On April 6, three of us set out from Lakewood — me, my 23-year-old son Ryan and 85-year-old mother, Mary — toward Oklahoma, near the Texas and Arkansas borders. We hoped to be in the path of totality, but were fully aware that the weather could thwart our goal. We were willing to risk it. We had other reasons for the trip.

Mom grew up in Healdton, Okla., a small town just west of the path that, incidentally, is the birthplace of the late “Golden Girls” TV star Rue McClanahan (who, also incidentally, lost a baby beauty contest to my Aunt Susie in the 1930s). Mom hadn’t been to this part of her home state in 60 years or so and has fond memories of Girl Scout camp near the Red River as a young tomboy nicknamed Missy.

Who knew if we’d ever have this chance again?

En route to the eclipse, we were chasing nostalgia, looking to experience Oklahoma through mom’s eyes, prompting her to reminisce, and determined to have our fill of Arbuckle Mountain’s Original Fried Pies. (They can now be found in Arkansas, Kansas and Texas as well, but we were aiming for the flagship shop in Davis, Okla.)

We were keeping the itinerary “loose,” travel-speak for “we didn’t plan the specifics of our trip well enough in advance.” The only hotel room we had booked was 96 miles west of our eclipse-watching destination of Idabel, Okla. We couldn’t find anything closer, but didn’t much care.

After all, committing to a five-day, 1,900-mile round-trip through Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico for a four-minute experience that won’t happen again within the United States for another 20 years is an act of optimism, and perhaps faith. Especially if the clouds refused to cooperate on April 8.

Let the adventure begin.

High hopes from the get-go

My car — a bright yellow Kia with license plates that by chance begin with the letters ECLP — was stocked with snacks (including four flavors of Moon Pies), our eclipse-viewing sunglasses, and a pack of toilet paper. (I had seen all the doomsday predictions about limited port-o-potties and local restaurants and gas stations running out as the roving millions invaded the path of totality like so many locusts.)

We weren’t even out of Colorado before we stopped, finding a charming coffee shop in Ordway, The Sand Cherry, along Main Street. I went a little tourist crazy, buying pastries, coffee, locally made jars of jam and homemade salsa, and some earrings.

It was starting to feel like a vacation.

Not long after, billboards began to sprout up along US 50 in Kansas: large, hand-written messages with “Jesus” and “God Is Real” on them. Here, the eclipse felt more like a wink from the Creator than an event scientifically studied and brought live to a television audience by NASA cameras and commentators.

Traveling Gen Z-style

Eschewing the finicky Google maps, Ryan brought an oversized Rand McNally road atlas to chart our journey and find routes other than the interstates we feared would be packed with eclipse-chasers and semi-trucks. This throwback approach rewarded us with well-paved but sparsely populated country roads from town to town showcasing gorgeous agricultural vistas and flocks of starlings moving in murmuration.

He also provided the soundtrack of eclectic music from the 1940s to the 1980s, contemporary alt, and upbeat Mexican pop music. Mom and I approved.

The occasional remains of an armadillo or raccoon that failed to make it across the road alive made us sad but also reassured us that those wild creatures are still out there. Ryan longed to see a pronghorn and I hoped to spot a fox or two.

When we reached Dodge City, Kan., we decided to stay at the Best Western North Edge Inn, where metal palm trees adorned a small swimming pool out front. We were delighted to discover the real trees surrounding the parking lot were a bird haven. Ryan’s Merlin Bird ID app recorded the chorus singing outside our room and came up with a list of nine: American goldfinch, blue jay, Eurasian collared-dove, European starling, great-tailed grackle, house finch, Mississippi kite, mourning dove and Western meadowlark.

We later spotted bright red cardinals whistling their distinctive calls, circling vultures, and white cattle-egrets living the dream near a fetching pond in a wildflower-speckled meadow that was spotted with cows.

The next morning, we headed for Oklahoma City and arrived just in time for burgers, beers and big screens streaming the NCAA Women’s College Basketball Finals. Watching Caitlin Clark’s dream of leading Iowa to a win over undefeated South Carolina slip away somehow seemed a bad omen for our hopes of a win over April showers. So irrational.

Nearly there

We arrived in Choctaw Nation on the eve of the eclipse just after sunset, content from a stop for a dozen fried pies with sweet fillings like cherry and pumpkin. A casino lit our way to a rather dismal hotel in Durant, but we toughed it out. We planned to check out early anyway, fearing a traffic jam of eclipse watchers would prevent us from reaching our goal.

The increase in humidity was noticeable the next morning as we rolled onto US-70 East. The slowdown we expected never developed, and we were treated to a lovely sunrise. Ninety minutes later, we found ourselves in Idabel, ahead of schedule and with six hours to kill before the eclipse. Clouds were building; we were willing them to take their time.

