Feature Writing

The Long Chase Home

Winner of the Best Magazine Feature Writing award at the 2015 Great Plains Journalism Awards

Racing east on Interstate 40 as fast as the law and the weather will allow, Eric Hopkins calls his wife a second time. His end of the conversation goes something like this: Honey, you and Brittany need to take cover right now. There is a debris ball on the radar. It’s a tornado. He doesn’t have to tell her we’re heading right for it. She already knows.

From the passenger seat, Michael Hook, aka the Weather Ninja, a veteran storm chaser and leader of this two-man storm-chasing team, tweets again to his 9,000-plus followers that anyone in Maumelle, North Little Rock and Mayflower needs to take cover immediately. Then he, too, pulls out his cell and starts calling loved ones near the tornado’s path to give them the same warning.

After just over 1,000 fruitless miles and 40 hours of chasing storms out and back across the Oklahoma plains, we’ve finally come home to Arkansas, but for all the wrong reasons. A precious handful of minutes earlier, right around 7:06 p.m. on April 27, a tornado touched down 5.4 miles west of Ferndale in western Pulaski County. Just shy of an hour from now, that funnel cloud will dissipate into the gray evening sky. But between now and then, 15 people will lose their lives.

When Will The Water Run Out?

Nearly half a million homes in the Centennial State could be without water by 2050. Colorado River reservoir levels are in a free fall. And local farmers already don’t have the supplies they need. What happens next depends on what we do today.

What’s even more alarming is that, in many ways, the future is already here. This past June, the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Colorado River through a network of reservoirs, announced that the seven states in the Colorado River Basin had 60 days to devise a plan to reduce the amount of river water they use annually by two to four million acre feet, as much as a third of the waterway’s annual flow. The proposed reduction is meant to save Lake Mead and Lake Powell from dead pool, the point at which the reservoirs become so low that water can no longer flow through their dams, drastically reducing water supplies for millions in the Southwest. After the states failed to meet that deadline, another was set for January 31. Six states managed to agree on a proposal that fell half a million acre feet short of the minimum. Add in California’s refusal to sign, and it’s likely the federal government will have to take unilateral action. This discord only adds to the sense among experts that we’ve entered a new era for water in much of the West.

Tunnel Vision

Fifty-one years after the first bore opened, the tunnels are undergoing the largest overhaul in their history. The upgrades will be significant—but will they be enough to keep the critical east-west passage open for decades to come?

“This mountain changes every day. Everything changes year to year, season to season,” says Fox, a stout man with a trim goatee and an easy laugh. “But you can’t change it in any way. You just have to work with it.”

Then, as if to prove him right, a CDOT communications manager calls Fox, but the cell reception is so poor the connection doesn’t go through. At nearly the same time, Stacia Sellers, another CDOT communications manager who’s organized this excursion, gets a text from Denver7 News asking why the tunnels are shut down. Short traffic holds such as the one they’ve enacted today are common enough that Fox usually doesn’t even notify his bosses about them, much less the media. To get a text now probably means something has gone wrong at the East Portal. We won’t know until we get back to the light

Inside the Raucous, Fiery, and Little-Known World of Mountain Town Hockey

How a Denver venture capitalist founded a top-level amateur hockey team so he’d always have a place to play—and took 22 of his teammates along for the ride.

Batenburg stopped trying to score before the first period was over (blowouts are usually bad for business, and he knows that tomorrow’s crowd will likely be half the size of tonight’s), but the team’s owner can only suppress his competitive drive so much. Over the past few years, Batenburg has been so focused on building the family business and running the Vipers that he wasn’t on the ice as much as he wanted. “When I don’t skate, I get in a funk,” he says. “It’s such a slow decline that you don’t really notice it.” Recently, he’s been trying to spend more time on the ice. Not only has his play improved, but his mental health has rebounded, too. “This year, it’s as if there’s been a renewal in me,” he says. He ends the game against the Roughnecks with nine assists in a 17-1 Vipers win.

Despite the score, the crowd barely thins before the final whistle. Fans line the Vipers’ route back to the locker room to congratulate the players. But the community’s support, as welcome as it is, is just a bonus. At one point, many of the Vipers had stopped competing only to later realize they’d given up one of the most important things in their lives. “For decades, we all had the trust and companionship and closeness of a team that’s battling together,” Batenburg says, “and then one day that was gone.” Now, they have it back.

There’s a New Commercial Space Race Happening, and Colorado Wants to Win It

Private aerospace companies are trying to mold a modern orbital ecosystem driven as much by profits as it is by exploration. Already home to the nation’s second-largest commercial space economy, the Centennial State is a major launch pad in more ways than one.

When Vicky Lea started as director of aerospace and aviation for the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation (EDC) more than a decade ago, she was tasked with growing the city’s—and, by extension, the state’s—aerospace economy. It seemed like an easy enough gig. After all, the state was already home to major space defense installations, massive corporations competing for NASA contracts, and universities with storied histories of extraterrestrial research. The Space Foundation in Colorado Springs had even been hosting the annual Space Symposium, one of the largest gatherings of industry professionals in the world, since 1984. But when she headed to that event to promote the state as a significant aerospace center, the most common reaction she got from attendees from outside of Colorado was puzzlement. “The recognition just wasn’t there,” she says. Fast-forward to the most recent symposium, and things have changed dramatically. Lea says the new message from conferencegoers is this: We are considering relocating our business, and we’ve been told that Colorado is where we should be looking.