubbed and washed their hands, and were screened for fevers every time they visited Reign. Neither family nor friends were allowed to join them. But the restrictions were nothing compared to PopeHodge’s own feelings of separation.

While practicing skin-to-skin contact to encourage bonding between mother and child, Reign would often cry. His heart rate and oxygen levels would drop—a common occurrence for preemies experiencing touch for the first time—and alarms would shriek. “I felt scared to touch him,” Pope-Hodge says. “Like I was going to hurt him. Maybe I stress him out? I felt detached from Reign for a very long time.”

Detachment might be the official emotion of the pandemic—particularly for new parents. Even though nascent research suggests COVID19 is uncommon in newborns, even among those with COVID-19-positive mothers, most local hospitals and birthing centers have restricted access during birth to the parents (or mom and one support person, such as a doula). Once a baby heads

After a difficult birth, Aliesa PopeHodge relishes her one-on-one time with Reign.

home, many doctors recommend limiting visitation there as well.

While this has thwarted the ambitions of cheek-pinching grandparents, seclusion hasn’t been all bad for parents. “You aren’t trying to cater to extended family and keep them updated,” says Dr. Anna Zimmermann, a neonatologist at PSL’s Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children. “It pares the experience down to the parents and allows them to just get to know their baby.”

Research on the benefits of pandemic-induced alone time is minimal so far, but one study did test its impact on familial bonds.

During April 2020, 70 pregnant women in Ireland participated in a survey that sought to quantify the emotional effects of social distancing. Of those whose relationships with their partners had not deteriorated (only three had), 34.3 percent said they’d grown closer, 28.4

percent said they talked more, and 20.9 reported exercising together.

Pope-Hodge and Taylor finally brought a five-pound Reign home from PSL in November and promptly barred visitors—a difficult decree considering they live with Taylor’s mother. “She held him on Christmas,” Pope-Hodge says. “Other than that, she hasn’t touched him, which is really hard for her. She feels stripped of the gift of being a grandmother.”

The isolation, though, has allowed Pope-Hodge to form a connection with Reign that she never imagined possible at the NICU. “[Our eldest son] King had his grandma and his aunties, and everyone else around him that gave him love,” Pope-Hodge says. “With Reign, I feel proud that I am, with Diamond, the ones who are taking care of him. Everything that he gets is from me. I feel really proud of that.”

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COME TOGE THER

NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION

Confronting the connections between public health and health care in our local communities.

M

ore than any other disease, COVID-19 has drawn attention to the tether between social ills and physical illness. “The pandemic has just brought it to the fore in ways that, frankly, diabetes didn’t, kidney disease didn’t, [and] high blood pressure didn’t,” says Dr. Jandel Allen-Davis (pictured), the president and CEO of Craig Hospital in Englewood. To illustrate the connection between COVID-19 and public health issues, Colorado Health Institute (CHI), a Denver-based public health advocacy group, created a Social Distancing Index (SDI). CHI gave each Colorado census tract a score from one to 10 based on its comparison to other tracts

WESTWOOD The four U.S. census tracts that make up the Westwood neighborhood are all at least 80 percent populated by people of color.

KEY SOCIAL DISTANCING INDEX 4.5 to 7.3 3.4 to 4.4 2.6 to 3.3 0.0 to 2.5 Data not available

in the state in three areas: population density, overcrowded housing, and proportion of essential workers. The index is the average of a tract’s three scores. The higher the score, the more vulnerable a tract’s population is to the spread of COVID-19—and, as noted below, a range of social inequities.

MONTBELLO This tract in the Montbello neighborhood is one of the 25 USDA-identified food deserts in Denver County, all but six of which have SDIs above the county median of 3.1.

DENVER COUN T Y

EAST COLFAX According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the percentage of low- to moderate-income residents (those who earn less than 80 percent of the metro area median income) in this part of East Colfax ranges from 61.2 to 87.7 percent.

COLLEGE VIEW More than 40 percent of children under 18 in College View live in poverty, compared to 18 percent countywide.

HILLTOP The wealthiest tract in Denver County is in the Hilltop neighborhood (median household income: $209,000). It is 86.6 percent white.

HAMPDEN SOUTH In the tract with the lowest SDI, only 4.7 percent of residents live below the poverty line, compared to 12.9 percent across the county.

Note: Areas in tan are not part of Denver County.

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Courtesy of Craig Hospital

WINDSOR The per capita income in this tract is $26,341, about three-fifths of Denver County’s per capita of $43,770.

MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH

Bioethicist Matthew Wynia speaks out about the mortal dilemmas of the pandemic—and how COVID-19 could forever guide our moral compass. a ventilator and W howhogetsdoesn’t?

Should every-

Caleb Santiago Alvarado

one be forced to wear a mask?

Which demographics deserve to receive the COVID-19 vaccine first? These are the questions the pandemic forced Dr. Matthew Wynia and other bioethicists to wrestle with as they attempted to guide the health care system through a stark market of supply and demand. Director of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus’ Center for Bioethics and Humanities, Wynia not only advised on state policy, but also helped oversee the UCHealth triage team as it made critical decisions. In the early stages of the vaccine rollout in Colorado, 5280 spoke with Wynia to better understand how local hospitals came to some very difficult decisions.

5280: Were the choices about, say, who would get ICU beds already determined before COVID-19 came along?

Matthew Wynia: Not exactly.

We had a framework because we’ve had prior pandemics—the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic had generated a lot of interest in these issues. But it hadn’t been adapted to COVID. So that was the initial work.

Pull that off the shelf, open it up, and start making adjustments based on COVID. Very early on, we were already seeing that there might be a problem with blood clotting. Well, that’s not a normal problem with influenza. How does that affect the clinical decision-making?

How does it?

Those factors get put into your risk calculation for how likely a patient is to die

Matthew Wynia helped UCHealth prepare for difficult ethical choices that COVID-19 forced the system to face.

if they’re really sick with COVID. Because if you think they’re going to die no matter what, you’re better off not allocating them scarce resources.

Also, if you think they might be able to pull through if they don’t get the scarce resource, you similarly don’t want to put them on the scarce resource.

So if a patient has a history of blood clots, no ICU? Well, I’d be careful about that, because there are about 30 things in our calculation.

This is a question typically reserved for supervillains, but how did you sleep at night?

I am famous in my family for being able to sleep anytime, anywhere. That’s my superpower. In March, for the first time in my life, I was tossing and turning, because we thought Colorado was going to get hit hard, and we were going to end up implementing our triage teams. The thing [we] do not want is the bedside doctor to be the one deciding who receives these resources and who

doesn’t. Number one, your bedside doctor should be your advocate. And number two, the bedside doctor does not have great situational awareness of what else is going on around the hospital or the region.

Yeah, but that means you have to make that decision.

Yes, but based on better information than that individual doctor has.

Because of all the tough choices doctors had to make during the pandemic, do you think bioethics has evolved?

If we make good decisions that clearly prioritize equity, we could come out of this with greater levels of trust in the health care system among racial and ethnic minority populations that haven’t always trusted the health care system—because they didn’t have a lot of good reasons to trust the health care system. Watching leaders in health care really struggle with how to do this right, so that we don’t disadvantage this community, that can be a cohesion-building experience. m APRIL 2021

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GOING TO TRINIDAD T H E S T O RY O F HO W O NE VI S I O NA RY D O C T O R T U R NED A S M A LL T O W N I N SO U T H ER N C O LO R A DO I NT O T H E “SEX-C H A NGE C A P I TA L O F T HE W O R LD.”

BY M A R T I N J . S M I T H ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MAXWELL

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ON DECEMBER 12, 1990, A LAW OFFICE SECRETARY AND PART-TIME ENGLISH GRADUATE STUDENT IN RANCHO CUCAMONGA, CALIFORNIA, SAT DOWN TO WRITE A LETTER THAT HAD BEEN NEARLY FOUR DECADES IN THE MAKING. HER NAME WAS CLAUDINE TONI GRIGGS.

The diminutive Griggs had lived as a woman for 16 years, since the summer of 1974, though she’d been born and spent the first 21 years of her life as Claude Anthony Griggs. So complete had been her outward transformation from male to female that few of her friends and professional colleagues knew. At fivefeet-five and 120 pounds, she says, “All I had to do to look sexually ambiguous was shave what little facial hair I had.” Plus, for 17 years she’d been taking hormone treatments that eased her even further toward the female end of the gender spectrum.

Her transition had stalled short of the next logical step, though: surgery that would transform her male genitalia into that of a female. But by early December 1990, Griggs had made peace with that decision.

During a routine appointment with her endocrinologist less than two weeks earlier, though, her doctor had asked a direct, provocative question: “When are you planning to have surgery?”

“Never,” she replied. “I’ve learned to live without it.”

The doctor pressed. “Why don’t you want to have the surgery?”

When she’d explored the possibility in the 1970s, Griggs told him, she’d found the attitudes of the doctors she approached off-putting. Her half-dozen encounters with various surgeons, medical centers, psychiatrists, and others left her feeling they were “less than knowledgeable, sometimes less than competent and less than ethical.” In her journal, she later allowed herself to remember those difficult encounters: “If you do everything we tell you, when we tell you, and convince us you will be successful as a woman (their definition of ‘success’), then we will consider, after keeping you under our scrutiny for several years, whether to authorize final sex reassignment; and bear in mind, we rarely approve surgery (no alternative was ever mentioned). On one occasion, I met with a slightly more dangerous attitude: ‘If you’ve got the money, I’ll do surgery—immediately.’ ” Once, in 1977, she’d gotten as far as scheduling the operation—only to find out the chosen surgeon had lost his medical license just weeks before he was set to do her surgery. “I was told by another physician that ‘he had butchered a couple of people,’ ” Griggs later recalled. “To this day, I do not believe I have completely recovered from the experience.”