To my disappointment, the Museum of the Red River was closed. (I had hoped to see the Acrocanthosaurus exhibit and learn about Oklahoma’s state dinosaur.) We stopped at Accent Coffee Company, where baristas said they had served visitors from as far away as Hawaii in recent days. At a nearby T-shirt stand selling eclipse-themed merchandise, the excited proprietors mentioned meeting a guy from Germany who was a global eclipse chaser.

We looked up at the gray skies and hoped the German knew something we didn’t.

A nature hike seemed a good way to pass the time so off we went to Beavers Bend, a state park that skirts the shores of nearby Broken Bow Lake. I saw my first loblolly pine with its shingled bark; Ryan spotted a dead crayfish in a clear brook, which caused him to slip on a mossy rock into the water; and Mom took a minor tumble on the trail but luckily got back up unscathed.

By 11:30, about an hour before the eclipse would begin, we were feeling antsy so headed back toward Idabel and stopped for a quick lunch at The Oaks Steakhouse in Broken Bow. Several tables were filled with uniformed state police and local sheriffs’ officers. They were in good humor but wearing bulletproof jackets and checking their watches.

With the celestial event near, we decided the field behind the restaurant seemed an ideal place for viewing. As the minutes passed, the clouds thinned and thickened, teasing us with momentary glimpses of blue sky.

Family members in Colorado and Washington state began texting updates from their televised views starting in Mexico and moving up through Texas. We were about three minutes behind Dallas by this measure and the few clusters of people who had also parked and pulled out picnic blankets and unfolded camping chairs nearby began to settle down, don protective glasses and look up.

The big event

I fidgeted with my iPhone and attempted to use a device made to simultaneously look through one lens and take photos and videos through another side-by-side. I couldn’t get it to work and soon abandoned the clumsy thing.

Mercifully, the clouds continued to blow by. Car traffic stopped, a few airplanes buzzed overhead, and all birds but one obnoxious blue jay stopped singing. The temperature dropped and the sunlight dimmed, street lights came on, and we oohed and aahed and felt fortunate and amazed and suddenly so clearly aware of sitting atop the crust of a spinning planet with an orbiting moon that miraculously appears to be the same size as the much larger star beaming at us from 93 million miles away.

Unlike partial solar eclipses where the moon scoops a semicircle out of the sun’s shape like two flat plates, it became visible as a dark, three-dimensional sphere. As it traveled right to left, we marveled at the “diamond ring effect” before the last piece of sunlight beamed outward, and then — BLINK! — a solitary speck of bright light burning at the bottom, possibly a solar flare, was visible. The rest was the sun’s radiant corona framing the dark moon.

Spontaneous applause and shouts went up around us, with one woman repeating “Oh my God!” over and over. We removed our glasses (it was now safe to do so) and observed two tiny red lights race past, one after the other: satellites in Earth’s orbit. We could see Jupiter and Venus glowing in the middle of the afternoon. It was astonishing how dark it became in the moon’s shadow.

We stared at that moon until the diamond ring reappeared, and rather than replacing our glasses and watching the rest of the eclipse, strangely felt that that was enough. We noted the return of the sun’s heat and saw the dimness lift, the street lights blink off, the birds start up again. Car engines signaled our collective pause had passed.

We three looked at each other with mutual awe and happiness and agreed the effect had been better than expected. That full solar eclipse, despite all the anticipation and explanation, was a sight that will live on in our memories.

It also left us with gratitude for each other, and the willingness we each had to give in to the adventure of it all.

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That’s a moment of excitement that will brand you for life.

Over three summer visits to the ranch with her older sister Kate, Wood amassed a collection of 18 bones from a dinosaur dating to the Late Jurassic period. Many trips to the library back home in Colorado Springs enabled the young detective to identify the bones she had unearthed as parts of a mighty Allosaurus. Elmer’s glue aided her attempts to put the puzzle back together. She stored the bones in shoe boxes beneath her bed and named the piecemeal creature “Alice.”

A few years later, Wood was finally able to get some of the fossils in front of a paleontologist. At age 16, she was hired to help excavate the rest of the remaining skeleton that had amazingly survived millions of years, encased in mudstone. Today, that toothy meat-eater is one of the most impressive specimens at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Kirk Johnson — who was lead scientist at DMNS for years and is now director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. — was so taken with the fact that a 12-year-old discovered and helped excavate the long-extinct predator that he made sure her story was featured in its exhibition and invited her back as a 28-year-old for the ribbon cutting.

Johnson and Wood have remained friends. He calls her an explorer by nature who will always be looking for the next adventure. But her first one will live in the annals of paleontology forever.

“It’s an epic story of the American West,” is how he describes Wood’s discovery near the Moffat County cattle ranch then managed by friends of her parents, the late Colorado writer-photographers Myron and Nancy Wood. Three Springs Ranch includes part of the fossiliferous Morrison Formation from around 150 million years ago — back when a bipedal creature with serrated teeth and three-clawed hands stood at the top of the food chain in what is now Colorado.

