CULTURE

Immersive art has found its place in Denver, bringing audiences through the screen and onto the stage

BY ANDREW FRAIELI AFRAIELI@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” is immersive, drawing the listener into a carefully crafted soundscape of strung-out emotions and mountains crashing. Salvador Dali’s “Melting Clocks” is immersive, transporting the viewer to a surreal world of heat and time amuck. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is immersive, throwing the reader into an age of bootlegging, jazz and prosperity before the Great Depression.

Any great work of art is immersive — what differentiates these classics from today’s defi nition of immersive art is a matter of purpose and choice. An audience chooses how they interact with the art, the art giving them the agency to act on that and what that art, this medium, can impress onto the audience because of it.

“We wanted to give [the audience] agency, but also to create a contextualized experience so they aren’t just sitting in the dark half of a theater, but are part of the event, because they are moving their eyeballs and ear canals in the world,” said Patrick Mueller, Denver-native, and artistic director at Control Group Productions, a production company based out of Lakewood.

The company’s most recent project, “The End,” came to a close in Denver last month after bringing its audiences far from a darkened theater, forcing them to smell the refi neries in Commerce City and walk around fallen bricks in an abandoned hideout, all on a Mad Maxesque bus touting other survivors in a post-apocalyptic climate change warning story.

The goal, according to Mueller, was to give “an experience of what it feels like at the precipice of a de-civilizing moment, something falling apart in a serious way.” But to impress that weight on the audience, he said the immersion was “crucial.”

Audience becomes involved

“It feels like people are looking at it in the face at this point, but they still aren’t fi guring out how to change behavior,” he said. Really, he elaborated, the show allows people to be involved, to see themselves inside this crisis in a way that screen or theater cannot do, a way that forces people to look it in the face and “not having it be this virtuosity that is celebrated by distancing and elevating it onto the stage.”

But Mueller sees the style doing even more than that single project’s goal: “We can offer what people are most hungry for, if they actually think about it — a rich experience that they’re part of, a social interaction for people that may spend their whole day working from home — being out in the world and experiencing it really differently.”

And for Zach Martens, co-founder of OddKnock, that is practically the goal of the production company’s work.

“Coming through the pandemic, everyone has been isolated and gotten very used to it, and gotten used to spending a lot of time in front of Netfl ix,” he said. “People are being trained to sit still and isolated, and those are the two things that I think will destroy humanity the fastest.”

OddKnock’s latest project (which also closed in Denver last month) was “From on High,” an absurd satire that brought the audience into an ‘80s offi ce full of co-workers with an almost religious fervor for profi ts, and an obsessive work ethic. Slowly, as the work “week” goes on,

the co-workers become more and more unhinged.

But people are free to explore the offi ce and interact with their “coworkers” and fellow audience members alike. As people are dragged left and right for different tasks, audience members have those close interactions with strangers and are pushed to involve themselves.

To Martens, it’s a “massive win for us, because then you go home and realize you really felt something. For that brief moment a complete stranger touched me, patted my hand and made me do something, and that just doesn’t happen anymore,” he said.

He added that people disengage with the world around them until they decide otherwise.

“And I think we’re saying, ‘Engage, engage, engage,’” he said.

The show itself gives people choices, he explained. To not be a cog in a machine like it may feel like in everyday life, even if the show is a stringent offi ce setting.

“But by putting them in that position we’re saying, ‘Do you like this? Do you feel this? This is what you do every single day of your life,’” Martens said. “We’re just saying, ‘Look, this is the world we’re living in, do you agree? Do you want this? If you don’t, make a choice about it.’”

These choices, this interaction, this is what the immersive art does, according to Martens. “That’s why we do what we do: You can’t smell or touch or taste anything that’s happening on a Netfl ix show.”

Body movement a major element

In both shows, interpretive dance was a vessel of emotion, a push to the plot, and another way of pushing the audience through the screen and into the show. It makes the audience realize “all the things that our bodies can do in action, because we’re right there, we can see the hair follicles, and the sweat beads, and maybe even smell the person,” according to Mueller.

