Several agencies practice wildland firefighting from the sky
The Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control does the training annually, and teams up with the Colorado National Guard and a couple of local fire departments to make it happen.
This year's training will have a variety of helicopters, including Single Engine Air Tankers: UH-72 Lakota helicopters and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, and CH-47 Chinook helicopters.
One of the main activities will be targeted aerial water delivery practice at Chatfield State Park in Littleton, Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge in Commerce City and Button Rock Reservoir in Longmont.
Rabbit suspected in wildlife strike that forced United flight to divert back to DIA
The goal is for crews to be prepared for the real thing when the time comes. The training, organizers and officials said, is increasingly necessary.
All the agencies involved were the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, Colorado National Guard, USDA Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Boulder Fire-Rescue, City of Longmont and Longmont Fire Department.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Miami Herald
26-06-2025
- Miami Herald
Hikers from NC spend ‘chilly night' trapped at 13,000 feet on Colorado mountain
A pair of 19-year-old hikers from North Carolina spent the night trapped 13,000 feet up on a Colorado mountain, officials said. They called 911 just before 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 24, from the north face of Capitol Peak, Mountain Rescue Aspen said on its social media accounts. The teens had reached the mountain's 14,130-foot summit earlier that day, but got stuck in a precarious spot while trying to find a shorter way down, the agency said. There is no shorter route down, but it's all too common for even experienced hikers to mistake a route for a shortcut, according to several comments on the rescue agency's Facebook post. 'There are no shortcuts on Capitol,' someone said. Several comments echoed the same sentiment. 'So many people assume from looking down that it's climbable terrain when it's far from!' another person said. 'There is no other shorter or safe route off of Capitol,' someone said. 'They were so fortunate for your rescue efforts in challenging conditions.' A photo shows the towering peak from a smaller slope below. The mountain is located in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness area near Aspen. The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative calls it 'one of the most difficult and demanding' of the state's highest peaks. Much of the route is exposed, meaning it exposes hikers to a high risk of injury on steep vertical drops, KDVR reported. The Capitol climbing route is also along 'loose, crumbling rock,' the outlet reported. 'Climbing website rates it at a difficulty level of 4 out of 5, and the (Pitkin County Sheriff's Office) said five people died on the mountain in 2017 alone,' the outlet reported. 'I can see how you can get sucked into going that way because it's briefly 4th class before you end up on 5.7 terrain,' someone said in the comments. 'I climbed the NW Buttress last year and it's a great route, but committing. Retreating that way would be long, difficult and technical with mandatory rappelling.' Rescuers told the hikers to stay put until rescuers arrived, which wouldn't be until 'sometime early the next morning,' officials said. 'Chilly night up there for those two teens!' someone said. 'At least they knew help was coming.' At 6 a.m. the next day, a rescue helicopter carrying two hoist-rescue technicians flew toward the peak. The search effort was delayed by a snow shower and lightning for a few minutes, but the crew spotted the teens 'despite the fact the stranded hikers were wearing all black and gray clothing,' rescuers said. 'Please wear bright clothes. You never know when you will need to be located from above,' someone said in the comments. The rescue helicopter hovered around 13,000 feet as rescue technicians hoisted each hiker one at a time off the cliff, officials said. The teens were evaluated by medical personnel at a landing field before they were released, rescuers said. 'Capitol is the LAST place you'd even think about short-cutting,' someone said in the comments. 'Two VERY lucky 19 yos.' Capitol Peak is about a 140-mile drive southwest from Denver.