Wood, now 57, is living in Boulder and working on a coming-of-age memoir called “The Dinosaur’s Daughter.” She’s also writing about a more recent adventure that she has been speaking about to groups around the state: crisscrossing Colorado on foot.

But you don’t dig up a dinosaur and then just forget about it and move on with your life. “Her dinosaur always comes back to haunt her,” said Johnson. And the Allosaurus fossils were not the last she found. After moving to New England for college, Wood could not stop thinking about the site. So as a 19-year-old undergrad student, she persuaded Dartmouth College, the Carnegie Foundation and Shell Oil Company to fund a dig back at that same location because she sensed there was more to be found in Alice’s graveyard. She was right.

Wood’s field team uncovered bones of a pterosaur, an early mammal, as well as fish, crocodilians, lizards, turtles, frogs, salamanders, shrimp, clams, snails, ferns and horsetail plants. She then co-authored a paper with Harvard scientists about the findings, describing the ancient ecosystem. She believed there was much more to be found, but she went to grad school, got married and went into business as a marketer.

It would be decades before she would have the chance to be involved in another scientific expedition there.

Which brings us to last October. Wood’s 30-year marriage had just ended, and she was busy writing, speaking and searching for a publisher for her travel memoir about a pandemic-era nature quest she had undertaken. In 2020 and 2022, Wood hiked two 750-mile diagonals across Colorado in an X-shaped trek from corner to corner and corner to corner.

Wood’s personal narratives appeal to a broad range of groups, from the Rocky Mountain Map Society to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which held its annual meeting in Denver Feb. 15-17  and included a panel on fossils, in which India participated. (Her next talk will be before the Sterling Livestock Commission on Feb. 26.)

Along her hikes, Wood met rural landowners, photographed wild animals, and gained a sense of the water resource problem our state’s growing population faces. The experience left her both worried, informed and renewed. “People say, ‘Oh, my God, Colorado’s being loved to death,’ but in 98 percent of the state nobody goes there. Try walking an X across the state and see how many people you meet,” she said.

One of the diagonals led Wood back to the scene of her childhood dinosaur discovery. Three Springs Ranch, which was sold to new owners last year, is a place of refuge for Wood that appears mostly unchanged even as her interests and circumstances continue to evolve. Wood admits that her connection to that land is maybe the longest-lasting relationship of her life.

“I know it so well, and also know the history of the immigrant invasion that pushed out the Utes who used to live in the area,” Wood noted. She knows about hidden pictographs in a canyon and the stories of tough Colorado women who lived and died in that corner of the state bordering Utah and Wyoming. “That’s the other part of why I like it up there; the women didn’t take any crap.”

India Wood may not be a household name (even though it sounds as if it should be), but in American paleontology she is legendary. Which is why last fall, a group of researchers from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History invited her to join them back at the ranch, and on nearby Bureau of Land Management property. The group was there to search for micro-vertebrate fossils. They knew she could help.

The rugged landscape that lies about halfway between the tiny towns of Maybell and Dinosaur is known to scientists as the Wolf Creek Paleontological Site. The Peabody’s collection manager, Vanessa Rhue, was excited to have Wood on-site during their four-day field survey.

“It was an absolute delight to meet India; she has a long history with the outcrops,” Rhue said. “Her expertise was invaluable to understanding where they had done work in the past, to look at old field photographs and align with topography still present today.”

The team took rock samples back to Yale for micro-CT scanning. The technology allows them to see what’s inside the rock without damaging any tiny fossils. Rhue said the Allosaurus’s old quarry is covered by a lot of overburden that would take considerable time, money and personnel to remove. It remains to be determined whether they will seek permits for a proper dig. If they do, Wood will no doubt be there.

During that nearly 1,500-mile hike crisscrossing the state, Wood at times had companions, including one of her daughters. But much of the time Wood was on her own with no human distractions to keep her from seeing, smelling, hearing and feeling Colorado.

She can now speak authoritatively about drought and the shrinking prairies that are threatening Colorado’s wildlife.

“What possessed me? I needed it,” Wood said. “I felt like I had lost track of that Allosaurus-finding India. That inquisitive, curious, confident woman.”

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For more than 40 years, Lockley identified and mapped Jurassic and Cretaceous period tracksites in Colorado and everywhere they’ve been found. His insights substantially increased knowledge about dinosaur activities including courtship, parenting, migration and herding behaviors.

“I’ve asked other leading paleoichnologists about Martin’s influence and there’s no debate that he stood alone,” said Friends of Dinosaur Ridge (FODR) executive director Jeff Lamontagne. “As one colleague put it, Martin was the gold standard for identifying dinosaur tracks.”

Born in South Wales, Martin followed in the footsteps of his father, renowned ornithologist and prolific author Ronald Lockley. His father’s research and studies in natural science were a lifelong source of inspiration, as were several of Ronald Lockley’s famous friends, including Julian Huxley, Richard Adams and Sir David Attenborough.