“I think as an immersive audience member, it reminds me of my own body’s capacities,” he continued, an ideal shared by Martens.

More than just reminding the audience of their body’s capabilities, though, there’s also the mind’s capabilities.

“We want to create spaces that allow people to see their creative potential and how much they are a creative being,” said Chadney Everett, senior creative director of Convergence Street at Denver’s Meow Wolf and lead designer of House of Eternal Return at Meow Wolf Santa Fe. “...not only being a creative being, but also how necessary they are to the environments they create.”

At Meow Wolf, artists create environments, Everett said. Worlds that “really allow you to feel like you’ve been transported to another place, and therefore free you to express yourself in a different way in that space.”

The immersion allows a “marriage” of the audience and what they created, creating something new and better, he explained. Like a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it, the art — the environments — don’t “exist until the audience comes and interacts with it, and brings it to life with their unique perspective,” he said.

The start of Denver’s immersive art scene is before Meow Wolf, OddKnock and Control Group Productions came to town, according to Mueller.

“There was a really particular point in time that immersive had a big moment of entering public consciousness in Denver, and there were a lot of factors involved in that, but specifi cally, Charlie Miller’s Off-Center production of ‘Sweet and Lucky,’” he said.

“Sweet and Lucky,” in which Mueller was a cast member, premiered in 2016 by Third Rail Projects and was commissioned by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ Off-Center program. Created by Zach Morris, “Sweet and Lucky” was an immersive theatrical piece described by Westword at the time as “designed to take you out of your everyday reality and deposit you in a shifting, dreamlike world where memories come and go and you occasionally fi nd yourself doubting your own senses.”

“It’s had a big effect on the fact that Denver is now a fairly major hub for immersive art and performance,” Mueller continued.

This exiting of reality had been a running thread through these immersive pieces since.

“But I think a lot of the impulse that is driving the local scene is the fact that Coloradans are highly active people,” Mueller said. “They spend a lot of time outdoors, have a very socially focused recreational lifetime around breweries and distilleries and food and nightlife.”

With no deep tradition of live theater, according to Mueller, immersive is a way of bridging the gap between “that feeling of it’s for grandma, or snooty New Yorkers.” It brings the audience shoulder to shoulder with the performers, who rely on the audience’s reaction to propel a scene.

Meanwhile, a gallery may be the perfect setting for paintings, Everett explained.

“The white walls ask me to focus on that piece — taking away all other information around it is exactly right for that thing.”

Everett also is a writer, musician and painter, who says of those art forms: “They do all work, but in different ways. They each serve their own function.”

Really, immersive art should be used because it’s the best tool for the job, according to Mueller.

Even within immersive art, there is a difference in approaches and goals. But the main difference that Mueller sees between the types of projects is their purpose.

“I defi nitely fi nd a different value in work that talks about the human condition in a way that addresses social ills and social justice,” he explained. “I’m interested in art that makes people do and be better in their world.”

The outside of Meow Wolf in Denver by Justin DeCou.

A retro computer setup in Denver-based OddKnock productions’ “From on High.”

PHOTOS BY ANDREW FRAIELI

Bailey Elora inks deal to distribute music, preserves her independence

BY BELEN WARD BWARD@COLORADOCOMMUNINTYMEDIA.COM

Bailey Elora, 22, is a small-town Colorado girl with a powerhouse voice.

Now, she’s a small-town Colorado girl with a music distribution deal with Sony Music subsidiary The Orchard.

Elora said her music distribution deal gives her some of the benefi ts of having a label without being tied to all the label’s rules. She can continue to operate as an independent artist under her own self-named Elora label.

“I will release a handful of songs this year starting with a new song, ‘Love Like This,’” Elora said.

David R. Navarro, Elora’s manager, said the deal lets The Orchard distribute Elora’s music while she develops as an artist and builds a following. The company has a year to produce music and then extend the contract. They start the musician in small venues or radio to get a feel for their music and see if the audience likes it.

“It been a good journey and we look forward to Bailey having new music coming out starting in August,” Navarro said.

Elora said she’s hoping to eventually be able to record and release more music. She is currently working on something more upbeat.