The endocrinologist shook his head, assuring Griggs that things had improved. Still anxious about revisiting the idea, she couldn’t escape that thought as she left his office that morning.

A “familiar and terrible emotional storm” began to swell, and she found herself crying during the drive home.

Five days later, during a phone call, she asked the doctor to help her identify and locate one of the specialists he’d suggested 92

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might help. The doctor referred her to a nun in nearby Orange County, who he said had experience in connecting transgender people with a doctor who could do the type of surgery she was seeking. Although they never met in person, Griggs today believes the nun was herself a transgender woman and was prepared to make a referral based on her own experience.

Griggs made the call. After a phone consultation in which Griggs answered questions about how long she’d lived as a woman, whether she was taking hormones, and if she was in counseling, the nun simply said: “Most patients go to Dr. Biber.”

Who? Griggs was given the contact information for an office in a place that sounded as if it were the middle of nowhere, a small town 200 miles south of Denver near the New Mexico border that the New York Times many years later would describe as “the sex-change capital of the world”: Trinidad, Colorado. “I had never heard of Dr. Biber or Trinidad until I was referred to his office, and I really didn’t want to travel so far for the surgery,” Griggs says today. “But I wanted the procedure badly enough to do it nonetheless.”

GRIGGS’ IMPROBABLE ADVISER, the Orange County nun, was correct. Since 1969, Dr. Stanley H. Biber had been specializing in something that few surgeons dared attempt, and he had been doing so in perhaps the unlikeliest place on the planet.

Trinidad, a small town along the southern Colorado–northern New Mexico border, once was a coal mining and ranching outpost that today is home to only about 8,000 people. While it has a colorful history and maintains a charming downtown, Trinidad has always been the kind of place where road-numbed motorists traveling Interstate 25 between Denver and Santa Fe exit just long enough to top off their gas tanks, refill their gocups, and use the bathroom.

Trinidad’s only hospital, which serves a population that’s more than 50 percent Latino, still has only 25 beds. Biber had performed the first of more than 6,000 gender confirmation surgeries there in 1969 during a career that would last until he was in his 80s.

The self-assured doctor—himself a bantam at five-five, but who once was a bodybuilder—had honed his surgical skills as chief surgeon of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH unit, during the Korean War and spent the early years of his career focused on appendectomies, tonsillectomies, and C-section births. But one day a social worker and personal friend asked a question at the end of an otherwise routine appointment: Would Biber consider performing a delicate surgery?

Clockwise from top left: Michael Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images; Courtesy of Mary Lee Biber (2); Jeffrey Beall/Wikimedia Commons; Denver Public Library/Western History Collection

Clockwise from top left: Biber at the hospital before performing an operation in 1998; an office sign listing Dr. Stanley Biber as a surgeon; Biber in the early 1950s during his stint in the U.S. Army; Mt. San Rafael Hospital in Trinidad; Biber at age 81 in 2004 in his office

“Of course I can do your surgery. What do you want done?”

His visitor explained that she was a transgender woman.

“What’s that?” he replied.

At the time, few U.S. surgeons had ever performed a gender confirmation surgery. About 18 years had passed since the phrase “sex change” first entered the American lexicon, when an American soldier who was assigned male at birth traveled to Denmark to become Christine Jorgensen. But Biber never lacked for confidence and began researching the idea. He consulted a doctor in New York who’d performed the male-to-female surgery, obtained some hand-drawn diagrams from Johns Hopkins University, and without informing his bosses at then-Catholic Mt. San Rafael Hospital, agreed to give the experimental operation a try.

It was the beginning of a medical specialty he never could have imagined. As he began to refine his techniques, word got around. By the time Griggs first heard Biber’s name in late

1990, the phrase “going to Trinidad” had become a familiar euphemism for undergoing that type of surgery among transgender men and women around the world.

Griggs thanked the nun for the information, hung up the phone, and stared for several minutes at her notepad. Don’t get too excited, she remembers thinking. Don’t get your hopes up until you have actually heard from this person. She knew the screening process to qualify for the surgery could be rigorous, based on guidelines recommended for treating those with gender dysphoria. She also knew that only a handful of doctors in the world were capable of doing what she wanted done. It was a long shot, and she was afraid to imagine. For people like her, she later wrote, “the distance from faintish optimism to the brink of suicide can be very short.”

Six days later, according to her journal, Griggs sat down at her keyboard and began to type. “Dear Dr. Biber,” she began, APRIL 2021

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trying to sound businesslike and restrained. “I was referred to your office by Dr. Herbert Roberts, M.D. [a pseudonym Griggs created for UCLA’s Dr. Gerald Leve to mask his identity, among others, in her published journal]. Dr. Roberts indicates that many of his transsexual patients have had surgery through your office. I have been under Dr. Roberts’ care for 17 years.

Would you please send me information regarding your requirements for my having surgery through your office? If you need more information or have any questions, do not hesitate to call.

Thank you. I am looking forward to hearing from you. Very truly yours, Claudine Griggs.”

She recorded her feelings about sending the letter in her journal. Reflecting on the letter’s tone, she wrote: “I don’t want to sound as if I’m begging, because I have determined that I will not plead my case from my knees.” Of the quiet desperation that took hold once it was in the mail, she added: “I am afraid that the surgeon will respond too soon; I worry that he will not respond at all; I fear that he will die or retire before I can have the operation; I dread the surgery; I dread more a life without it.”

But the holidays were fast approaching, as were her exams for a master’s degree in English. During holiday meals of turkey, dressing, pie, and wine with family and friends, she wondered, Will I be alive next Christmas? Will I be female?

SOME SAY THAT THE STORY of Stanley Biber in Trinidad began during a childhood train trip from his native Des Moines, Iowa, to visit an uncle who lived on a Texas ranch. That’s where, according to his widow, Mary Lee, the dream of owning a ranch and running cattle may have caught fire in the young man, a dream stoked and nurtured by Biber’s fondness for John Wayne movies and the Hollywood version of Old West mythology.

Others suggest the story began more directly in Korea, during Biber’s time as a battlefield surgeon in a MASH unit.

That’s where he honed his skills as a surgeon while trying to save soldiers who’d been shot or who had stepped on a land mine, leaving their bodies devastated by wounds to reproductive organs, bowels, and urinary tracts. That’s where he developed a reputation as tireless and determined, where he supposedly cemented his legend by performing 37 consecutive surgeries before passing out, and earned a commendation for completing an operation even after shrapnel from an explosion outside the surgical unit lodged in his butt, sending a stream of his own blood down his leg as he worked.

Of course, there was a bit of serendipity involved as well. Biber was born May 4, 1923, in Des Moines, where his father owned a furniture store and his mother stayed busy with local social causes. After briefly considering a career as a concert pianist, he graduated from high school early and enrolled in a yeshiva in Chicago, intending to become a rabbi. As happened with so many of his generation, World War II interrupted his studies.

The basic origin story of Biber’s life in Trinidad holds that he arrived in 1954 after serving as a civilian employee with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) in Alaska and Canada’s Northwest Territories during World War II. Biber, who was not yet 20 at the time, didn’t talk much about his work during that period. “Just say I was there,” he told an interviewer in 1998. But Kelly Tucker, who in 1983 became Biber’s financial adviser, says Biber once alluded vaguely to “blowing up Japanese radar bases.”

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The specific details of Biber’s OSS service may be lost to history. At best, they’re buried in inaccessible government records that even a Freedom of Information Act request could not excavate. But it’s worth noting that in June 1942, six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese troops invaded two remote, sparsely inhabited Aleutian Islands named Attu and Kiska in what was then the American territory of Alaska. What followed is a nearly forgotten chapter of the war called the Aleutian Islands campaign. The Japanese military quickly established bases there, about 1,200 miles west of the Alaska Peninsula, possibly to monitor any American attempts to strike Japan from the Aleutians, or possibly to dilute U.S. forces before the planned Japanese strike on the more strategic Midway Island in the central Pacific. Either way, the islands represented the only U.S. soil captured by an enemy during the war, and because of that their recapture had great symbolic value.

After setting up a naval blockade of the islands, the U.S. military landed 11,000 troops on Attu in May 1943 to take it back.

After a bloody two-day battle, more than 2,000 Japanese soldiers were dead, as were about 1,000 Americans. The Japanese occupiers soon abandoned Kiska, where 35,000 American soldiers landed unopposed in August 1943. Was Biber part of that mostly uncelebrated effort? It’s difficult to say, though his cryptic comments to Tucker raise that intriguing possibility.

Biber excelled at a number of things during his postwar life, including his premedical studies to become a psychiatrist and his quest to become a member of the U.S. Olympic weightlifting team. He once claimed to have missed that honor “by 20 pounds,” and even into his 80s was prone to rolling his sleeves up over his biceps to show off his guns. After graduating from medical school at the University of Iowa in 1948, he discovered a talent and passion for surgery during his residency at an Army hospital in the Panama Canal Zone. He was also a gifted pianist, and he found that his dexterous hands quickly adapted to the fine motor skills needed during surgery. He liked the challenge of it and the opportunity to innovate as circumstances with the patient changed. He excelled, and people noticed.

Biber eventually found himself in Korea. “He was encouraged by the government to either volunteer for two years or be drafted for three,” Mary Lee Biber, his fifth and final wife, says.