Lockley moved to the U.S. to teach geology at the University of Colorado Denver in 1980 during the oil and gas boom. That was when and where his research on creatures from the Age of Dinosaurs began. It wasn’t long before his work began attracting professional attention and public excitement for the lesser-known branch of paleontology. Lockley was fond of pointing out that fossil bones don’t demonstrate how animals lived the way tracks do. He made the case in a 2022 TEDx Talk that has so far attracted more than a million views.

During his 30 years at UCD, Lockley traveled to hundreds of remote geological sites around North America, Asia, Europe, South America and East Africa. When he wasn’t in the field or teaching, he was an avid writer, publishing more than 600-plus  peer-reviewed articles, 1,000 papers, and 17 books. Lockley received numerous awards, including most recently the Korean Presidential Citation for Contribution to Cultural Heritage Protection in 2020. He was the first non-Korean to receive the award.

Lockley was driven in non-academic ways as well. In his youth, he was a star athlete and two-time winner of the All-England Schools championship in shot put. He never became an American citizen but chose to live in the Colorado foothills in a home he filled with souvenirs from a lifetime of world travels. He enjoyed the views and opportunities to hike outdoors almost daily.

In 1989, Lockley co-founded the nonprofit Friends of Dinosaur Ridge (FODR) to protect the iconic sloping tracksite on the hogback 20 miles west of Denver. He co-founded other nonprofits, research institutes and a Dinosaur Track Museum, and led efforts to establish UNESCO World Heritage sites to protect trackways in other countries. He also served as associate curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and was director of science at Moab Giants in Utah.

In 2021, Lockley and colleagues ranked the top 12 dinosaur tracksites in the United States. Dinosaur Ridge in Morrison was named No. 1 based on 16 criteria, including the number of tracks, the variety of species, and ease of accessibility for public visitation. It was Lockley’s hope that Dinosaur Ridge and the surrounding area would one day be designated a UNESCO Global Geopark.

The nonprofit that manages tours at Dinosaur Ridge will rename its Discovery Center building near Red Rocks Amphitheatre the Martin G. Lockley Discovery Center in tribute to his countless contributions. The organization is working on an exhibit to feature items from the scientist’s personal collection, including his charming drawings and field notes, on a rotating basis starting in spring 2024.

Lockley is survived by his children Peter Lockley (Emily) and Katie Lockley Weller (Spencer); four grandchildren, Graham, Aurelia, Isla and Daniel; his nephew Daniel Lockley (Liz) and grand-niece and nephew, Juniper and Asher Martin. He is also survived by his sister, Ann Mark, and his long-term partner, Gretchen Minney. He was preceded in death by his younger brother, Steven Lockley, and his parents, Ronald Lockley and Jill Stocker Lockley of the U.K.

The Lockley family has suggested that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to Friends of Dinosaur Ridge at dinoridge.org.

Kristen Kidd of Littleton is director of marketing and communications at Dinosaur Ridge. She was a Colorado Voices columnist in 2010.

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Those are the first questions people in Highlands Ranch are asking each other when meeting up nowadays, a few weeks after the wildest weather event anyone can remember experiencing in the suburb south of Denver.

The next discussion is likely about how to replace what has been destroyed, mostly the trees.

On that humid Thursday afternoon, Douglas County was hit by one of those wild Colorado storms that for tens of thousands of residents in Highlands Ranch is now an indelible life moment. Thankfully, no one was hurt by the technically small (EF-1 on the Enhanced Fujita scale) but destructive tornado on June 22. Very few actually saw the twister cloaked in sheets of rain and hail as it hit Northridge Elementary School and blasted across homes and businesses for more than 6 miles just south of C-470, from Lucent Boulevard to Quebec Street

But some doorbell cameras caught the action, like this one.

The tornado was powerful enough to destroy an estimated 16,000 mature trees along major parkways and residential yards. Douglas County Office of Emergency Management (OEM) is still assessing the damage in order to request a national disaster declaration that could provide funding for repairs. Countless homeowners are in the process of filing claims with their insurance companies and finding out what is and isn’t covered.

The soundtrack of summer now includes chainsaws and wood chippers.

Beyond the expense, many are lamenting the loss of so many large trees that created shade, privacy, bird habitats and seasonal beauty. For the community to be transformed in such a striking visual way in a matter of minutes has everyone processing a sense of shock, sadness, and relief that it wasn’t worse.

“We moved here from the Midwest nine years ago and we’ve never experienced a tornado before now,” said Jennifer Smith, who sheltered in her basement with their two daughters and their pets while her husband, Matt, peered cautiously out main floor windows. “The winds were blowing in all directions,” he said. “It felt like you were inside a washing machine.

Luckily, the couple didn’t lose any of their own trees, but said a large aspen across the street was knocked over. They spent July 1 making trips to the Eastridge Recreation Center parking lot to shovel fresh mulch into buckets and cardboard boxes for xeriscaping their yard. Mountains of chipped trees are piled up in several locations around town, including near the post office on Quebec and University. Residents are being encouraged to take as much as they would like.