“I’ve got a lot of music with sultry vocals and want to move more into the more alternative raw sound,” Elora said.

Singing to recording

Elora grew up in the Hudson/ Keenesburg area and graduated from Weld Central High School. She has been singing since she was eight and started singing professionally with the Youth on Records.

Elora said she was inspired to audition for the children’s chorus in a production called Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley music school.

She entered the Denver student music non-profi t group called “Youth on Record’ at age 14. The program hires experienced musicians to teach the students aged 14 to 21 years old. The students have access to a complete recording studio to participate in labs and are taught spoken word poetry and music theory.

It was through Youth on Records that Elora started doing actual stage performances. She joined a women’s female group called “SenPowered” that got to sing at Michelle Obama’s Women’s Foundation event when she came to Denver at the Pepsi Center.

Westword Music Showcase

But Elora’s big Denver music scene break came in 2019 when she was invited to perform during Denver’s 25th Anniversary Westworld Music Showcase. She also received a nomination for the prestigious “Best Singer-Songwriter “ voted by the public.

“The Westword showcase was mainly luck. They didn’t even announce it or tell me,” she said. “I found out that I was a part of the lineup of people that I could get an award. I went on to vote for one of my friends and saw my name on the list. I thought, cool!”

“They choose who gets to perform at the showcase based on who’s got the most votes so it was luck and I hard work,” she said.

Elora said she also received the Youth on Records Real Rock Star Award for a Music Ambassador and has been a part of multiple fellowship groups. Also, she has been a dedicated and active artist with Youth on Record for over seven years.

Elora’s genre is Alternative-Rock and sings with her band lead guitar Alfredo “Freddy” Zamora, guitar Isaac Zamora, guitar Dillon Jeffries, bass Geoff Orwiler and James Romine on drums.

They continued to play at local venues around town until February 2017. And then COVID hit, delaying everything. She kept busy, however.

“During COVID, I did a lot of songwriting,” Elora said.

Future

She and the band would love to continue to be doing more festivals and would like to go out on the road, she said.

“I’ve never done like a legit like tour, I think it’d be fun and cool,” Elora said.

For the time being, Elora and her band are playing a lot of small local venues. She recorded her new music with music industry professionals Glenn Sawyer and Rich Veltrop at The Spot Studios in Evergreen. She also has new music coming out this year with Jason Cave of Beat Hogs Production Company in Loveland, Colorado.

Elora not only sings in English she has crossed over to singing and writing in Spanish. She has performed with Denver Latin rock band, iZCALLi for about a year. Elora has written fi ve songs so far with lead singer, Miguel Avña.

Two of the songs, “Pasa el Tiempo” and “One Last Time” are on their new album, Rebirth. “Pasa el Tiempo” was Bailey’s fi rst song that she has written, performed and sang in Spanish. This is a big deal since Bailey doesn’t speak Spanish.

The Bailey Elora Band be performing at The Roxy on Broadway in Denver for a Coastless Creatives concert with Bennett Lamaster on Saturday, September 10th. The show starts at 9:00 p.m.

Bailey Elora

PHOTO BY RICKY ZASTROW

Colorado fi rms land weather forecasting contracts

BY DENNIS HUSPENI DENVER GAZETTE

NASA recently awarded two aerospace companies with a large Colorado presence work on weather satellites that “will ultimately help save lives by enabling even more accurate weather forecasting,” according news releases.

Broomfi eld-based Ball Aerospace will complete two 20-month studies on new instruments for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s “Geostationary Extended Observations” (GeoXO) program.

One instrument will measure atmospheric composition; the other ocean color.

The GeoXO is being dubbed “NOAA’s next-generation constellation of geostationary weather satellites to address critical operational environmental prediction requirements” — i.e. weather forecasting and the environmental impacts of global warming conditions.

Lockheed Martin, which has a large campus in Waterton Canyon that houses about 8,000 of the company’s 11,000 Colorado employees, was awarded a $5 million contract to work on GeoXO’s lightning mapper and another $5 million contract for “spacecraft bus” design.