“So he volunteered and went to the DMZ as a MASH doctor.” As the unit’s chief surgeon, Biber once told an interviewer, he supervised such medical advances as vessel transplants and “got a tremendous amount of experience.” He also became an inadvertent hero, according to two family members, after accompanying a helicopter pilot behind enemy lines to rescue wounded soldiers. “He didn’t know he had crossed enemy lines!” says stepdaughter Kelly Mestas, whose mother, Ella Mae, was Biber’s fourth wife. “He went and he picked them up. They were shooting at him and everything. And he brought them back.

But he said, ‘Do you think I’m dumb? I wouldn’t have crossed enemy lines. I didn’t know!’ ” After the war, Biber was working at the Army’s Fort Carson near Colorado Springs when a colleague asked him to join a five-member clinic planned by the United Mine Workers in Trinidad. He figured he’d help get the clinic up and running, then move on. But he didn’t. While Las Animas County’s population peaked at nearly 39,000 people during the coal boom in the 1920s, it still had a post-boom population of

Courtesy of Claudine Griggs (all photos and documents)

Clockwise from above: Claudine Griggs in 1999 in Southern California; documents and personal notes related to Griggs’ surgery; Griggs’ college and high school graduation photos (before and after her transition); Griggs at work in 1986

about 26,000 residents by the 1950s. At that point, Biber was the only general surgeon in town.

His focus was caring for the workers doing the dangerous underground work at the Allen Mine, which opened in 1951 and was among the most productive in the state. He once told Ella Mae, to whom he was married for 23 years, that he knew he could practice medicine anywhere in the world. But he also told her he never wanted to leave Trinidad. “He was so dedicated there,” she says. “He delivered so many babies, did everybody’s surgery, and everybody trusted him tremendously. He loved everyone in Trinidad. You don’t see doctors commit to their patients anymore.

He took care of them from birth to death, in most cases.” Mary Lee Biber, who worked as a nurse with Biber for 42 years before becoming his fifth wife, says she ended up marrying the man who’d been her doctor since she was 15 years old.

Biber once described working 18-hour days, six days a week, during his early years in Trinidad. By many accounts, he did a bit of everything, from setting broken bones, to repairing gunshot

wounds, to resolving more run-of-the-mill problems such as hernias, hemorrhoids, and infected or burst appendixes. “He told me he made $3,500 his first year in Trinidad,” Mary Lee says. “He charged $3 for a house call and $2 for an office visit.”

He also began what ultimately would become a very complicated family life—five wives and nine children and stepchildren—during those years. He and his first wife, Shirley, had four children: Joann (who now goes by the name Prabhu Nam Kaur Khalsa), Robert, Debbie, and Patricia. After the marriage ended in divorce, Shirley decided to relocate with their kids to the Denver area, nearly 200 miles north of Trinidad. The children sometimes visited their father, and Biber apparently used his pilot’s license to visit them on weekends, but for much of their lives there remained a distance between Biber and those four children.

Biber’s second marriage, to Sharon, was short-lived but produced a son, David, who now lives in a rural area near Pueblo.

The surgeon’s third marriage, to a nurse named Debbie, was brief as well, and produced no children. CONTINUED ON PAGE 106 APRIL 2021

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Special Adver tising Section

&

WEDDINGS CELEBRATIONS Couture Colorado Special Adver tising Section

Written by Laura Steele The pandemic has really changed so much of our day-to-day life and weddings are no exception. From Zoom weddings to postponing to elopements, the pandemic has not stopped people from falling in love and getting married. Here are a few wedding trends that have been popping up in Colorado weddings.

Check it out at couturecolorado.com

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Photograph by From the Hip Photo, Planning by Cloud 9 Weddings

BEER BURROS  P. 9 8

BOLD COLORS

 POTTED PLANTS AND TREES

Elopements and Micro Weddings.

twinkle lights and hanging floral decor.

Desser t First.

Elopements were already trending and

Unique styles of tents have also become a

In order to get more of the formalities out

now with the pandemic they have been

staple in Colorado weddings.

of the way, couples have opted to cut their

pushed to the top of our trend list for

Potted Plants and Trees.

cake at the beginning of the reception.

2021. Couples have embraced the romance and intimacy of an elopement.

Some are going with the mentality of ‘wed now party later’. Elopements can only

Not only does this trend make a big design impact, it is eco-friendly. And sustainability is always in style.

mean one thing here in Colorado:

Beer Burros.

a mountain top, of course!

There is nothing cuter than getting ser ved

Long-Sleeved Wedding Gowns.

a cold beverage by a well-dressed burro.

There was a time when sleeved wedding

The only downside is that the burro might

dresses were saved for being modest. The

outshine the bride.

times are a-changin’! Now, long-sleeved

Bold Colors.

wedding gowns are high fashion and left for the style-conscious brides.

There will always be a space for romantic pastels in wedding decor, but in 2021,

This allows more time for dancing! Some couples have even done it during their ceremony. Nothing quite like saying your vows over cake!

Backyard Vows.

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 guidelines and venue cancellations, many couples have chosen to downsize their wedding and opt for a backyard ceremony with a view. And with so many mountain Airbnb’s here in Colorado, there is no shortage of houses to rent.

Tented Outdoor Receptions.

couples are being bold with their color

Bigger Diamonds.

We have learned that being outdoors

choices. Bring on the color! From mustard

The bridal jewelry industr y has seen an

helps prevent the spread of COVID-19.

colored suits to saturated florals, I say go

uptick in sales of larger and more novel

Wedding planners embraced this with

for it! An unexpected bold color palette

cuts of diamonds. Since couples are not

no problem. Tented outdoor weddings

will make your day unique and anything

spending their budget on big weddings,

popped up throughout the state featuring

but traditional.

they are buying bigger diamonds.

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Photography (clockwise from left): Bonnie Sen; Jamee Photography; James + Schulze, Planning by Bella Design & Planning; Erin Witt, Planning by Sweetly Paired.

LONGSLEEVED WEDDING GOWNS



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2 0 2 1 W E DDI NG S & CE LE BRA TIONS GUIDE

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2021 W EDDINGS & C EL EBRATIONS GUID E

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DINING GUIDE $

U N D E R $ 10

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$ 11 T O $ 15

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$ 16 T O $ 25

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25 B E S T

SYMBOL KEY NEW

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

$$$$

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

Blackbelly

25 B E S T

C 25 B E S T

ChoLon

Annette

$$$

Aurora / American Caroline Glover brings a warm dining experience to Stanley Marketplace with Annette. Enjoy a shareable menu featuring seasonal salads, toasts, and wood-grilled fare.

Reservations accepted. Stanley Marketplace, 2501 Dallas St., Ste. 108, Aurora, 720-710-9975.

Dinner, Brunch Avanti Food & Beverage

$$

Highland / International Current tenants of this food collective include Del Mar by Rooted, Lea Jane’s Hot Chicken, Brava! Pizzeria Della Strada, and Bistro Georgette. 3200 Pecos St., 720-2694778. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

B Barolo Grill

Beckon

$$$$

RiNo / Contemporary Chef Kodi Simkins brings an elevated, intimate dining experience to Larimer Street. The seasonal menu changes frequently, and excellent, thoughtful wine pairings are available. Reservations required.

2843 Larimer St., 303-749-0020. Dinner The Bindery

$$$

Highland / Contemporary Chef-owner Linda Hampsten Fox’s eatery, market, and bakery offers worldly fare inspired by her travels. Reservations accepted. 1817 Central St., 303-993-2364.

Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

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$$$

Comal Heritage Food Incubator

Corrida

Fresh Catch At Del Mar by Rooted inside LoHi’s Avanti Food & Beverage, Vesta alums Nicholas Kayser and Scott Ericson have created an upscale food-hall menu centered around sustainably sourced pescatarian and vegetarian fare. The fruits of their collaboration appear as artfully plated dishes like grilled chimichurri-glazed Colorado trout set on a bed of root vegetable bravas with roasted-pepper aïoli, a delicious tribute to the bounty of both land and sea.

$$$$

Boulder / Spanish Housed on the rooftop level of the Pearl West building, this elegant Spanish steak house offers Flatiron views and fabulous cocktails and wines. Reservations accepted. 1023 Walnut St., Ste. 400, Boulder, 303-444-1333. Dinner

D

$$$$

Downtown / Asian This contemporary restaurant serves modern twists on Pan-Asian cuisine. Also try the Central Park location. Reservations accepted.

1555 Blake St., 303-353-5223. Dinner

$$

Globeville / International You’ll find family recipes from Latin America and Syria at this restaurant, which has a rotating menu and provides job training to local women. Reservations not accepted. 3455 Ringsby Ct., Ste. 105, 303-292-0770. Lunch

Denver Milk Market

$$

Downtown / International Bonanno Concepts’ 16-venue collection of bars and restaurants features everything from fresh pasta and grocery items to poke bowls and charcuterie. Don’t miss the signature fried chicken sandwiches at Lou’s Hot and Naked. 1800 Wazee St., 303-792-8242.

Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

25 B E S T

Dio Mio

$$

RiNo / Italian One thing you can count on at Alex Figura and Spencer White’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 not accepted.

3264 Larimer St., 303-562-1965. Dinner

F

$$$$

Cherry Creek / Italian Dedication to authenticity translates to the food and extensive wine menu at this elegant eatery, which is focused on the cuisines of northern Italy’s Tuscany and Piedmont regions.

Reservations accepted. 3030 E. Sixth Ave., 303-393-1040. Dinner 25 B E S T

Cattivella

25 B E S T

25 B E S T

Central Park / Italian Chef Elise Wiggins offers rustic, wood-fired Italian fare from a chef‘s counter. Reservations accepted. 10195 E. 29th Dr., Ste. 110, 303-645-3779. Dinner

A

25 B E S T

$$$

Boulder / American Chef Hosea Rosenberg’s meaty menu focuses on charcuterie, small plates, and daily butcher specials. Reservations accepted. 1606 Conestoga St., Boulder, 303-247-1000. Dinner

Indicates inclusion in 5280’s 2019 list of Denver’s best restaurants; we did not release a 2020 list due to COVID19 disruptions and closures. These selections are at the discretion of 5280 editors and are subject to change.