“We also took one of those large stumps for the garden,” Smith said pointing to a pile of pine trees that had been sliced into sections like large souvenirs, each revealing inner rings numbering more than 30. And the air around Highlands Ranch is perfumed with the pungent smell of pine sap.

Longtime local plant nursery The Gardens has been doing brisk business since the storm. Staffer Kate Kator was at work when the tornado warning blared on the smartphones of everyone inside the store. Some customers rushed to their cars and drove home, while others chose to wait it out with the employees. Kator says within 10 minutes, dark clouds were overhead soon followed by rain and hail blasting in first from west to east, then from east to west.

“One of our gazebos flew up into the trees and portions of the greenhouse and main store roofs were torn off,” she said. “Some of our fencing blew over and the greenhouse flooded.”

A large Scotch Pine just outside their gate blew down, but the next day they were able to prop it back up into place because the rootball was intact. “We’re advising our customers that phosphorous can help trees re-root, and nitrogen will help them grow. A lot of people are coming in asking for replacement trees. We don’t sell large trees, and right now we are just getting in small shrubs that we ordered weeks ago.

“People are buying annuals to replace the flowers they lost, but a lot of people are sad about their shade trees. One customer did say she’s gained a lot of extra space in her yard for the kids to play in now.”

A few years ago, the Colorado State Forest Service came out with recommendations for homeowners along the Front Range who want fast-growing trees.

The blue spruce was listed high up, along with silver maples, white oak varietals and catalpa trees, which are known for their white fragrant flower clusters and heart-shaped leaves. These could become the next generation of popular trees in Highlands Ranch.

“This storm affected more of our evergreen trees than the deciduous varieties,” noted Kator. “Those had broken branches, but the evergreens have more shallow roots and were uprooted by the winds. In Highlands Ranch, we have hard-packed soil once you get past the layer of clay, so it’s hard for roots to go deep.”

Kator said people can plant trees between March and October in Colorado as long as they are well watered for the first couple weeks to get them established. She expects the demand to be extremely high for trees like the flowering crabapples.

Kator noted The Gardens owners Steve and Michelle Smith opened their business in 1997 when Highlands Ranch had many fewer (and smaller) trees. Newcomers don’t know there was a time when the now-mature trees along the greenbelts, parks and subdivisions in the community were just saplings.

Gary Debus served as community manager of Highlands Ranch for 20 years starting in 1991. He recalls the rolling grasslands, where pronghorn and prairie dogs lived. “When Highlands Ranch began in 1981 with the first house, there were very few trees and those that were on the Ranch were native types along with some small native shrubs. Grasslands covered most of the development area.”

Debus said, “Landscape architects developed the parkway plantings and commercial areas that added aesthetics. As new homes were built and sold, homeowners started completing their own landscapes. It was very easy to tell where the newest areas were. Critics dubbed us a ‘sea of rooftops.’ But Highlands Ranch was soon designated a Tree City USA.”

Charla Kelly specializes in helping people buy and sell homes here. She lives close to the community’s original Mansion, which lost numerous large trees in the storm. She said it’s sad, but people have been outside talking with each other more.

“Neighbors have been helping each other,” she said. “People with trucks have been transporting branches to the drop-off sites.”

Kelly hopes those looking to plant new trees in their yards will remember to contact Colorado 811 before doing any digging and potentially hitting buried power lines. It’s the reason no one lost power during the storm, but it’s easy to forget that and start shoveling. Homeowners can go online to request their lines be located and flagged at https://www.colorado811.org/ or just call 811.

Dave and Laura Mutton have lived in their Highlands Ranch home for 21 years. They lost a tree that was planted by the previous owners but had grown to have special meaning for their family. This was the tree where they took annual back-to-school photos of their children from kindergarten through 12th grade. The kids are now out of the nest, and the tree that appears in so many cherished photos is also gone. Their daughter, Julia, was the one who mentioned the photos that feature her and her brother Andrew smiling and hanging on to a limb, even hugging the tree that was like part of their family as they themselves grew each year.

That kind of tree can never be replaced.

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Lighthouse Writers Workshop grew beyond their wildest ambitions and has succeeded in putting the Mile High City on America’s literary map. Not only do they now have a newly-constructed dream space with 15 employees and 1,500 members, but they’ve also built an annual pilgrimage for established and would-be authors.

Lit Fest, which ends June 16, has become a beacon for thousands of writers of all levels and genres. The event features eight days of writing workshops, seminars, panel discussions, networking opportunities, and celebrations of the written word, both in-person and virtually. And this year’s festival has coincided with the grand opening of Lighthouse’s shiny new headquarters, ta 3844 York St., on what had been an empty lot in northeast Denver.