The lightning mapper tracks 1 million strikes per day globally.

“We’re thrilled at this opportunity to take all we’ve learned — through developing remote imaging capabilities for NOAA’s current lightning mapper and the agency’s GOES-R satellite series — and infuse new technology to build a powerful, weather-monitoring platform of the future,” Adrián Cuadra, Lockheed Martin’s weather programs director, said in the release. “We’ve continued to advance this technology, which will help provide more timely forecasts and snapshots of our environment to enable decision-making that makes our world a better place for upcoming generations.”

For Ball, the 20-month studies “will be based on Ball Operational Weather Instrument Evolution (BOWIE), a series of innovative environmental sensing systems to meet next generation space-based observation needs identifi ed by customers,” according to the release.

“These studies are just the fi rst steps in NOAA’s efforts to improve the nation’s ability to monitor, forecast and understand the conditions impacting weather, climate and health; from air and water quality to coastline health,” Makenzie Lystrup, vice president and general manager of Civil Space for Ball Aerospace, said in the release. “As weather events become increasingly unpredictable and extreme, we need to keep building better monitoring and forecasting tools. The instruments we are helping to defi ne and design will be critical in NOAA’s commitment to building a weather-ready nation.”

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Torres readies for potential college basketball shot

BY STEVE SMITH SSMITH@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

It’s a hot summer day, almost too hot to even think of playing basketball at Colorado Park in Brighton.

But on the concrete court is Eagle Ridge Academy’s Peyton Torres, working on his short-range game, the mid-range jump shots – all with the goal of landing in a college program inside of a year.

“My dad was the coach at the Brighton rec center,” Torres said. “He got my sister (Prairie View High School alum Kilee Torres) and I into sports. I gradually went to an indoor sport, which was basketball. I played baseball for a while. I kind of fi nished that. Standing in the outfi eld got kind of boring. I like moving more. I’m always going to be running playing basketball. There’s always active movement.

Torres is a four-year starter. His fi rst varsity start was not planned. One of his teammates had to visit the restroom just before tipoff, and Torres got the nod.

“The best part is playing the game with people you know, building that relationship,” Torres said. “It’s a fun thing to do. You can do it anywhere, any time.”

It’s also provided some education.

“I’m a lot stronger than I thought I was, mentally,” Torres said. “Sometimes, you get into a shooting slump, but you have to persevere your way through it and do it yourself. It helps you feel a lot better about yourself.

“When I got in my fi rst shooting slump, I was down on myself,” he continued. “My coaches, my dad, my grandpa were all like, ‘Keep shooting. Keep shooting. You’ll work your way through it.’ I worked through it. You just have to ride it out until you get back to that high level of confi dence.”

Torres said one coach helped him realize his potential.

“When I fi rst realized I could play at a high level, my confi dence went through the roof. I was always trying to play,” Torres said. “My sister is three years older than me, and I tried to beat all of her friends. I played with Eli Haskell, the old Brighton (High School) head coach. He’s the one who taught me to shoot a basketball. I started watching high-school kids. Every single chance, I was trying to see if I could beat them. I didn’t, but I defi nitely was trying to.”

Torres is a senior-to-be and an extra-coach-on-the-fl oor-to-be, too because of his experience in the Warriors’ program.

“I want to teach the younger guys about building something that my teammates and friends have,” Torres said. “We want to keep building that, and I tell them, ‘Even though you might not be where we are now, we want to get you to that level so that when we come back in two or three years, we’re going to be at the same point.’ I have to help them. I have to make sure that I’m doing the best for them and the team.”

Torres plays year-round.

“Basketball is defi nitely what I want to do,” he said. “If I need to go to that practice instead of that dance, I’m going to do that. If I miss prom because I’m playing in an out-of-state tournament, I’m going to do that. I don’t regret missing anything, but there were a couple of things like, ‘Those would have been fun to go to.’”

Torres is beginning to look at potential colleges. There aren’t any front-runners yet, and he’s not sure what he wants to do after he fi nishes school.

