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Go paleo and dig for dinosaur bones at area quarry

The evening before Melinda Mawdsley and I dug for dinosaur bones, I mentioned the exciting news to a friend. Granted, my friend is not a 7-year-old boy, so this might not have been as receptive an audience as I’d want, but still: Me: Melinda and I are digging for dinosaurs tomorrow! Friend: Great! Me: There’s a chance we could find sauropod bones! Friend: Sauropod? Me: The really big plant eaters, like apatosaurus. Friend: Is brontosaurus one? Me: Apatosaurus is ...

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Our Great Summer Novel

Summertime, and the reading is easy. Leave the deep themes and heavy symbolism for colder, darker months. Summer is for car chases and zombies, sassy divorcees and alien invasion. It’s for the unrealistic but entertaining, the page-turning, the sand between chapters. Summer, of course, is for the summer novel — the beach read, the literary cotton candy, the book you have a hard time putting down. So, why not write one? Between all of us, we definitely can craft a summer ...

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Expressions of success, bravery in first day of events

Alex Bender, backstroke queen, sat with her ankles lightly crossed, alternating occasional bites from a ham sandwich and a big, red apple. Below her, deck-level in the El Pomar Natatorium at Colorado Mesa University, athletes from around the state were arrayed in various stages of warming up: wrapped in a towel at pool’s edge, splashing into the water for a few laps, pausing midstroke to catch the eye of a coach or family member nearby. Kellie Carpenter, one of Alex’s coaches ...

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Antics, dance moves, high-fours: Being a mitt-headed mascot is great

Just so you know, I was grinning like a lunatic inside that enormous baseball mitt head. When kids wanted their picture taken with Mr. JUCO, I smiled even bigger: Cheese! Super cheese! Nobody could see, of course. Mr. JUCO has a perma-smile on his exuberant baseball face, and that should have been enough, but behind the mesh panel through which I was peering — placed helpfully in his smile — there was plenty to grin about: 1. I was delivering high-four after high four, ...

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Father reclaims his life to care for son with disabilities

5:30 a.m. (Thankfully, not 2 a.m. like the morning before.) In the periwinkle early morning of summer’s coming, a sleepy rustle under the Toy Story blanket. Blue eyes pop open and rosy lips part in a slow-spreading grin. “...aaaaaaaaa…” With his tilted-up nose and strawberry cheeks, his ears that angle out just enough, he is an elf on the edge of a laugh. “...AaAaaAaAa…” He’s 13 now, and wow, the teenage mood swings! Smiles, then ...

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Popular Hanging Lake causes parking dilemma

As is often the case in Colorado, scenic wonders are loved. A lot. Sometimes to the point that problems arise. Case in point: Hanging Lake, the popular hike in Glenwood Canyon that’s accessed from the Hanging Lake Rest Area. Its popularity has only increased in recent years, so that more than 130,000 visitors hike the trail annually, according to the U.S. Forest Service. However, this means that on busy days, the rest area parking lot fills and visitors then park illegally along ...

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Driven apart after a divorce, Clifton father, son reunite 30 years later

So much changes in 30 years. Hairlines recede, waists expand, memories dim. And little boys grow from gangly 9-year-olds to 39-year-old fathers of six. And so on Feb. 3, his wife at work, his Clifton home relatively quiet, Fred Romero sat down to watch the Ravens play the 49ers in the Super Bowl. A short time before kickoff, the phone rang. Fred grumbled a little, but muted the TV. “Hello?” he answered. “Hi, is your name Fred J. Romero?” the voice on the other ...

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Leave intimidation behind and enjoy the rugged thrill of mountain biking

Ever since that Columbia-brand Blue Angel bicycle — the one with a cloud-motif banana seat — that my parents bought for me when I was 6, I’ve loved riding my bike. The freedom of heading out in any direction on a bike is one of the most brilliant euphorias I know. I rode all over Utah Valley in college, through the nooks and crannies of my sketchy neighborhood in Arkansas, to the beach innumerable times in Florida, and the day I finally managed to barter for a bike in ...