Dupree and Henry are in the happily-ever-after days. What began in their living room systematically outgrew more than half a dozen artsy but problematic locations around Denver over the past 25 years. With each move, Lighthouse attracted more collaborators and talent until the COVID-19 pandemic brought unexpected good fortune. The shift to virtual teaching vastly expanded its reach and led to a game-changing grant.

Last year, Colorado Creative Industries awarded Lighthouse Writers Workshop $2.4 million to construct an 11,000-square-foot building dedicated to housing the literary arts. Those American Rescue Plan funds materialized like manna. “The timing was perfect for us. This building wouldn’t have happened without the grant,” Dupree allowed.

Architect Collin Kemberlin, known for redesigns of Denver Union Station, History Colorado Center and other stylish landmarks, fashioned the newly finished Lighthouse building to complement its red-brick surroundings in the historic York Street Yards complex at 38th and York Street, with an emphasis on energy efficiency and ADA compliance.

Henry and Dupree are most proud of the three-story spiral staircase that mimics the inside of a lighthouse, and a large classroom named for the late Denver Poet Laureate Chris Ransick, whose widow donated Ransick’s collection of poetry books for display and inspiration.

“Chris was a beloved teacher here. Mayor (John) Hickenlooper appointed him as poet laureate, and he was a big supporter of the literary arts,” Henry said. Ransick taught courses at Lighthouse for years in its previous iterations.

In the new building, industrial-style metal bookshelves, high ceilings, a kitchen for coffee and catering, event spaces, classrooms with soundproofing and smart TVs are features that the Lighthouse community wanted. Accent walls in shades of Jordan almonds are like smooth, candy-coated backdrops for cushy couches and comfy chairs. A cozy salon with a fireplace and numerous west-facing windows with views of downtown Denver, the Front Range, and the neighboring Coca-Cola plant frame the setting that could effectuate the next great American novel, poem, sci-fi thriller, murder mystery or memoir.

“We’ve seen eight of our book project mentees sign book deals with major publishers like Penguin Random House. A novel and a nonfiction book were published in 2022, and a middle-grade novel and a nonfiction book and story collection will be out this year,” noted Lighthouse Marketing and communications manager Alexa Culshaw.

Regular teaching programs attract seasoned professionals like Denver Post film and theater critic Lisa Kennedy, who has both taken and taught Lighthouse courses. Kennedy attended an advanced course with Nadia Owusu, whose memoir “Aftershocks” was on Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year list. “That teacher was amazing, and I was happy with the mix of other students who contributed in a rich way. I felt served,” said Kennedy, who is working on her own life story.

Children and teenagers who love writing are especially welcomed at Lighthouse, where a large room featuring black-and-purple checkerboard carpeting, a throne-like chair, and an antique wardrobe that leads to a secret book nook are meant to stimulate imaginations. A troop of passionate instructors teach in the Young Writers Program, including Assetou Xango, a community activist born and raised in Colorado who served as poet laureate of Aurora from 2017 to 2019.

Aspiring adult wordsmiths are drawn to the menu of workshops. Boulderite India Wood has taken seven Lighthouse workshops and seminars to help shape projects including her first paid magazine article, “Going Diagonal” for Colorado Life magazine. “Erika Krouse’s novel and short story workshop taught me practical creative writing tools. Joel Warner’s nonfiction workshop taught me a disciplined journalist’s approach to books and articles along with a creative spark,” Wood said.

“Now that they have this great new home, the question is will the appetite of the community support 365 days a year of literary programming? Will enough people have an insatiable passion to spend the money on courses?” Kennedy wonders if the hybrid teaching model of virtual and in-person will continue to draw students from other parts of Colorado and beyond. “Lit Fest is buzzy, which is helpful.”

The regional festival continues to attract top authors like Katie Kitamura, whose most recent novel “Intimacies” was named one of The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2021, and Rebecca Makkai, whose novel “The Great Believers” was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist.

Lighthouse Writers Workshop, 3844 York St., Denver;  303-297-1185; lighthousewriters.org.

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So it was on a lark that we decided to drive from our Denver area homes to Hays, Kan., for the second annual Lek Treks Prairie Chicken Festival put on by Audubon of Kansas (AOK) in mid-April.

Yet we (and other birdwatchers we met) didn’t fully grasp what we were in for. We thought a Prairie Chicken Festival sounded amusing and novel. It was that, but also a physically challenging and politically troubling experience for the uninitiated.

Mom and I arrived without many useful things, including the wisdom of experience. For example, we had no spotting scope; no American Birding Association “life list” to track the birds we’ve seen in our lifetimes; no eBird or Merlin mobile apps loaded onto our phones; no pricey cameras with zoom lenses like portable Webb Space Telescopes slung across our shoulders. Our clothes were not nearly warm enough.

We started off by getting battered by wind during the five-hour drive from Denver on Interstate 70. Those we met who had traveled from Missouri, Texas, Arkansas, Massachusetts and New York reported the same astonishment over the intensity of Kansas wind. On the road, we passed countless towering white wind turbines churning above grassy fields. Kansas seems an obvious place for these energy generators, but their presence is a colossal source of concern for those worried about migrating and sensitive ground-dwelling birds.