“I’ve talked to a couple of schools but nothing yet,” he said. “I’m hoping over the next couple of months, I’ll pick up some interest. My mom said God is going to guide me where I need to go. As long as I stay true to where I go and where I think God wants me to go, I’ll be satisfi ed.”

Brighton’s Muniz records another BJJ victory

BY STEVE SMITH SSMITH@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

Brighton’s Danthony Muniz seems to have found his niche in life.

Muniz is a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu artist who trains at 303 Training Center in Westminster. He won his second match at the Aurora Stampede. He needed just two minutes to beat Aj Fernandez at the Aurora Stampede.

“Essentially, the triangle choke requires for your opponent to have one arm in and one arm out, and you must do a series of adjustments in order to secure the choke,” Muniz said.

Muniz, who has a purple belt in BJJ, enjoyed the win but picked up something else along the way.

“My favorite part of the match was how dominant I was able to be over a more experienced opponent,” Muniz said. “I put on a very technical match and was able to completely out class him.”

The pre-match routine may have played a part in the win. But it was different, too.

“The process leading up to this match was more intense than it’s ever been for me,” Muniz said. “My routine consisted of waking up at 5 a.m. and going for a fi ve-mile run, then going to train jiu jitsu at 11-12.”

After that, there was time to rest, hydrate and eat.

“Then I’d attend one or two BJJ classes a night, depending how intense the training throughout the day was,” Muniz said. “I would defi nitely say this has been different from past matches due to the growth I’ve faced after each victory.”

While he grows in the sport, Muniz has some work to do.

“At this point, I would say I have a ton I need to learn and be able to adapt into my game,” he said. “I wouldn’t quite say I’m at my fullest potential quite yet. I would say this is the most prepared I’ve been for a match. With that being said, the confi dence I had making the walk was impeccable because I knew I had put in the work that was required for the situation.”

Muniz’s interest in martial arts is longstanding.

“I was always very interested in the whole mixed martial arts scene,” he said. “One of my favorite movies played a big role on me actually starting my journey – ‘Never Back Down.’ The 2008 movie details the story of a teenager at a new high school where he discovers an underground fi ght club.

His next goal is to win the 145-pound purple belt title, perhaps as soon as next month. His MMA debut is set for October. He’s looking for sponsors, too. Email danthonymuniz12@gmail.com.

“I’m looking to build a platform so that way I can support local businesses and they can support me,” he said. “The only way we can grow quickly is if we work together and build each other up.”

“When I fi rst started BJJ, I had the goal in mind of getting my ground game on point to eventually move onto MMA training,” Muniz said. “My overall goal is to train and give everything I possibly can in order to one day compete in the UFC one day. I knew I’d get to this point eventually because through hard work and discipline you can achieve anything.”

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Mazon Spencer, 11. center, and his brother Gage, 9, both of Thornton, pose for a photo with Horizon safety Blake Barnes, prior to the Hawks’ 6th annual All Heroes Football

Game, held Aug. 5, at Horizon High School. PHOTO BY STEFAN BRODSKY

BY STEFAN BRODSKY

Horizon high school celebrated all of its students Aug. 5 with an All Heroes game. Area special needs children and young adults participated in the event, along with Horizon football players, cheerleaders, and band members.

Rents continue to rise along Front Range

Westminster, Broomfi eld areas have highest costs for one-bedroom units

BY KYLE HARRIS DENVERITE

Westminster was once seen as an affordable-ish landing spot for young people who could no longer pay Denver and Boulder rents. Those days may be over.

Now, the Denver suburb, which has seen a mural festival, a revitalized downtown, an Alamo Drafthouse, a new Tattered Cover, and plenty of wacky events programming (ballerina dodgeball, anybody?), has the highest onebedroom rents in the metro area. The price: $1,860, according to data pulled from active listings on the online rental site Zumper.

Coming in second place: Broomfi eld at $1,850.

Both of those cities are near Boulder County and the site of the late 2021 Marshall fi res, which destroyed more than 1,100 homes and commercial properties and left many families renting as construction lagged.

Centennial and Denver tied for third priciest median rent at $1,760.

