The Delta Egyptian Theater is planning a daylong celebration of filmmaking and filmmakers from across the Western Slope. T

Dave Frank resigned from Montrose City Council on Tuesday, siting stress and conflict among councilors. The resignation comes amid tensions over proposed city charter changes.

Had Donald Trump been president in 1973, when Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into federal law, the Gunnison sage-grouse would be extinct. Close to 90 percent of all Gunnison sage-grouse remaining on the planet are in the Gunnison River Basin of west-central Colorado. The rest are in Utah. They’ve been extirpated from Arizona and New Mexico.The species is critically endangered in fact, if not by official decree. It is protected by the Act as just “threatened” because the Interior Department lost a lawsuit brought by Gunnison County, the states of Utah and Colorado, and ranching, livestock and energy-development interests.

We all tell stories of how ourselves, others or the world should or should not be. When we look at the energy behind these shoulds, we find a lot of judgment. These shoulds compare an ideal image or perception to what reality is and we often perceive the actual reality as being less desired.

The Montrose County School Board has announced that Superintendent Dr. Carrie Stephenson resigned, at their request.

Local playwright and director Marty Durlin is bringing a new musical theater experiment, “Outspoken,” to the Blue Sage Center for the Arts in Paonia. The piece explores nearly 200 years of activism through the stories and words of five women: Lucy Stone, Kate Richards O’Hare, Emma Goldman, Judi Bari and Greta Thunberg.

Sweitzer Lake State Park is undergoing a massive redevelopment and expansion project that will bring overnight camping back to the park for the first time since 1981. Recent land purchases have allowed the park to triple in size from around 200 acres to 600 acres.

“Make this your worst draft.” That’s what Craig Childs will often say to students when they first sit down to write. “We’re creating stuff out of nowhere, so we’re lucky to get a word down on a page. We’re exploring options.” In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with the popular creative non-fiction author about his own unusual path to a writing career. Our conversation includes:How to invite intuition and surprise into your writing,How teaching writing changes and enhances our understanding of our own process,How a thesaurus, used unconventionally, can be a great tool for when you’re stuck,Creative ways to take words from a page and bring them to life,And how a journaling practice helps inform a writing practice.Craig will be a keynote speaker at the 2026 Grand Mesa Writers’s Symposium in Cedaredge on September 11-13.CRAIG CHILDS is an explorer who brings tales of deserts and ice caps to the page. He has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including The Secret Knowledge of Water, Atlas of a Lost World, Stone Desert, Virga & Bone, Tracing Time, and The Wild Dark. His books have won numerous honors including the Reading the West Book Award, Southwest Book of the Year, a Foreword INDIES medal, and the Orion Book Award. His nonfiction narratives and journalism have appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, High Country News, The New York Times, The Sun, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and Radiolab. He blogs at Last Word On Nothing. Childs lives in southwest Colorado.

I drove to the bluff overlooking the “Gunny” to process the sad news — news that hasn’t yet been made official — that by October a big portion of the lower Gunnison River in western Colorado will be dry. The official term is “fully dewatered.”Monsoons were supposed to be heavy this year. As I looked down at the river in late August, clouds in the distance appeared almost monsoonal. Wisps of rain streamed out, but they evaporated before reaching the parched ground. It just about made me cry.Below me, the North Fork of the Gunnison unceremoniously trickled into the Gunnison River at a place known as Pleasure Park, a weather-beaten outpost of civilization that’s one of the last best-kept secrets in Colorado.