Two weeks ago, the southwest monsoon arrived, bringing relief to these parched landscapes and their residents. Most afternoons since then, Ouray has had measurable rain. But the condition of these mou...

I'm not a Jeep enthusiast or an off-highway vehicle user, but I am a hiker and photographer who cares deeply about our high-country environment. After recent discussions at county commissioners' meeti...

If you look east from Ridgway, the view of the Cimarron Range is usually a masterpiece of sharp, clear angles. At the center of it all stands the unmistakable spire of Chimney Rock. Together with its ...

By some stroke of luck or simple habit of missing the moment, I’ve had a knack for dodging disasters around here. A decade ago, I rolled into Silverton for a seasonal job nearly a year after the Gold ...

The green gentian is blooming all over Colorado in the montane zones between 8,000 feet and 12,500 feet in elevation. This event has a special name – a mast bloom – which is a term for when a large nu...

Ouray County remains in serious drought, as it was last month. Most of Colorado’s mountains are in extreme/ exceptional drought; the northern San Juans remain in the severe category. (U.S. Drought Mon...

When I called to inquire about purchasing refurbished newspaper racks, the gal seemed a bit surprised. "We don't sell many newspaper racks," she said. "Most of the calls we get are people wanting to k...

The "power of place" is the theory that physical locations shape our lives, identities and ultimate destinies. This concept suggests that a geographic location is never merely a dot on a map or a set ...

We used to be able to say, “Seeing is believing.” Now we’re learning to be more discerning about images and videos we see posted online. We’re counting people's fingers in photos, looking for clues ti...

A “9,000 mile “freight train of warm water” — a Kelvin wave — “hundreds of feet deep” in the Pacific Ocean has surged eastward toward Peru since April. Scientists are monitoring its progress. Named af...

Although the Ridgway girls’ soccer team’s run for a championship ended earlier this month in Westminster with a second round 6-1 defeat at the feet of the Flatirons Academy Bison, it was a season to b...

For decades, the San Juans were valued primarily for what could be pulled out of them. These mountains were a brutal, dangerous locale defined by the extraction of silver, gold and other metals. As Wo...

After three months of desperately dry Colorado weather, there’s finally good news. ENSO-neutral conditions are now present and favored from April-June (80% chance). “From May-July 2026, El Niño is lik...

For anyone driving the lonely stretch of Colorado Highway 141 through the West End of Montrose County, the sign for “Disappointment Valley” usually prompts a chuckle or a sympathetic sigh. It sounds l...

Thursday, April 9 Adult craft night: making earrings out of old books, from 5:156:30 p.m. with the Ouray Public Library in the San Juan Room of the Ouray Community Center, 320 Sixth Ave. Sign up requi...

This week marks our seventh anniversary of owning the Plaindealer. I always remember the date because of April Fool's Day. We were careful to avoid April 1 as our closing date for purchasing the paper...

Early this month, spring 2026 seemed to be yet another hot, droughty season across the West. Since then, March has been abysmally dry and scarily warm, thanks to a highly unusual heat dome parked over...

It’s not uncommon for track athletes to break in a new pair of shoes at the dawn of a new season. But it is exceedingly rare for all of them to have the chance to set a new course record, which is exa...

Wyatt Earp wasn’t born a legend. He was an opportunist, a man with a keen eye for the next horizon and a knack for finding — or perhaps stirring up — chaos wherever he set his boots. While history boo...

At intense moments of a close basketball game, there’s nothing that Ridgway senior Sophia Scranton savors more than to hunker down in her defensive stance, slide in front of a hapless dribbler and wit...