25 B E S T

Visit our online listings at 5280.com/ restaurants.

25 B E S T

Frasca Food and Wine

$$$$

Boulder / Italian Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson and master sommelier Bobby Stuckey’s fine-dining mecca has racked up scores of accolades over the years (including nods from the James Beard Foundation). The elegant Friulano cuisine always wows.

Reservations accepted. 1738 Pearl St., Boulder, 303-442-6966. Dinner

G NEW

The Ginger Pig

$$

Berkeley / Asian Chefs Natascha Hess and Carrie Baird serve Asian-inspired street food with playful twists at this casual spot. Try the cheeseburger fried rice. Reservations not accepted. 4262 Lowell Blvd., 720-324-8416. Lunch, Dinner

Courtesy of Nick Kayser

PRICE KEY

(Average Entrée)

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CAMP

GUIDE 20

Colorado Watersports

Denver, CO (303) 697-7433 coloradowatersports.com

A safe, positive, and fun experience for every child is our overriding goal. We offer both a sailing and a paddlecraft camp, both camps introduce kids to the basics of sailing or paddlecraft, no experience necessary! This all takes place in our safe and controlled ‘No Wake Zone’ of Chatfield lake, with our highly qualified and experienced instructors close by.

Summer at Ricks

Denver, CO (303) 871-4839 margaret.wright@du.edu

Summer at Ricks blends fun summer activities with rich learning experiences all while enjoying the benefits of the University of Denver campus.

Campers entering preschool – 6th grade will enjoy weekly themes and specialty camps ranging from Inventors Workshop to Art in Motion and more.

21

Denver Botanic Gardens Denver, CO (720) 865-3580 gardencamp@botanicgardens.org

Grow your mind with our garden camps. Discover the world around you through art, science, gardening and outdoor exploration. 9 a.m.—4 p.m., ages 6—12.

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Explore nature, meet farm animals and learn how to grow food while immersed in life on the farm.

9 a.m.—4 p.m., ages 6—12.

TELL 5280 READERS ABOUT YOUR SUMMER CAMP! Contact 303.832.5280 for more information.

2021 April Camp Guide 103

DINING GUIDE

H

Kobe An

Honey Elixir

$$

RiNo / Contemporary Nonalcoholic potions, boozy cocktails, sipping chocolate, teas, and more, along with a menu of light bites, are the draw at this stunning bar. Reservations not accepted. 2636 Walnut St., Ste.104, 720-328-5992. Lunch, Dinner

25 B E S T

Hop Alley

I India’s Restaurant

$$$

Hampden / Indian This spot serves an extensive menu of Indian specialties, including tandoori chicken. Reservations not accepted. 8921 E. Hampden Ave., 303-755-4284. Lunch, Dinner

Izakaya Den

$$$$

Platt Park / Japanese Ultrafresh sushi, sashimi, and creative small plates are on the menu at this local favorite. Reservations not accepted. 1487-A S. Pearl St., 303-777-0691. Lunch, Dinner

J Jamaican Grill

$$

Lincoln Park / Jamaican This family-owned Jamaican restaurant serves classic Caribbeancentric dishes like jerk chicken, fried plantains, and rice and peas, accompanied by a menu of rum-infused cocktails. Also try the Jamaican Mini Grille and International Jerk Market in Lakewood.

709 W. Eighth Ave., 303-623-0013. Lunch, Dinner

Jerusalem Restaurant

University / Middle Eastern You can’t beat this spot’s tasty, affordable, and traditional Middle Eastern fare. Reservations accepted. 1890 E. Evans Ave., 303-777-8828. Lunch, Dinner

Jovanina’s Broken Italian

$$

La Chiva

25 B E S T

Downtown / Italian This gorgeous LoDo eatery expands on traditional Italian fare by incorporating unexpected, seasonal ingredients. Reservations accepted. 1520 Blake St., 720-541-7721. Dinner

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$$

Owlbear Barbecue

$$

RiNo / Japanese Jeff Osaka’s modern ramen shop features original noodle soups, bento boxes, and creative small plates. Reservations not accepted.

2611 Walnut St., 303-955-7938. Lunch, Dinner

RiNo / Barbecue The brick-and-mortar joint from pitmaster Karl Fallenius is serving brisket, ribs, and all of the fixings. Try the smoked pork belly.

Reservations not accepted. 2826 Larimer St., 970-708-3954. Lunch, Dinner

P Pho Duy

Westwood / Vietnamese Slurp down delicious bowls of noodle soup at this popular Vietnamese mainstay. Reservations not accepted. 925 S. Federal Blvd., 303-937-1609. Lunch, Dinner

M Mango House

$$

Mazèvo Mediterranean Eatery

$$

Aurora / International This immigrant- and refugee-led food hall is home to five outstanding culinary concepts, including Urban Burma, Rocky Mountain Sudanese, Odaa Ethiopian, Golden Sky Asian, and Nepali Mountain Kitchen. 10180 E. Colfax Ave., Aurora, 303-900-8639. Lunch, Dinner

Berkeley / Mediterranean Enjoy specialties from across the Mediterranean at this cozy eatery, from dolmas (stuffed grape leaves) to tahini hummus to harissa roasted chicken. Reservations not accepted. 3961 Tennyson St., 303-9558256. Lunch, Dinner Mercantile Dining & Provision

Osaka Ramen

Phoenician Kabob

$$

Q 25 B E S T

Q House

$$$

City Park West / Chinese Enjoy a modern take on Chinese cuisine executed by chef Christopher Lin, an alum of Momofuku in New York City.

Reservations accepted. 3421 E. Colfax Ave., 720-729-8887. Dinner

$$$

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

Narrative

$

South Park Hill / Middle Eastern This quiet restaurant serves a solid menu of Middle Eastern and Lebanese fare. Reservations accepted. 5709 E. Colfax Ave., 303-355-7213. Lunch, Dinner

Quality Italian

$$$$

Cherry Creek / Steak House This upscale spot serves a smart mix of steak house fare and American-Italian favorites. Try the baked lasagna for two. Reservations accepted. 241 Columbine St., 303-532-8888. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

N

Downtown / American This community bistro features consciously sourced ingredients and a raw seafood bar. Also try the Boulder location.

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

10 4

$$$$

Downtown / French Lon Symensma’s upscale, European-inspired eatery features tableside preparations and a roving cheese cart. Don’t miss the Paris-Brest dessert. Reservations accepted.

1555 Blake St., Ste. 102, 720-845-1673. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

K The Kitchen

$$

LeRoux

$$

Cole / Southern New Orleans native and owner Henry Batiste serves his grandmother’s recipes for gumbo, po’ boys, and much more at this Louisianainspired spot. Reservations not accepted. 3321 Bruce Randolph Ave., 720-389-9544. Dinner

O

Overland / Columbian This brick-and-mortar, spawned from the popular food truck of the same name, is a cozy, colorful place to enjoy the cuisine of chef-owner Jorge Aguirre’s native Colombia. Try the sancocho, a slow-simmered soup made with chicken, green plantain, yuca, corn, and Colombian spices. 1417 S. Broadway, 720-389-9847.

Lunch, Dinner

25 B E S T

$$$

NOLA Voodoo Tavern and Perks

L

$$$

RiNo / Chinese From Tommy Lee of Uncle, this neighborhood hangout serves dishes rooted in Chinese tradition with a touch of distinctive flair. Try the dan dan mian. Reservations accepted. 3500 Larimer St., 720-379-8340. Dinner

$$$

Cherry Creek / Japanese Everything is traditional at this Japanese restaurant, including the seating. The menu features favorites such as tempura, gyoza, and yakisoba. Reservations accepted. Also try the LoHi location. 231 Milwaukee St., 303-989-5907. Lunch, Dinner

R $$$

Cherry Creek / American Chef Paul Nagan serves gussied-up versions of American favorites—such as shrimp and grits with Tabasco butter—at this sleek eatery. Reservations accepted. 222 Milwaukee St., 720-571-8080. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

NEW

Randall’s

$$

Cole / Southern This neighborhood restaurant serves up comforting Southern fare with a side of warm hospitality. Try the fried catfish dinner.

Reservations not accepted. 3349 York St., 720-400-7648. Lunch, Dinner

TUCC_AD_2-25x10_20-11-13-v1.pdf 1 11/13/2020 8:38:16 AM

DINING GUIDE NEW

The Rotary

W

$$

Hilltop / South American The brick-and-mortar outpost of the former Avanti Food & Beverage stall specializes in Churrasco-style rotisserie, meats slow-cooked over a wood and charcoal fire.

Reservations not accepted. 217 S. Holly St., 303-537-5327. Lunch, Dinner

Whittier Cafe

S

25 B E S T

Safta

$$$

Sakura House

$$

25 B E S T

RiNo / Mediterranean Acclaimed chef Alon Shaya brings his modern Israeli fare to Denver.

Start with the creamy hummus and pillowy woodoven pita before moving onto tabbouleh salad, charred cabbage, and halloumi. Reservations accepted. The Source Hotel & Market Hall, 3330 Brighton Blvd., 720-408-2444. Lunch, Dinner

Downtown / Asian Ramen is king at this Japanese noodle house, which offers seven different varieties, including chasu, seafood, and spicy miso. 1255 19th St., Ste. A, 303-292-2323. Lunch, Dinner

25 B E S T

Spuntino

$$$

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. Reservations accepted.

