Colorado Sunday | A stepping stone in peril

May 11, 2025 WOL

Happy Colorado Sunday, friends. And happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate. (If you were late to the gifting game this year, we’ve got some sweet new Colorado Sun ballcaps in the store this week.)

I’ll be celebrating the day with my mom doing only the things she wants to do and thinking about how fortunate I am that she made zero effort to slow my progress toward self-sufficiency, starting with her being OK with me working in the family business starting at age 13. I had a lot of jobs between then and my official launch in my 20s, jobs that taught me to be polite, resilient and mostly unafraid of unfamiliar circumstances, and how to make change without the aid of a computer. I am grateful — the very long leash served me well.

We’ve been thinking about what kinds of experiences help make kids into adults for a few weeks, since federal funding for the AmeriCorps program was slashed. This week’s cover story by Tracy Ross takes a look at the intentions and the outcomes of niche programs under the service umbrella in Colorado.

YouthBuild Corps Member Dishaunee Miller-Christensen poses for a portrait in front of a mural depicting a graduate and construction worker at the Mile High Youth Corps headquarters in Denver. (Alyte Katilius, Special to The Colorado Sun)

When I was a 20-something, feeling out of place in the halls of college, I stumbled upon an opportunity to spend my summer doing trail work in one of the burn scars created by the massive wildfire that roared through Yellowstone National Park. This would be the hardest job I had ever done, but I was ready. All I wanted was to be as far from civilization as possible, in a land full of predators that could eat me. (I didn’t have a death wish. I just want to feel that kind of energy.)

Once the school year ended, I loaded my backpacking gear into my Subaru and drove from Santa Fe to Wyoming. And for the next three months, I spent 10 days at a time working 10 hours straight, fueled by fig Newtons, on trails covered in talcum-textured dirt turned black from the fires. I chopped, hand-sawed and bow-sawed charred trees and logs out of the way and reconstructed trail I was pretty sure no one would hike on for a very long time. And when I left at the end of my term, while hiking out of the forest alone, I was indeed charged by a grizzly bear. Obviously I wasn’t eaten.

The griz encounter is a story for another time. For now, all you need to know is that my summer with the Student Conservation Association changed my life. I swear I think about some aspect of it at least a couple times a week. But more importantly, the SCA gave me an opportunity to figure out what I wanted to be. Before, I’d only dreamed of a career in the wilderness. SCA got that going. I’ve done a lot of different outdoor jobs since. And my writing career has mostly focused on stories that happen outside.

This is my longwinded way of saying that writing about AmeriCorps and the opportunities it gives young Coloradans for my story this Sunday was like hiking back into Yellowstone. The only difference is that the young people I met, who are doing such great service for the state while getting a supported bridge into adulthood, aren’t assured their programs will continue. That’s because AmeriCorps funding is part of the great slashing happening under the Trump administration. It’s disheartening. But the experiences of 22-year-old Dishaunee Miller-Christensen, who has benefited greatly from her time with the Mile High Youth Corps in Denver, help leaven the story.

READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE

The 120 days of the first regular session of the 75th General Assembly began and ended in what felt like a flash. Though the final gavel came down Wednesday, all signs point to the possibility of a special session being called to hammer out unresolved issues around regulating artificial intelligence and, perhaps, a Medicaid funding crisis. Political reporter Jesse Paul had his camera out on sine die, the Latin name for the Legislature’s last day of work.

Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, D-Denver, speaks on the Senate floor Wednesday at the Colorado Capitol. Despite his efforts, Rodriguez was unable to negotiate changes to a bill that would have tweaked a law adopted last year regulating how businesses use artificial intelligence. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)

Frank Lombardi, chief sergeant at arms in the Colorado Senate, stands to be recognized Wednesday. Lombardi retired after more than four decades working for the state. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)

Sens. Barbara Kirkmeyer, left, Jeff Bridges and Judy Amabile, right, the Senate members of the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, pose for a selfie. The committee’s work this session was particularly challenging as lawmakers worked to close a $1.2 billion budget gap. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)

State Reps. Cecelia Espenoza and William Lindstedt mingle in the House. Both Democrats had heavy calendars this session, with Espenoza working as lead sponsor of a bill allowing youth psychiatric facilities to fence their properties for safety, and Lindstedt leading the charge on a popular measure to make tiny Japanese Kei trucks street legal in Colorado. Both bills were signed by the governor. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)

Jarrett Freedman, the communications director and deputy chief of staff for the House Democrats, looks at his computer on the House floor. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)

“The Evacuee,” an oil painting by Tokio Ueyama, created in 1942, while the artist was incarcerated at the Granada Relocation Center, now the Amache National Historic Site, in southeastern Colorado. (Denver Art Museum)

The annual pilgrimage to Amache National Historic Site in southeastern Colorado begins Friday in Grenada, a weekend of self-guided and docent-led tours of the camp where American people of Japanese descent were imprisoned after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The programming is centered on a core event Saturday, a memorial at the Amache Cemetery and the display of a comprehensive listing of more than 120,000 people who were incarcerated known as The Ireichō – Sacred Book of Names.