In Hays, the Best Western was headquarters for the 130 people registered for the festival, 40 more than the inaugural year’s list, we discovered. Inside the lobby, it was immediately obvious who among us was serious and who didn’t know what the hell they were doing. True birders pegged us in a microsecond as being clueless schlubs. But they were once like us, so they were tolerant if not friendly. Besides, ornithologists were there to keep them honest.

A lesson in birding, geology

Over the next three days, we attended various outings, like a birdwatching walk with Dr. Medhavi Ambardar, a delightful professor from Fort Hays State University. Because Ambardar had a science class to teach at 8:30 a.m., we set out just before sunrise to spot as many avian species as we could in 90 minutes on a nature trail near the charming Sternberg Museum of Natural History.

With us was native son Dean Stramel — a former KSU science professor who now teaches classes at Fort Hays State University — whose family goes way back in Hays, including several named on impressively large tombstones in the city cemetery. Stramel provided a backstory about Hays and later led us to a residential park where dozens of turkey vultures perched in tall trees. He knows their routine, and all the great birdwatching spots in Hays as well.

This gentle beginning gave us the impression we would be enjoying mild excursions in pleasant temperatures mere minutes from the hotel. (As in, “Look! It’s a red-bellied woodpecker snickering in the treetops.”)

We were wrong.

“I tell my students it’s like they told a joke and they’re laughing at the joke and the laughter goes on far too long,”  Ambardar remarked.

That first day, we approached a spring-fed pond and heard the “tea kettle tea kettle tea kettle” call of a Carolina wren. James Swim, a birder from Arkansas, commented on how folks often confuse Carolina chickadees with black-capped chickadees. A conversation ensued about juvenile bald eagles looking like golden eagles, and birds identified as purple finches likely being just red house finches. (“Hey, look, there’s a cowbird! By the way, it’s tick season so check yourselves.”)

We also took a tour of the Kansas Badlands led by rugged geologist Rex Buchanan, director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey. With cold winds gusting, we explored outcrops of eroded Niobrara Chalk that have been the source of spectacular marine fossil finds from the Late Cretaceous. We also took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, where a tray of dead prairie chickens was pulled out for our inspection.

A wake-up call

That evening, we attend Trivia Night featuring some silly birds-in-pop-culture questions along with scientific ones that were way out of our league. Lucky for us, our team included 15-year-old Molly Morford from Lenexa, Kan.

Morford has a large collection of illustrated bird books at home. She can tell a vesper sparrow from a fox sparrow, enjoys setting up wooden boxes for eastern bluebirds in her neighborhood park, and is one of about 100 students in the Olathe Public Schools who got into a special Animal Health Academy. She’s thinking of going to Kansas State or Cornell. “I’ve heard people say birdwatching is an old person thing, and that makes me sad.”

Her mother, Megan, stumbled across the event online and signed them up. “There are a lot of people not my age here,” Molly said, glancing at my 84-year-old mother. Certainly, we saw no one else wearing leopard print yoga pants or green-banded braces either. (Lots of silver hair at the welcome night gathering to be sure.)

That evening, we learned from Native American spirit dancer Dennis Rogers that Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach had just joined Texas and Oklahoma in suing the federal government over the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service upgrading the lesser prairie chicken’s status from threatened to endangered. The lawsuit claims the designation violates property rights and seriously impacts plans for new oil wells, ranching operations and wind farms. Kobach wants the feds to stay out of it and allow states to decide how to manage the situation.

The federal government divides lesser prairie chickens into two distinct population segments (DPS); the Southern DPS is now listed as endangered and the Northern DPS is listed as threatened. Southeastern Colorado is home to the Northern DPS, where landowners and land managers have greater flexibility with land use than states where the Southern DPS prairie-chickens live.

But more than 95% of U.S. tall grass prairie has been developed, and because birds like prairie chickens don’t migrate, their shrinking habitat, exacerbated by ongoing drought, is causing their numbers to nosedive, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

“There’s a lot of bad press about prairie chickens in Kansas and I want to be able to (provided) the opportunity of going to a lek and witnessing something that connects us to the grasslands, to our history, to our future,” said AOK executive director Jackie Augustine. With more than 5,000 hours logged studying greater and lesser prairie chickens on their native turf, Augustine has possibly spent more time at leks (places where male birds put on a display during courtship rituals) than anyone.

“A lot of my research is focused on what makes male prairie chickens sexy,” Augustine said. It was those elaborate displays that drew all of us to Hays for the chance to observe an ancient animal practice.

The birders

On the third and final morning of our odyssey into the declining world of the birds that once numbered in the millions, we rise at 3 a.m. (with the admonishment to not drink coffee because there are no bathrooms on the leks). Dozens of us climb into rented vans for the hour-long drive to secret locations on private plots where landowners have granted us access.