2639 W. 32nd Ave., 303-433-0949. Dinner

The Wolf’s Tailor

X Xicamiti La Taquería Bistro

Y

$$$$

U Uchi Denver

$$ CMY

City Park West / Mediterranean This family-run restaurant serves silky hummus, a variety of excel- K lent grilled kebabs, and from-scratch sweets. Try the lamb kebabs. Reservations not accepted. 2207 E. Colfax Ave., 720-532-8746. Lunch, Dinner

Yazoo Barbeque Company

$

Five Points / Barbecue This unpretentious barbecue joint offers a Deep South menu, featuring slow-smoked pork ribs and brisket. Also try the Greenwood Village location. Reservations not accepted. 2150 Broadway, 303-296-3334.

Lunch, Dinner

Overactive Bladder Voiding Dysfunction Female Urologic Health

Z Zeppelin Station $$$

Downtown / Seasonal This steak house features whole-animal butchery and an excellent charcuterie program, and sources its honey from a rooftop beehive. Reservations accepted. The Oxford Hotel, 1659 Wazee St., 303-262-6070. Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

US Thai Cafe

MY

$$$$

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 Farmer

CM

CY

Yahya’s Mediterranean Grill & Pastries

Tavernetta

$$

Golden / Mexican This long-standing joint serves cooked-to-order burritos, tacos, quesadillas, and alambres (skillet dishes) made with recipes inspired C

by Walter Meza’s childhood in Mexico. Reservations not accepted. 715 Washington Ave., Golden, M 303-215-3436. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Y

Downtown / Italian The team behind Boulder’s acclaimed Frasca Food and Wine offers the same attention to 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., 720-605-1889. Dinner

25 B E S T

$$$$

Sunnyside / Contemporary Basta chef Kelly Whitaker fuses Asian and Italian techniques and ingredients at this hip Sunnyside eatery. The results, such as 7X brisket braised in dashi and red wine and house-extruded mafaldine pasta with koji tomatoes, are unique and delicious. Reservations accepted. 4058 Tejon St., 720-456-6507. Dinner

T 25 B E S T

$

Whittier / Cafe This espresso bar, which supports social justice–related causes, serves coffee, beer, and wine sourced from African nations and a small menu of pastries, burritos, paninis, and more.

Reservations not accepted. 1710 E. 25th Ave., 720-550-7440. Breakfast, Lunch, Brunch

Edgewater / Thai Classic, fresh ingredients and spicy dishes make for an authentic, if mouthtingling, dining experience. 5228 W. 25th Ave., Edgewater, 303-233-3345. Lunch, Dinner

$

$$

RiNo / International This industrial-chic food hall is home to eight globally inspired food and drink vendors, including Nixtamos Tacos, La Rola Urban Columbian, Thai-Kun, Graves Good Burger, and Soy Pinoy. 3501 Wazee St., 720-460-1978.

Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Brunch

Providing tomorrow’s urologic therapies today

 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., Ste. 675, Denver, CO 80202 or dining@5280.com.

303-762-7100

5280TUCC.com APRIL 2021

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GOING TO TRINIDAD

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 95

The 23-year marriage to Ella Mae produced two children, John and Terri, who shared Biber’s ranch home with Ella Mae’s daughters from her previous marriage, Pam and Kelly. Biber spent his final years with longtime nurse Mary Lee Vigil, eventually marrying her in 2005, less than a year before his death in January 2006, at age 82.

Biber’s professional success carried on through it all. The more he worked, the more he got to know the people in the community, and the more useful Biber felt. He touched many lives, in many ways, every day. It’s hard to find a local who’s not eager to share a personal story of the time Biber set their broken bone, did minor surgery during an office visit, or delivered them squalling into the world.

Lifelong Trinidad resident Dick Hamman recalls a day in 1960 when Biber

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saved his father’s life. The elder Hamman, a tough-it-out clerk on the Colorado and Southern Railway for nearly 50 years, experienced severe abdominal pain at work and was sent home to recuperate after four days of suffering. The family doctor requested a urine sample, which Hamman’s mother collected in a sterilized jar. Young Dick, then perhaps eight or nine years old, rode the sample to the doctor’s Main Street office on his bicycle. The doctor tested the sample and then ordered Hamman’s father to the hospital, immediately.

When they arrived by car, Stanley Biber was waiting and took the father into the operating room, where Biber discovered that his appendix had ruptured four days earlier. Infection of the abdominal wall had already set in. “That’s a death sentence,” Hamman’s son says. “He took my dad in, cut him open, and literally took his guts out, put them on the table, washed them all out, repaired everything, put him back together, and sewed him up. And since then dad swore he was the best ever. Before that, he didn’t like Dr. Biber, but after that….”

Hamman shakes his head as he recounts the story. “Everybody will tell you he was a

brilliant, brilliant surgeon. And he was. He was very good at it.”

THE MOMENT THAT WOULD change Biber’s life, the reputation of his adopted hometown, and the lives of thousands of transgender patients “came to him by accident,” says stepdaughter Kelly. “It just kind of walked into his office one day.”

His visitor was a friend, a social worker with whom Biber had consulted in the past on harelip and cleft palate cases from around Las Animas County. As Biber recounted in a 1998 interview, the red-haired woman lingered a moment after the business of the day was finished.

Eventually, she summoned the nerve to ask her important question. Biber knew about the widely reported case in which Christine Jorgensen had been surgically transformed. But at the time, the term transsexual or transgender was hardly part of the cultural vocabulary.

After his visitor explained that she was among the first patients to be treated with female hormones by pioneering gender researcher Dr. Harry Benjamin, Biber began educating himself the same

GOING TO TRINIDAD afternoon—apparently after he’d tentatively agreed to do the operation. He learned that Benjamin was a Germanborn protégé of Magnus Hirschfeld, who Susan Stryker, author of the 2008 book Transgender History, says first advanced the theory of “sexual intermediaries”— the notion that each person represents a unique combination of sex characteristics, secondary sex-linked traits, erotic preferences, psychological inclinations, and culturally acquired habits and practices.

Benjamin moved to the United States in 1913, and by the 1950s had established himself as the leading American authority on transgender issues. It would be another decade before Benjamin’s “standards of care” would become the accepted protocol for treating transgender patients, but Biber’s visitor apparently already was adhering to basic tenets of those standards. She was taking hormones, had passed Benjamin’s psychological criteria for the surgery, and already had lived for a full year as a woman.

At the time, the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore was the American center of what then was called sex change surgery. Biber called Dr. John Hoopes, a plastic surgeon at Johns Hopkins who at the time had done about 13 such operations, seven of which were what Biber described as “simple penectomies,” similar to the operation done on Jorgensen.

Hoopes eventually sent Biber a set of rudimentary hand-drawn diagrams showing the basic technique for deconstructing a man’s genitalia and reconstructing it into a sort of artisanal vagina.

Biber looked over the drawings and called the social worker back. “Well, I’ve never done one, but if you want to do it, I think we can do it.” She agreed, and Biber for the first time performed a procedure known as the penile-scrotal flap, a technique he later described as “horrible looking.” But he also said it seemed to work reasonably well.

In the early 1970s, transgender people seeking surgical relief didn’t have many options. Things were changing, for sure.

Thanks to the social and sexual upheavals of the 1960s, women wearing pants in public no longer caused a fuss, and men whose hair spilled over their collars were more the norm than the exception. Gender-bending entertainers such as the New York Dolls and David Bowie were finding their ways into the American mainstream.

Historian Susan Stryker describes the dawning of a momentarily cool “transgender aesthetic” back then that signaled

a changing relationship between appearance and biological sex, even if the more entrenched forms of gender discrimination and sexism remained firmly in place.

For transgender men and women, Stanley Biber’s nascent practice in Trinidad was a revelation. Here was a skilled surgeon at a real hospital who offered them help, dignity, and hope—all with a dose of extreme confidence, and without judgment. At the time, that combination was enough to coax reluctant and sometimes desperate people to Trinidad from thousands of miles away.

JUST THREE WEEKS after she’d first reached out to the renowned surgeon, Griggs found a letter in her mailbox postmarked Trinidad, Colorado, from the offices of Dr. Stanley Biber. She braced herself.

Biber’s response was, she says, “a pleasant shock.” His letter simply described the available services—genital surgery, breast implants, a tracheal shave to reduce the Adam’s apple, rhinoplasty—and their corresponding costs. It described the need for two psychiatric evaluations recommending her for surgery, and the need to write and forward to Biber a social history of herself.

Also, Griggs was told that she must have been living full-time as a woman for at least one year before she would be considered. She’d already been living openly as a woman for 17.

The cost breakdown, payable in full at the time of the surgery, would be as follows: Biber’s surgical fee, $4,850; hospital cost, $5,435; anesthesiologist fee, $925.

Breast implants were not included, but were available for an extra cost. Insurance would not cover the surgery, the letter noted, but Biber promised to refund appropriate fees if she made a successful claim against her medical insurer. It ended: “We will be glad to help if you can meet our requirements.”

Again, Griggs began to cry.

By January 21, 1991, less than two months after she first wrote to Biber, Griggs was ready to send another letter that included the requested “brief social history.” It was 10 pages long, single-spaced, beginning with her birth in Millington, Tennessee, 37 years earlier; her youth as the child of an Air Force and California National Guard “lifer”; her primary and secondary education in Southern California; her own year and a half as an information specialist in the Air Force; her honorable discharge from the military after revealing her gender-identity situation; her education and work history; and her

generally unsatisfying sexual history with both male and female lovers. At the time, she wrote, she was involved in a four-year relationship with a woman named Carolyn, “the first relationship I have ever dared hope will be permanent.”