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Ready to make their mark

It was her voice, her singing, but the CD was stuttering, made worse in the reverberations around an otherwise silent Brownson Arena Friday morning. Finally, Ashley Moore turned and asked for the CD to be stopped. “I wasn’t planning on doing this live,” she told the crowd of hundreds gathered for R-5 High School’s graduation. Pulling the microphone from its holder on the podium, clutching it in her right hand, she began a capella: “I want to leave my ...

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Cycling in silence

Somewhere in the middle of the pack, which in the moment feels more like a scrum, rhythmically breathing as legs pump like pistons, maybe 20 minutes into the race, bent low over the handlebars, a fleeting thought: Why am I doing this? Minutes and weeks and years of training — a part-time job, hour-wise — with the burning lungs and the howling muscles, facing competitors at least as prepared, at least as hungry, and in near-total silence. No audio cues, no whir of gear teeth ...

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GJ artist’s unique tattoo style turning heads

“We talked about it kind of wrapping around your arm, right?” Justin Nordine asks Tish Collins, a yellow Sharpie poised just above the skin of her left forearm. Tish says yes and Justin pulls the pen back, staring for several beats at the canvas of blank skin beneath the serene face of Guanyin, Buddhist goddess of mercy, on Tish’s upper arm. Justin created the goddess tattoo several months ago. “I’m going to have you stand,” he says, “and hold ...

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Moving forward

Does it help to know what the brain is doing at times like these? The prefrontal cortex, which helps regulate emotions, is affected, maybe weakened. The amygdala, home of emotions, is over-stimulated. And the hippocampus, which controls short-term memory, plays recent events over and over on an excruciating loop. Over and over and over. So, that’s what the brain is doing, up there in what increasingly feels like the swamp of the skull. And still, the feet don’t want to move ...

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Deputies hunt person who shot
 dog in the head

A dog was shot in the head sometime between Sunday and Tuesday but lived, and now the Montrose County Sheriff’s Department is investigating. The 2-year-old yellow Labrador retriever named Bella was found Tuesday after crawling out of canal in Olathe near Amber and 60.00 roads. Deputies took the dog to a veterinarian, where it was discovered she’d sustained a small-caliber gunshot wound to the head, according to the Sheriff’s Department. The dog was kept overnight for ...

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Group swaddles youngsters in diapers in a show of cloth

Some are just into diapers — and just into this world, really — and some are on their way out of them (please, please, please let the potty training work). Some did not appreciate a publicly changed diaper at all and some could not be distracted from the delight of fingers to slurp. But at 11 a.m. on the dot Saturday, 16 babies and toddlers had their cloth diapers changed, whether they needed it or not. The event, held at Colorado Baby, 560 Main St., was part of the worldwide ...

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Grand Junction dedicates a new safe place to play

After the red ribbon was ceremonially cut with the enormous scissors, after dozens of children thronged into the newly renovated and just-dedicated playground at Lincoln Park, Niki Duckworth pushed her son Liam, 6, into the melee of the jungle gym. A yellow Spongebob Squarepants blanket was tucked around him against the blustery Saturday morning, and up a gentle ramp to a covered platform in the new play area, he closed his eyes and smiled. “A park is a place where a kid can be a ...

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Take a dirt road out of Gateway to Utah ... maybe?

We may or may not have been in Utah. I told Melinda Mawdsley I would sense a disturbance in The Force if we were, but however many miles down a rocky dirt road and our initial goal of “Let’s go check out the state border!” stopped mattering. I’d like to say all that mattered was the soaring, stark red cliffs surrounding us or the green blush of spring on the trees along the river, but what really mattered was me shutting up. “Hey! We’re pretty much ...

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Precious water takes center stage at event

Ultimately, Deanna Jenne’s thoughts and feelings crystallized to this: “Water is not a commodity and it’s not renewable,” she explained. “What we got in the very beginning of time is all we have.” It was that devotion to a finite resource that inspired her to organize Water Comes First, a two-day event featuring concerts, lectures and workshops Friday and Saturday at the Avalon Theater, the KAFM Radio Room, Yoga West Studio and at a special ceremony on ...

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