For many, it is a long haul out to Grenada, but you can get a sense of the experience of living in Amache through an exhibit in its final weeks at the Denver Art Museum. The Life and Art of Tokio Ueyama is a 40-painting exhibit telling the life story of the artist who immigrated to the U.S. as a young man in 1908 and traveled the world as a student and painter until he and his wife were locked up at Grenada. There he painted and taught art to a handful of adult students among the 10,000 prisoners, capturing a moment in Colorado history when, as the museum describes it, “Americans experienced dislocation and loss, and, more importantly, displayed unimaginable resilience, tenacity and creativity in the face of prejudice.”

The Life and Art of Tokio Ueyama, through June 1, Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver

EXCERPT: Author John Be Lane set his sci-fi novel “The Future Lies” in Denver, so it would be grounded in reality. From there, he extrapolated on today’s nascent artificial intelligence technology — and keep in mind he formulated his story before the emergence of tech like ChatGPT — and imagined a future in which AI, called the Network in his narrative, calls all the shots for humanity. The result was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in sci-fi/fantasy.

READ THE SUNLIT EXCERPT

THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: Lane explains how a thought experiment in which he projected what current realities might look like by the end of the century left him thinking that “things aren’t looking good for the home team.” Those ruminations led to inspiration. Here’s a portion of his Q&A:

SunLit: What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?

Lane: … I remember the early days of the internet, when there was this idealistic sense of potential, with information and communication being liberated from all the gatekeepers. And then smartphones put the greatest knowledge tool ever conceived into the pockets of most of the human race. You might expect that those two things would result in an explosion of enlightenment. But I fear the opposite has occurred; we’re allowing our tools to use us. From that fear came the book.

READ THE INTERVIEW WITH JOHN BE LANE

LISTEN TO A SUN-UP PODCAST WITH THE AUTHOR

A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.

Really, everything’s under control with AI in Colorado. Except maybe it’s not. Expect to see lawmakers back at the statehouse in the next few months to hammer out a solution. (Jim Morrissey, Special to The Colorado Sun)

🌞 As we mentioned above, the legislature gaveled out of session Wednesday. With 600 or so bills on the docket, it’s possible you missed a few. Jesse Paul and Brian Eason and our friends at the Colorado Capitol News Alliance analyzed the session along five key themes. For those who are more detail oriented, we’ve got a recounting of 101 bills you should know about. And on the macro level, here’s what happened with school finance, a plan to reduce the cost of homeowners insurance and a measure to tweak Colorado’s first-in-the-nation AI regulations.

🌞 Remember that bold idea offered by the YIGBY crowd? (That’s Yes in God’s Backyard.) It would have allowed churches, schools and universities to build housing on their property — no matter what the zoning. The novel approach to the housing affordability crisis in Colorado was squashed in the Senate, Brian Eason reports, because it stripped local governments of their ability to control housing policies. (See: Boulder vs. the University of Colorado south campus.)

🌞 The “Free Tina” movement has found its way into the White House, with President Donald Trump calling former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters an “innocent Political Prisoner” and directing the Department of Justice to do all it can to have her released from state prison. That same day, Jennifer Brown reported that a federal judge in Denver has extended the ban on deporting Venezuelan migrants without due process under the wartime 1789 Alien Enemies Act as Trump ordered earlier this year.

🌞 The water forecast in southwestern Colorado is grim, Shannon Mullane reported, with agricultural operations in that corner of the state warned they might receive just a third of their allotment of irrigation water.

🌞 This kind of water scarcity is but one reason that Southern Ute Tribal environmental monitors are extremely worried about a spill of 23,000 gallons of fuel from a broken pipeline carrying unleaded gasoline to Grand Junction from New Mexico. The resulting plume of benzene appears to be making its way toward the crucial Animas River, Michael Booth explains.

🌞 There has not been a ruling in the Gross Reservoir expansion case, but the person who designed the plans to raise the dam and triple its storage capacity said in court last week that if the stop-work order is upheld, there could be catastrophic consequences. Jerd Smith was in the courtroom.

🌞 Could the ski train from Denver be extended on to Steamboat from Winter Park? A deal between the state, which owns Moffat Tunnel, and Union Pacific, which owns the tracks that run through it, clears the way for more passenger service on the route heavily dominated by freight, Jennifer Brown explains.

Thanks for stopping by this beautiful Colorado Sunday. I hope to see you in real life on Friday at Colorado SunFest. Your support of this newsletter gets you a cheap ticket to the symposium at the University of Denver, where we’ll be contemplating the ways to build a better Colorado all day long. Find the details at coloradosun.com/colorado-sunfest

— Dana & the whole staff of The Sun

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.