“I have asked myself why, if I am so happy, do I seek out a surgeon as I approach middle age; I can come up with only partial answers,” she explained to Biber. “I know that if surgery were impossible to attain, I could survive without it, bearing the discomfort of my present physical condition in much the same way (I think) I might bear up if I were paralyzed from the waist down and had to spend my life in a wheelchair. It would be a distressing situation, it would present some grave obstacles, it would be depressing, but it would not stop me from reaching out to work, study, learn, and just keep moving through life.”

She also enclosed a photograph and noted in closing that the cost would be manageable. “I may flinch when I withdraw the funds from my savings, but I can afford your fees.” About three months later, on April 27, Griggs got the answer that both thrilled and frightened her. Biber accepted her as a “surgical candidate” and enclosed a four-page information packet called “The Trinidad Experience: Information About Your Hospital Stay (Male to Female Procedure).” But the decision was not yet final, Biber explained: “Though you have been accepted as a candidate, please bear in mind that I will make the final decision in my office the day prior to your scheduled surgery.”

Still, Griggs allowed herself some hope.

Fifteen years after her first attempts to find a surgeon, she found herself reassured by this voice from the Colorado wilderness, by Biber’s professionalism and confidence, by the fact that, as she wrote, “medical care is being offered almost routinely to a subdued transsexual who had given up looking for a remedy, resolving instead to accept the pain of existence—physically, legally, psychologically—in a kind of sexual limbo.”

For the first time in what seemed like forever, Claudine Griggs imagined the life she felt born to live. m This article is adapted from Going to Trinidad: A Doctor, a Colorado Town, and Stories from an Unlikely Gender Crossroads, which will be published by Bower House Books on April 15; Tantor Media will release Going to Trinidad as an audio book on that same day.

Martin J. Smith is the author of five novels and five nonfiction books, and is a frequent 5280 contributor.

Email him at letters@5280.com.

APRIL 2021

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BOULDER | Price Upon Request Elegant modernized 3br/5ba home tucked into the coveted Juniper/Kalmia area of North Boulder. Beautiful chef’s kitchen w/professional appliances and quartz countertops. Main floor master bedroom w/master bath and access to backyard w/hot-tub. There are 2 upstairs bedrooms w/en suite baths. Complete w/basement, patio space, backyard and gardens.

Spencer Clapperton 720.919.1002 spencer.clapperton@coloradohomes.com | spencerclapperton.cbintouch.com

DENVER | Price Upon Request Spectacular 5br/6ba home sits on almost half an acre. Private saltwater pool, multiple offices, bonus rooms & greenhouse. Large windows & many skylights provide lots of natural light. The main floor provides a perfect view of the greenery that surrounds the home.

The configuration of this property allows for a guest suite or rental income apartment.

Cecilia Favetto 952.220.6628 | cecilia.favetto@coloradohomes.com | CeciliaFavetto.cbintouch.com Dan DeBacco 720.955.6111 | Dan.DeBacco@coloradohomes.com | DeBaccoRealEstate.com 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. ©2021 Coldwell Banker. All Rights Reserved.

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DENVER | Price Upon Request Almost 3,500 square home boasts 5br/6ba over four floors w/2-car detached garage. It has been meticulously and features hardwood floors & 2 working corner fireplaces. The main floor has a living & dining room, gourmet kitchen & family room. The second floor has the primary bedroom w/en suite bath & private deck. The lower level has been fully finished and includes a living room & kitchenette.

Robb Green 303.885.2924 robb.green@coloradohomes.com | robbgreen.cbintouch.com

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LAFAYETTE | $1,250,000 Along a beautiful tree-lined street, on a quiet cul-de-sac, is a magnificent home you simply must see. 5br/5ba home w/a chef’s kitchen, wide open floor plan and a large private back yard that is perfect for entertaining.

DENVER | $1,249,999 5br/3.5ba home. Living room w/fireplace. Kitchen w/stainless Thermador & Bosch appliances, new cabinets & soapstone counters opens to dining room w/custom woodwork. Master suite w/walk-in closet. Finished basement, wraparound deck, yard, 2-car garage

Brian MacDonald 303.915.6126 brian.macdonald@coloradohomes.com | IndianPeaks.Homes.com

P.J. Farrell 303.884.5368 pj.farrell@devonshirehomes.com | PJFarrell.CBIntouch.com

BOULDER | $1,000,000 5br/4ba home w/new hardwood flooring as well as vaulted ceilings and large windows. Kitchen w/quartz countertops, SS appliances and new cabinets. Master bedroom w/a master bath. Upstairs has 2 bedrooms and a full bath. Complete w/a finished basement.

CASTLE PINES | Price Upon Request Stylish & spacious 6br/4ba Castle Pines home! Open concept living: high ceilings, hand scraped hardwood floors & natural light. The home boasts a fashionable office, a two story dining room & a chef’s kitchen.

Jimmy Stewart 970.290.3755 jimmy@thekeygroupre.com | TheKeyGroupRE.com

Amy Smoldt 303.949.9683 amy@mountaintimerealestate.com | MountainTimeRealEstate.com

DENVER | $890,000 2br/4ba unit. Kitchen w/Quartz island and 6-burner gas range top.

Master suite w/balcony and spa-like bath. Complete w/basement, rooftop deck, back deck and two-car attached garage.

DENVER | $850,000 Beautiful Circa 1900 three-story home in a fabulous neighborhood.

High ceilings, hardwoods throughout, spacious living & dining room, lovely fireplace & original woodwork. Gorgeous updated kitchen and lovely sunroom opening to the backyard.

Eric Tack 303.295.2000 etack@ejtack.com | EricTack.cbhomes.com

Marilyn Dana 303.378.1089 Marilyn@MarilynDana.com | MarilynDana.com

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DENVER | $769,000 Well-equipped 5br/4ba home w/office, multiple bonus spaces, kitchen w/granite countertops, custom deck & 2 master suites! Premium location near Lowry's Town Center, schools & shopping!

HIGHLANDS RANCH | $749,000 Sweeping views & miles of trails from this 3br/3ba home! Chef’s kitchen w/new ovens, gas cooktop. Master retreat w/mountain-facing deck, 5-piece bath, dual closets and sitting room. Multiple work spaces!

3rd garage stall boasts workshop or Man Cave!

Jill Summers-Monds 303.332.5557

Tori Campbell 970.209.7745 tori.campbellre@gmail.com | ToriCampbell.cbintouch.com

jill.summers-monds@coloradohomes.com | JillSummersMonds.cbintouch.com

THORNTON | $748,850 5br/4ba features over 3,500 SF, wood plank flooring, GOURMET kitchen w/island & great room w/fireplace, master suite w/upscale bath & closet with access to the laundry room, lower level w/family room w/wet bar, bedroom & bath & extended deck.

PARKER | Price Upon Request Gorgeous 4br/3ba ranch backs to open space & includes hardwoods, family room w/fireplace, kitchen w/Cherry cabinets, quartz island & SS appliances, master w/fireplace, spa like bath & walk-in closet & lower level w/craft room, gym & media space.

Linda Gilbert 720.232.1990 linda.gilbert@coloradohomes.com | LindaGilbertHomes.com

debbie.joseph@coloradohomes.com | DebbieJospehSellsColoradoHomes.com

COLORADO SPRINGS | $650,000 Beautiful 5br/3ba w/open floor plan, kitchen w/central island & quartz counters, living room w/vaulted ceilings & fireplace, basement family room w/fireplace, master w/mountain views, en suite bath & walk-in closet & back yard w/stamped concrete patio.

THORNTON | $635,000 Energy efficient 5br/4.5ba home offering a gourmet kitchen layout w/SS appliances & generous island, Owners Suite w/5-piece bath & large walk-in closet, finished basement with full wet bar and bonus space complete with a 3-car tandem garage.

Bill Finkle 719.761.5874 bill.finkle@coloradohomes.com | BillFinkle.cbintouch.com

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

Debbie Joseph 303.842.8331

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THORNTON | $628,000 Better than new 2br/2ba home has an open floor plan offering 1,906 SF, wide plank flooring, upgraded kitchen w/raised panel cabinets & quartz counters, great room w/fireplace, master suite w/upscale shower & walk-in closet & patio w/pergola.

HIGHLANDS RANCH | Price Upon Request This 4br/3ba home sits at the end of a cul-de-sac, and features mountain views and open space! With hardwood floors, plantation shutters, recently remodeled kitchen, master suite & 2 newly remodeled baths, this home is truly a Highlands Ranch gem.

Linda Gilbert 720.232.1990 linda.gilbert@coloradohomes.com | LindaGilbertHomes.com

Dan DeBacco 720.955.6111 dan.debacco@coloradohomes.com | DeBaccoRealEstate.com

DENVER | $615,000 2br/2ba townhome w/open concept 2nd floor. Living room w/gas fireplace. Kitchen w/granite countertops, SS appliances and pantry.

Master retreat w/2-sided gas fireplace, walk-in closet, 5-piece bath and balcony. Complete w/a laundry and 1-car garage.

FORT COLLINS | $599,900 Ranch style home on a .57-acre corner lot. No HOA! Sprawling 3br/2ba features a formal living/dining room, eat in kitchen, family room, main floor laundry & finished basement. Large covered deck.

New septic system just installed! Steel building/shop.

Phoenix Rain 303.884.9489 phoenix.rain@coloradohomes.com | 5280RealEstate.com

Cheryl Melichar 303.817.6163 cheryl.melichar@coloradohomes.com | CherylMelichar.cbintouch.com

AURORA | $579,000 Enjoy mountain views from this 4br/4ba home with loft and walkout basement. The kitchen is open to the family room and flows out to the deck. The main floor guest suite + flex room is ideal for guests or dual home offices. 7937SGrandBakerWay.com.