Los Angeles Times
26-06-2025
- Los Angeles Times
I perfected pie by baking 60 a day. You can get it right the first time
Despite being an obsessive baker since I was a little kid, until I was 31 I had never baked a pie from scratch. Meaning: I had never made pie dough. And pie dough scared me. Cutting butter into flour? What did that mean anyway? A tender (as opposed to tough) crust? Aren't 'tender' and 'tough' personality traits? And what was up with the ice water? I wasn't sure I wanted to know. At the time, I was writing primarily for women's magazines and taking odd jobs to make ends meet. My criterion for these jobs was that it was something that interested me and wouldn't interfere with my dream of being a writer. Fun, creative, dead-end jobs were my wheelhouse. So when my editor at Seventeen told me about a job opportunity as a summer pie baker in the most beautiful shop she'd ever seen, in a fishing-village-turned-billionaire-community in the Hamptons, I borrowed a friend's beaten-up Volvo and drove two hours east, to a whitewashed shack nestled in farm fields, and interviewed the German matriarch who owned and ran the place with her daughter. 'You seem like a bright girl,' she said. 'You'll learn.' If you don't have a German grandmother to teach you how to make pie dough, you should seriously consider finding one. By the end of my first week, I was practically a pro. And by the end of that summer, I knew all of the tricks. I learned that when it comes to pie crust, butter isn't necessarily king. That flour can give a filling that cloudy look. That a white, raw bottom crust was pie 911. And, as Anna says, the way a person crimped the edges of their pie dough was like their signature; no two are the same. I learned that a big ol' sprinkling of sugar on top before baking the pie covered up any imperfections in the crust and that perfection wasn't what we were going for anyway. We were going for homemade with — I hate to sound cliché here — love. And that, for even the novice pie baker, is an attainable goal. The mother's name was Anna, pronounced 'AHHH-na' not 'Anne-Uh.' On my first day, Anna stood by my elbow and taught me the ins and outs of pie dough. The ingredient list is simple: all-purpose flour, some kind of solid fat (butter, margarine, Crisco, lard or a combination), salt and ice water, which she taught me was to keep the fat cold. By keeping the fat — let's say butter — cold, the butter melts in the oven during the baking process, creating tiny steam pockets, which result in the layers that make the crust flaky. In baking terms, tough is the opposite of tender. A tough crust — and you've had them — is hard, crunchy and dense. A tender crust, by contrast, is flaky and light. A tender crust is the goal. To achieve the tender holy grail of crusts, the most important factor is not to overwork the dough. You work it exactly as much as necessary to transform it from a shaggy mess into a homogeneous mass. Working the dough develops the gluten in flour, which makes for a tough pie crust. Resting the dough before rolling it out (also key) relaxes the gluten. I made 27 pies my first day, and I wasn't any more proud walking across the stage as a graduate at UC Berkeley a decade earlier. 'Why only 27?' Anna asked. She told me that moving forward, I should aim for 60 pies a day. By day three or four, I was able to make 60, and soon I was hitting that goal with hours to spare, to bake whatever I wanted. 'You have light hands,' Anna said one day, looking over my shoulder. 'You're a good baker.' Some 30 years later, I still feel a big blueberry-colored heart swelling in my chest as I hear those words. (Anna died in 2015 at the age of 81, sadly hit and killed by a car while crossing the street.) We made the dough in two-pie batches, which is essential to a tender crust (because it's too easy to overmix a larger batch of dough). After making enough dough for 60 pies, which is 120 rounds (top and bottom), or 30 batches of dough, I put those in the walk-in (refrigerator) to chill and rest. Then I moved onto forming the shells from dough that had been resting already. I did those 10 at a time. After I got the pie shells in the fridge, one of the prep cooks would have a bowl as big as half a beach ball full of the correct amount of fruit for filling up to 10 pies. Sometimes the fruit was fresh, purchased from Pike Farms, which has a stand next to the shop. But very often it was IQF fruit, an industry term for 'individually quick frozen.' This process of rapid-freezing the fruit preserves the flavor and prevents ice crystals from forming and the fruit from sticking together. Many, but not all, commercial frozen fruit is IQF. Premium frozen fruit, picked and frozen at peak ripeness, is often better than fresh fruit. I carried that giant bowl to my station, mixed it with granulated sugar, cornstarch