If you’re looking for a deal, Greeley is still signifi cantly lower than Denver at $1,070 and Fort Collins comes in at $1,200. (But yikes, that’s still expensive. Throw in commutes to the Mile High City, and renters will be suffering.)

But when it comes to twobedroom rents, Denver’s still the priciest city, with a median rent of $2,340, followed by Broomfi eld, at $2,240, and Westminster, at $2,170.

Plenty of other suburbs that have long been considered affordable have seen massive hikes in median rent.

Take Englewood-area zip codes, where median one-bedroom rent now runs $1,290, according to Zumper’s data. That’s a 33% jump from this time last year.

Nearby, the Littleton area has seen a 24.5% rise to $1,370.

Longmont, near the Marshall Fire site, saw a 23.3% increase, year over year.

Statewide, median one-bedroom rent is $1,450.

Data from the online Apartment List, which uses a different methodology than Zumper that leads to a different set of numbers,

SEE RENT, P17

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But o ce workers are still largely missing

BY SARAH MULHOLLAND DENVERITE

Crowds are coming back to Downtown Denver to have fun, but the scene for offi ce workers is a different story.

Overall, downtown visitation is at 89% of pre-pandemic levels, according to a report from the Downtown Denver Partnership. But people aren’t as eager to come back to the offi ce. Offi ce attendance peaked at 47% of pre-pandemic levels in May, the report found.

There’s more than 8 million square feet of vacant offi ce space downtown due to the increasing prevalence of hybrid and remote work, with three of four major employers surveyed by the DDP offering hybrid work options.

“Downtown offi ce markets across the country suffered signifi cantly over the past year and Denver was no exception,” the report’s authors wrote.

A similar trend is playing out when it comes to tourism. Denver welcomed 31.7 million visitors last year, about 15% more than in 2020 and just shy of the 31.9 million visitors from 2019. For overnight visitors, 14.8 million were traveling for leisure, while just 1.8 million were in Denver for business.

Retail sales are gaining steam following the pandemic lull, with tax collections in the area up 57% in 2021 compared to 2020, according to the report. But it’s not all good news on that front, either, as there are a lot of empty stores. On the 16th Street Mall, one-third of ground fl oor space is “inactive,” according to data collected by the DDP in December.

Despite the challenges, roughly $2 billion in construction projects are underway in Denver. Major public works include the makeover of the 16th Street Mall and an expansion of the Colorado Convention Center. During the past four years, 41 projects were fi nished downtown, adding more than 6,000 residential units, over 1,400 hotel rooms and 2.8 million square-feet of offi ce space.

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This story is from Denverite, a nonprofi t Denver news source affi liated with CPR News. Used by permission. For more, and to support Denverite, visit denverite.com.

RENT

shows similar trends in rent-price growth in the region.

National median rent has grown 12% over the past year, according to data from the online rental site Apartment List.

With infl ation higher than it has been in the past 40 years, higher mortgage rates and still sky-high housing prices for buyers, many people are ditching their hopes of home ownership and continuing to rent. That creates more competition for already too few rental units.

On a national level, the Denver area rental market has the 71st fastest rising prices in the country’s 100 largest cities, from this time last year.

Cold comfort: The trend of rising prices is hardly a local phenomenon, and nationwide, landlords are also charging more than many renters can afford.

This story is from Denverite, a nonprofi t Denver news source affi liated with CPR News. Used by permission. For more, and to support Denverite, visit denverite.com.

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O cial number is low, but reality is more complicated

BY JOHN INGOLD THE COLORADO SUN

Missy Anderson stepped out of the shade and into the worsening heat of another day in one of Denver’s hottest summers on record.

Anderson is an injury prevention coordinator at Denver Health, meaning she works to deter the kinds of accidents and events that often land people in the hospital. On this July day, that involved giving a demonstration on the health dangers that summer heat can pose. She had parked her SUV in the driveway in front of the hospital and stuck a thermometer inside. Next to the car was a sign displaying the result.

It was about 95 degrees outside. Inside, the temperature after just a few minutes had already climbed above 150 — hot enough to kill. In a few minutes more, it would hit 165.