BRIGHTON | $525,000 4br/3ba home w/formal living and dining room, main floor bedroom w/full bath and a laundry. Kitchen w/SS appliances, breakfast bar and pantry. Master suite w/master bath and closet. Complete w/over 1,500 sqft basement, 3-car garage and fenced yard.

Medra Volpi 303.378.1144 medra@medravolpi.com | MedraVolpiRealEstate.com

Cybyske Home Team 303.635.1100 Lisa@cybyske.com | Cybyske.com

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LOVELAND | $477,500 6br/3.5ba home. Kitchen w/newer stainless steel appliances and a farmhouse sink. Master bedroom has attached full bath w/double sinks and a walk-in closet. Finished basement w/2 bedrooms, 3/4 bath and family room. Complete w/2-tier deck and backyard.

DENVER | $465,000 Luxury loft is close to downtown amenities. Boasting high ceilings, exposed brick, hardwoods, fresh paint & open floor plan! Kitchen features a gas stove, granite counters & island. Oversized bedroom w/brick wall, renovated bath & walk-in closet.

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

Alex Rice 720.518.8437 alex.rice@coloradohomes.com | AlexSellsDenver.com

HENDERSON | Price Upon Request 5br/3.5ba home w/a 2-story dining room. Family room and open kitchen concept at the back of home w/water views. Upper level has a master suite w/a 5-piece bath and water views, 3 more bedrooms, full bath and laundry. Complete w/a basement and patio.

LITTLETON | $440,000 2br/3ba home offering a kitchen w/new flooring, light grey shaker cabinets & SS appliances, formal dining room, front living area w/views, fireplace & owner’s suite w/bath & walk-in closet.

2-car attached garage, newer water heater & furnace.

Donna Jarock 303.718.6285 thanksdonna@gmail.com | HomesAndCondosDenver.com

Shannon Byerly 303.919.2611 YourFreshStartRealtor@gmail.com | YourFreshStartRealtor.com

WINDSOR | $440,000 3br/3ba Condo in Water Valley. Kitchen w/breakfast nook, wood cabinets and stainless steel appliances. Main floor master bedroom w/5-piece bath, walk-in closet and back patio access. Upstairs w/2 bedrooms and full shared bath. Complete w/2-car garage

WINDSOR | $425,000 3br/2.5ba home w/an open concept main level. Kitchen w/granite countertops, SS appliances and pantry. Master bedroom w/5-piece master bath and walk-in closet. Complete w/an unfinished basement, fenced-in backyard, spacious driveway and 2-car garage.

Jimmy Stewart 970.290.3755 jimmy@thekeygroupre.com | TheKeyGroupRE.com

Jimmy Stewart 970.290.3755 jimmy@thekeygroupre.com | TheKeyGroupRE.com

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GREELEY | $425,000 5br/3ba home. Kitchen and dining room w/hardwood floors. Master bedroom w/5-piece master bath and walk-in closet. Basement w/a rec room and 2 bedrooms. The screened porch provides outdoor entertaining. Backyard w/lush flowers and raised flower beds.

DENVER | $400,000 Stunning remodel in the Golden Triangle Prado Building. Bright and sunny with wide planked flooring and custom upgrades throughout.

Gourmet kitchen with quartz countertops and upgraded appliances.

Sunrise and city views from the spacious balcony!

Jimmy Stewart 970.290.3755 jimmy@thekeygroupre.com | TheKeyGroupRE.com

Alana Hankins 303.907.1500 alanahankins@msn.com | AlanaHankins.com

LITTLETON | $400,000 3br/4ba smartly designed floor plan greets you w/new flooring, living area w/fireplace, kitchen w/oversized cabinetry & hardwood flooring, owner's suite w/walk in closet & bath, secondary suite w/attached bath & mtn views & finished basement.

AULT | $400,000 5br/3ba home. Kitchen w/leathered granite countertops, wood cabinets and stainless steel appliances. Living room w/a fireplace.

Master bedroom w/a walk-in closet and 3/4 master bath. Downstairs has a theater room and wet bar. Complete w/a backyard.

Shannon Byerly 303.919.2611 YourFreshStartRealtor@gmail.com | YourFreshStartRealtor.com

Jimmy Stewart 970.290.3755 jimmy@thekeygroupre.com | TheKeyGroupRE.com

AURORA | $395,000 3br/2ba home w/open concept living space. Kitchen w/granite counters, stainless appliance package and access to covered brick patio. Lower level w/built-in electric fireplace, 1/2 bath, laundry and bedroom. Complete w/2-car garage and oversized shed.

WESTMINSTER | $387,000 2br/3ba townhome w/an open floor plan and vaulted ceilings.

Kitchen w/newer stainless steel appliances, tile backsplash and breakfast bar. Master bedroom w/private bath and walk-in closet.

Complete w/a finished basement, a two-car garage and patio.

Donna Jarock 303.718.6285 thanksdonna@gmail.com | HomesAndCondosDenver.com

Cybyske Home Team 303.635.1100 Lisa@cybyske.com | Cybyske.com

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LOVELAND | $385,000 Meticulously maintained 3br/2ba home in a cul-de-sac, backs to a greenbelt. Newer carpet, updated flooring, a new cement driveway, new gutters, finished garage & fresh paint. It’s light & bright w/vaulted ceilings & tasteful updates.

WESTMINSTER | $385,000 3br/3.5ba home w/vaulted ceilings and fireplace. Kitchen w/newer SS appliances and glass front cabinets. Master suite w/2 closets and full bath. Finished basement w/a kitchen, bedroom, living area and 3/4 bath. Complete w/a 2-car garage and patio.

Deborah Pixler 303.917.6771 deborah.pixler@coloradohomes.com | DeborahPixler.cbintouch.com

Cybyske Home Team 303.635.1100 Lisa@cybyske.com | Cybyske.com

FORT COLLINS | $375,000 Just minutes from Taft, Mulberry, and Downtown. This home is being SOLD AS IS! This home is currently a 4 bedroom, 2 bath with a large wood shed in the backyard. With some TLC and creativity this listing has great potential. Definitely a must see!

DENVER | $350,000 Super cute, quant home, that needs some TLC! This 2br/2ba house, can easily be made into a 3br/2ba bath house, with some great entertaining space. There is a pool in the backyard! Give me a call today, to find out more about this great opportunity!

Gus Bergs 970.308.4733 gusbergs@hotmail.com | TheKeyGroupRE.com

Melissa Foerster 720.827.4916 melissa.foerster@coloradohomes.com | MelissaFoerster.com

DENVER | $335,000 Updated 1br/1ba condo showcases floor-to-ceiling windows with Mountain & City Views. Stunning bathroom, custom California Closet in the bedroom, and great amenities w/24-hour concierge, gym & rooftop pool. Located in the heart of downtown.

DENVER | $320,000 2br/2ba townhome w/a spacious main floor living area. Kitchen w/quartz countertops, newer appliances and newly painted cabinets.

Upstairs has the 2 primary suites w/walk-in closets and extra storage.

Complete w/a stone patio and 2-car covered carport.

Garvin Laverick 720.245.9956 GarvinLaverick@gmail.com | LaverickRealEstate.com

Joanna McKinney 303.505.4523 joanna.mckinney@coloradohomes.com | AspenVerde.com

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FORT COLLINS | $665,000

ARVADA | $599,900

CASTLE ROCK | $575,000

4br/3ba - Plenty of fabulous living space, a custom kitchen, granite & concrete counters & dual drawer dishwasher. Custom storm windows, fenced yard, brick patio & detached garage.

5br/3ba home w/main floor master suite. Kitchen w/granite counter tops, new subway tile back splash and stainless steel appliances.

Complete w/finished basement and fenced garden area.

4br/3ba home in a Golf Community w/an open floor plan and hardwood floors. Finished basement w/family room, bonus room as well as an additional bedroom and bath. Complete w/a back deck.

Ethan Shapiro 201.961.2165

Mike Desmarais 303.594.4100

Jen Brink 303.653.2738

DENVER | $575,000

AURORA | $525,000

AURORA | $474,900

3br/2ba home in Park Hill w/an open floor plan and a wall of windows. 4br/3ba offers hardwoods, plantation shutters, kitchen w/42” Chef’s kitchen w/marble counters and stainless appliances. maple cabinets, granite counters & SS appliances, family room Complete w/a private master suite and attached garage. w/fireplace, master suite w/5pc. bath & stamped concrete patio.

Stunning 4br/3ba home includes a spacious kitchen w/included appliances, formal dining & living room, family room w/fireplace, open finished basement & large, fenced backyard.

P.J. Farrell 303.884.5368

Eric Tack 303.295.2000

Poonam Kakkar 720.280.7729

CASTLE ROCK | $465,000

LAKEWOOD | Price Upon Request

COMMERCE CITY | $450,000

Charming modern farmhouse with 4 upper level bedrooms, 3 baths Beautiful 4br/3ba ranch on almost a ¼-acre lot featuring hardwoods, 3br/1.5ba home. Kitchen w/all stainless appliances and granite and 3-car garage. Oversized professionally landscaped yard sides open-concept floor plan, updated kitchen w/birch cabinetry, owner's counters. Upper level has a master suite w/5-piece bath and to greenbelt. Walk to pool, trails and Rhyolite Park. retreat w/private bath & downstairs w/family room. walk-in closet. Complete w/unfinished basement and yard area.

Kylie Rupert 303.842.8205

Jeanette Starc 303.520.9425

Donna Jarock 303.718.6285

DENVER | $450,000

PARKER | $440,000

PARKER | $435,000

Charming 2br/1ba bungalow w/hardwoods, updated kitchen w/skylight, bath w/clawfoot tub, remodeled lower level includes new paint, lighting & carpet & fenced yard w/patio & 2-car garage!