for thickening (flour can make the filling cloudy), lemon juice to brighten the flavor, and one spice (cinnamon, nutmeg or clove, depending on the fruit), and proceeded to fill and cover my pies with either a second crust or crumble topping kept in a giant vat in the freezer. I made six different types of fruit pies a day, each one identifiable by a different cookie-cutter opening in the center. We froze the pies and pulled them out, brushed the crusts (not the crumble) with cream, sprinkled sugar over the cream and baked them off as needed, so there was always a selection of freshly baked fruit pies. That's a lot of information, I know, if you don't plan on opening a bakery in the heart of a summer community where you might find yourself in need of 20 to 40 fruit pies to sell in a single day. But I might have taught you a few things in the telling: The first thing you need when making fruit pie is a good recipe for crust. There are many. The formula we used at that shop was 4 cups of flour to 3 sticks (1½ cups) of whatever fat one might want to use. This might have been at the time (maybe still!) the most expensive prepared food store on the planet. The pie was the secret 'deal.' It was half the price of a French tart. But the big difference between the two, I soon learned, was that the French tart (which I also made, once I got good) was made with butter and the pie was made with — get ready for it — margarine! 'It makes for a flakier crust,' Anna said, dismissing me when I asked her why, and walked away. I've used that formula in different combinations until recently. Now I use butter. Per Martha Stewart's ratio of flour and butter, I add a bit more and also the smallest amount of sugar. Per Nancy Silverton's pie dough recipe, I add some cream, which she does to add fat, flavor and color to the dough, along with the ice water, and double up on the salt. It's a good flaky dough, and easy to work with. The filling for fruit pies can be any ripe (or frozen!) spring or summer fruit, including strawberry rhubarb (yes, I know rhubarb is a vegetable), blueberry, mixed berry, sour cherry, peach, nectarines and plums (Italian prune plums are the best if you can find them), or a combination of any of the above. Anna wasn't big on mixing fruits, except when it came to berries, and I have followed her lead out of respect. But don't let that stop you. Here are two options for a mixed berry pie: a traditional round pie with a crunchy crumble top, and a slab pie, which is a relatively new invention, made in a sheet pan. It's easy to carry, has less filling for the amount of crust, and you can eat it with your hands. Think of it as a giant Pop-Tart. And who doesn't want to think about a giant Pop-Tart. For the filling, I cook the sugar first to make a caramel, which adds some depth of flavor, and then add the blackberries; I found that even after over an hour of baking, they didn't break down, and everyone I shared the pie with left whole blackberries on their plate. I add the cornstarch here too, as insurance to make certain the fruit filling sets. For both pies, I bake them on the lowest rack of the oven on a preheated baking sheet to ensure a browned, crisp bottom crust. Whatever shape your pie, whatever fruit you use and whether or not your fruit sets perfectly, pie is just good, wholesome deliciousness. Yes, making dough requires a bit of skill (everything you need to know is in these recipes), but the worst thing that can happen, really, is a messy pie that you end up eating from a bowl. And seriously, how bad would that be?
The Hill
18-06-2025
- The Hill
National parks will be free to enter on Thursday: Here's why
DENVER (KDVR) — Entrance fees to all 63 of the nation's national parks will be waived on Thursday as the National Park Service commemorates Juneteenth. The day is known by many names — Black Independence Day, Emancipation Day, Jubilee Day — but the reason to celebrate it remains the same throughout: Commemoration of the day that the last African Americans learned they were no longer enslaved people. President Abraham Lincoln had already signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which became official as of Jan. 1, 1863, but African-descended people in Galveston, Texas, learned of the proclamation years later on June 19, 1865 — when a Union general led soldiers into town with the news that the Civil War was over and enslaved people were free. In light of the holiday, fees to enter all national parks in the U.S. will be waived. Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021 with legislation signed by former President Biden. 'All Americans can feel the power of this day, and learn from our history,' said at the time. It was the first new national holiday in nearly 40 years, the New York Times reported, since Martin Luther King's birthday became a holiday in 1983.