“We don’t think a lot about heat in Colorado,” she said. “We usually think about cold weather because that’s what we’re known for.”

Just going by the offi cial numbers, the health impacts of high heat are not something we need to think a lot about in Colorado. There have been no hot car-related deaths reported in the state so far this year.

Last year, only fi ve people in the state died from heat-related causes, according to death certifi cate data compiled by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. That encompasses all deaths with heatstroke, dehydration or hyponatremia as a contributing factor.

In 2020, there were six heat-related deaths in the state. Kirk Bol, the manager of CDPHE’s vital statistics program, wrote in an email to The Sun that the numbers from both years are a statistically signifi cant increase over the 20-year average of 2.7 deaths per year.

Compared to the hundreds of heatrelated deaths that are documented annually in places like Phoenix and Las Vegas, though, the numbers make it appear as if Colorado has little to worry about, even as summertime temps creep higher.

In 2020, the second-hottest summer on record for Denver and the one with the most 90-degree days, only about 300 people visited the emergency room in Colorado for heat-related illnesses and only about 40 people were hospitalized, according to CDPHE. Until recently, even offi cial heat warnings have been rare in the state, due to Colorado’s traditionally low humidity and cool overnight temperatures.

But experts in public health and prevention, such as Denver Health’s Anderson, say those offi cial numbers are missing the bigger picture.

All the di erent ways that heat harms

The problem with tracking heat-related deaths is that its most pernicious impacts typically leave no trace.

“I would consider heat to be a threat-multiplier, meaning it often puts other coexisting medical conditions in crisis,” said Dr. Jay Lemery, an emergency medicine specialist and the co-founder of the Program on Climate and Health at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

The result is that when, say, a patient with cardiovascular disease shows up at the hospital during a heat wave, doctors typically see and address the medical issue. They don’t recognize the impact of heat that may have pushed the patient’s condition into crisis.

The same goes for patients with chronic diabetes. Or kidney disease. Or the elderly. Lemery calls these patients “physiologically vulnerable.”

“That little push off the cliff gets people in trouble and they’ll have exacerbations of their disease,” Lemery said.

Dr. Ryan Lawless, a trauma surgeon at Denver Health, gave an example of how this works. On a recent night, a patient came into the hospital who had been found lying on the fl oor at home. The patient had underlying medical conditions, which is what caused the hospitalization and what doctors focused on for treatment.

But how the patient ended up on the fl oor and what role a recent run of scorching temperatures had played in worsening the patient’s condition were not part of the diagnosis. Heat may have been the triggering factor, but it didn’t make the offi cial statistics.

As temperatures continue to rise, the danger to people is rising.As temperatures con-

tinue to rise, the danger to people is rising. SHUTTERSTOCK IMAGE

SEE DEATHS, P21

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Solution

© 2016 King Features Synd., Inc.

TRIVIA

1. AD SLOGANS: Which product’s advertising slogan is “Look, Ma, no cavities!”? 2. MOVIES: The movie “300” is based on which famous historical battle? 3. U.S. PRESIDENTS: How many presidents have served more than two terms? 4. ANIMAL KINGDOM: How far can a skunk’s spray reach? 5. GEOGRAPHY: What is the southernmost major city on the continent of Africa? 6. LANGUAGE: What is a funambulist? 7. HISTORY: Who was the fi rst woman to complete the Boston Marathon (unoffi cially)? 8. TELEVISION: What was the name of the cruise ship on the sitcom “The Love Boat”?

9. GENERAL KNOWLEDGE:

Which colors make up the fi vering Olympic symbol? 10. FOOD & DRINK: Which plant produces cacao beans, which are used to make chocolate?

Answers 1. Crest. 2. The Battle of Thermopylae. 3. One. Franklin D. Roosevelt. 4. About 10-20 feet. 5. Cape Town. 6. Tightrope walker. 7. Bobbi Gibb, 1966. The race was opened to women in 1972. 8. Pacifi c Princess. 9. Blue, yellow, red, green and black. 10. Cacao trees.

(c) 2022 King Features Synd., Inc.

Crossword Solution