Welcome to your home within walking distance to all the fun activities in downtown Parker. Enjoy walks to the park, library and quality schools right from your own front porch.

4br/4ba offers kitchen w/new countertops, all appliances, new window shades, eat-in nook, plus adjacent dining space, great room w/fireplace & finished basement w/bath + 2-car garage.

Kim Dunning 303.588.6037

Michelle Orlandino 303.908.1871

Ed Flynn 303.378.3848

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AURORA | $425,000

AURORA | $425,000

THORNTON | PRICE UPON REQUEST

Beautiful townhome offers hardwood plank floors, a gourmet kitchen w/SS appliances and granite counters, dining area, deck, master suite w/bath & walk-in closet & finished basement.

Spectacular 2br + study/3ba home offers an open floor plan, kitchen w/quartz counters, upgraded cabinets, wood floors & SS appliances, family room w/fireplace, master retreat and patio.

4br/2ba home w/cast iron stove, Australian Cypress wood flooring, remodeled kitchen w/granite counters & gas stove, master suite w/brick accent wall & private bath. New roof/furnace.

Rae Marie Heard 720.234.7918

Jennifer Oldham 720.234.3863

Debbie Cooper-George 303.944.8494

AURORA | PRICE UPON REQUEST

DENVER | PRICE UPON REQUEST

BRIGHTON | $380,000

3br/2ba ranch offers updated kitchen w/SS appliances, quartz counters, white cabinets & subway tile backsplash, master w/bath & walk in closet & 2-car garage. Washer/Dryer included.

2br/2ba condo w/an open floor plan in a secured building.

Complete w/an underground heated parking and a courtyard.

Shopping, restaurants and culture are all right outside your door.

4br/3ba home. Living room w/vaulted ceilings and bay window.

Kitchen w/granite counters and pantry. Main floor master suite w/master bath. Complete w/finished basement and 2-car garage.

Kimberly Carlson 303.519.7127

Marci DeMott 303.319.3177

Angela Atkinson 303.775.3031

THORNTON | $379,000

DENVER | $375,000

BOULDER | $359,900

Spacious 3br/3ba townhome w/2-car garage features a gas fireplace, low maintenance flooring, SS appliances, upstairs laundry & backyard w/grass, sprinkler system & composite deck.

Charming 4br/2ba home offers a front deck, living room, formal dining room, eat in kitchen, basement w/family room, wrap around yard w/patio & 1-car garage. New Carpet & interior paint.

2nd floor 1br/2ba unit faces a large open park w/unobstructed views. Beautifully updated throughout. Vaulted ceiling, wood burning fireplace, all newer appliances included and loft.

Felix Cruz 303.718.4069

LaDawn Sperling 303.710.5817

Chum Tran 303.931.4012

CASCADE | $355,000

LONGMONT | $355,000

THORNTON | $350,000

2br/2ba mountain retreat overlooking Chipita Park Lake. New interior paint, refinished hardwood floors, completely remodeled bath and fenced 3/4 acre yard.

Partially updated 3br/1ba ranch style home w/a large family room.

There is a 1-car attached garage w/additional workspace and storage. Complete w/a fenced backyard w/a storage shed.

3br/2ba home. Kitchen w/newer appliances, gas cooktop and white cabinetry. Family room w/a gas fireplace. Master bedroom w/an en suite bath. Complete w/a fenced yard and 2-car garage.

Kylie Rupert 303.842.8205

Brad Pickels 720.839.1673

Christina Kern 303.915.0809

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DENVER | $348,000

KEENESBURG | $340,000

DENVER | Price Upon Request

Cozy 3br/2ba ranch featuring vinyl siding & solar panels. ADA compliant & all rooms are wheelchair accessible including sinks and shower. Large backyard w/firepit, playset & shed.

3 bed/3 bath ranch home has a spacious open concept. 2 bed/2 bath upstairs with additional bedroom & bathroom in basement. Complete w/huge fenced yard.

1br/1ba condo w/753 sqft. Kitchen w/new cabinets, quartz countertops and SS appliances. Bedroom w/new carpet and paint.

Complete w/unparalleled facilities and underground parking.

Diane Evans 303.875.7341

Shane Smith 303.517.1592

Reuben McKelvey 720.840.7763

ERIE | $300,000

DENVER | $281,669

COLORADO SPRINGS | Price Upon Request

Blue Sky first-floor 2br/2ba condo! Open floor plan, luxury baths, granite counters, updated lighting, walk-in closets, 2 decks & tons of storage. NEW Paint and NEW Carpet throughout!

Income restricted condo with deed restriction expiring July 25, 2025. Buy now at a rare Riverfront Park price. Recent upgrades include hardwood floors, new HVAC unit and dishwasher.

Charming 2br/2ba townhome w/garage, family room w/fireplace, kitchen w/remodeled backsplash & dining area. Upstairs bedrooms are large & spacious. Close to schools, parks & trails.

Brie Fowler 303.882.8672 Brandon Rearick 970.691.0122

Scott Beville 303.905.6872

Jon Zimmerman 719.377.8921

AURORA | Price Upon Request

LAKEWOOD | $260,000

DENVER | Price Upon Request

Fantastic 3br/2ba townhome - Main level features: living room w/fireplace, vaulted ceilings, hardwood floors & galley style kitchen w/counter seating & lower level includes bonus room.

2br/2ba condo w/brand new interior paint. Living room w/a fireplace. Dining area is just off the kitchen. Master bedroom w/a 3/4 bath. Complete w/a covered balcony and a washer/dryer.

2br/2ba townhome. Living room w/wood burning fireplace. Kitchen w/granite countertops and SS appliances. Master bedroom w/wall-to-wall closet and 5-piece bath. Complete w/private patio.

Julie Konrade 303.886.2773

Donna Jarock 303.718.6285

Lindsay Schulze 720.550.2282

LITTLETON | $240,000

DENVER | $235,000

DENVER | $225,000

Super cute 1br/1ba condo on the 3rd floor! Vaulted ceilings, new luxury vinyl plank flooring & new stainless appliances. Reserved parking space #70. Radiant heat & soundproof floors.

Great 1br/1ba condo in Capitol Hill w/unique 1920’s charm. Large closets, updated kitchen w/granite counters & tile backsplash, new paint, hardwood floors. Storage unit in basement.

Fabulous 2br/1ba condo in resort-style setting w/pond views, vaulted ceilings, abundant light, bonus loft area & private balcony.

Updated kitchen w/stainless steel appliances.

Jennifer Oldham 720.234.3863

Marilyn Dana 303.378.1089

Nita Kolarsick 303.250.8280

ColdwellBankerHomes.com

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BACKSTORY

John Elway has an eye for quarterbacks.

Sadly, as his track record at April’s NFL draft indicates, his vision is myopic, which might explain why the Denver Broncos legend handed over his general manager duties during the off-season. (He’ll still be the team’s president of football operations.) Elway, however, did leave his successor, George Paton, a guide for success in the bits and pieces of his most notable signal callers not named Peyton Manning. —SHANE MONAGHAN

JOE FLACCO’S RIGHT ARM Yes, Flacco finished 2-6 as a starter in Denver. But after witnessing the “Mile High Miracle”—the 70-yard touchdown pass Flacco, then with the Baltimore Ravens, threw to help bounce Denver from the 2013 playoffs—Broncos Nation learned the importance of packing an arm cannon.

KENDALL HINTON’S SPEED Elway had an affinity for tall, lumbering quarterbacks. It was this speedy practice squad receiver (and former college QB), however, who rescued the Broncos against the New Orleans Saints last season—when every Denver quarterback was ruled out because of COVID-19 protocols.

120 5 2 8 0

DREW LOCK’S CONFIDENCE Toward the end of the 2019 season, Drew Lock’s selfassured attitude made both fans and teammates (Von Miller said, “He’s a rock star in the making”) swoon. Even though he led the league in interceptions in 2020, Lock is still full of swag.

TIM TEBOW’S Q SCORE During his rookie season with the Broncos in 2010, Tebow had the best-selling jersey in the NFL. A franchise quarterback needs to boast that kind of star power—and Tebow’s toughness, spirit, and (yeah, we’ll say it) good looks wouldn’t hurt either.

P H O T O I L L U S T R AT I O N BY S E A N PA R S O N S

APRIL 2021

Doug Pensinger/Getty Images (John Elway); ZUMA Press Inc./Alamy Stock Photo (Joe Flacco); Matthew Stockman/Getty Images (Kendall Hinton); Jim Rogash/Getty Images (Tim Tebow); Tim Warner/Getty Images (Drew Lock); Michael Reaves/Getty Images (Trevor Siemian); Artur Debat/Getty Images (brain)

BETTER TOGETHER

TREVOR SIEMIAN’S BRAIN Siemian became a regular starter for two years following Peyton Manning’s retirement, during which time the Academic All-Big Ten honoree outfoxed opponents on his way to a winning record.

Does knee pain due to a cartilage injury have you

SIDELINED?

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TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF AND EACH OTHER. As the nation’s leading respiratory hospital, National Jewish Health knows that preventing the transmission of COVID-19 is a key to beating this virus. So, do your part. Wear a mask.

Practice social distancing. Wash your hands.

And, when it’s your turn, get the vaccine.

We also know that an important step in taking care of others is taking care of yourself. That’s why we’re here for all respiratory, cardiac and immunerelated conditions — for adults and children.

For your own health, keep your appointments.

And, follow up with your doctor.

Call 800.621.0505 or visit njhealth.org.