“I have observed that overall numbers of birds have dropped by half compared to last year,” Augustine said. “Two leks we used last year couldn’t be used this year because they only contain two or three birds. Of the six leks I studied last year, only one increased in size, and this is the one. There were 19 males and seven females here yesterday.”

Driving over dirt roads to our destination, I realize that our bleary-eyed flock has its own pecking order. Sitting shotgun is Alec Humann from Buffalo, N.Y., whose favorite bird is the whimbrel. “I like all the curlews but whimbrels have a fascinating migration route. I also band hawks in New Jersey in the fall. This is my first trip to Kansas to see the greater and lesser prairie chickens. It’s a trip I’ve wanted to go on for decades.”

Thomas Riley of Buffalo tagged along, “So I could get my prairie chicken ‘lifers.’ My favorite bird is the red-headed woodpecker.”

Tanya and Gary Spence traveled from West Texas, and have been birding for about 30 years. Her favorite bird is the chickadee; his, he says, is whatever he’s currently looking at. “Most of our vacations are around what birds can we see,” Spence said. “We’ve been taking more trips to see birds now that our kids are grown, having little expeditions and enjoying just the two of us.”

My mom, Mary, who lives in Lakewood, says the Western tanager is her favorite. They turn to me, expectantly. I say mine is the black-billed magpie, the first bird I ever recall noticing and thinking was a parrot. That gets a laugh. (Hey, I was 3 years old.)

Julia Givens from New Jersey now lives just outside Boston with Dan O’Brien. “I’m a fair-weather birder,” she said, adding that her favorite is the cedar waxwing. “Love summer birding and beach-combing.” O’Brien says the common grackle is what hooked him.

The big day

As we approach our destination, a pair of black-tailed jackrabbits scamper into the headlights, almost leading us to our stop. We park and clamber over a barbed wire fence into a pasture dotted with dry cow patties. Nearby, a pack of unseen coyotes yip and howl, perhaps at the crescent moon rising, blood orange, just above the flat horizon. Overhead constellations appear as fuzzy white blotches watercolored onto the inky black sky. The Milky Way is postured for admiration, but a biting, frigid wind urges us to hurry and erect the camouflaged blinds that we will huddle in for the next four hours.

#LesserPrairieChicken putting on an impressive show for the ladies! Sadly these wild birds are rapidly losing their native habitat and have been listed as an #endangeredspecies The #PrairieChickenFestival put on by the @audubonofkansas is meant to raise awareness. pic.twitter.com/tqkBobzhgT

— Kristen Kidd (@kiddstories) April 17, 2023

Our group divides into three side-by-side blinds. We sit on camp chairs, wrapped in blankets, awaiting the show. The temperature isn’t cold enough to see our breaths, but high humidity and a windchill factor ensure it is punishing to remove a glove and aim a camera barehanded for longer than a minute. My nose and toes go numb. I worry about how my mom is doing as she hides all but her eyes behind a blanket.

At 6:50, Augustine orders us all to be quiet. Within minutes, a dreamlike noise starts up, growing in volume. It’s like a Hollywood movie sound effect: an echoey, bouncy bwopping chorus, cartoonish like rubbery bubbles popping. The sounds, punctuated by rooster-like cackles, come closer and closer in the dark. We strain to see shapes moving on the ground before us.

The sun rises slowly behind our blinds, casting long shadows across the lek where 18 males and 16 females have converged. In Swedish, the word “lek” is a verb that means “to dance or play.” It’s fitting, although there is also fighting. Males square off, leaping and running at each other.

“The males stomp their feet like 20 times a second,” Augustine had said while describing a lek. “While doing that, the wings spread out and the tails go up, the pinnae up, these are feathers behind the head. The whole thing culminates in a pop vocalization, and air sacs inflate at the same time, helping project that vocalization.

“The air sacs are bright reddish magenta because they are lesser prairie chickens. If they were greater, it would be orange. Lesser prairie chickens also have huge yellow combs above their eyes. They’re fleshy and they engorge with blood and get really big when they’re excited.”

The instinctual performance is comical and fascinating to view from our hidden perches. Almost robotic, like wind-up toys.

Heading home

Chickens are most closely related to dinosaurs, which went extinct about 66 million years ago following a catastrophic asteroid collision with the Earth. On Dinosaur Ridge in Morrison (and other ancient sites), paleontologists have studied marks in Cretaceous sandstone made by the three-toed claws of theropods scraping left and right on a prehistoric lek. Dinosaurs performed courtship rituals, too.

At that time, a vast inland sea covered what is now Colorado, Kansas, Utah, Texas and Wyoming. As the North American continent uplifted, the seaway drained, leaving what would eventually become fertile grasslands where the surviving descendants of dinosaurs and many mammals including bison thrived. The remains of marine animals buried below became people’s fossil fuels.

Before European settlers arrived, Native American tribes lived and hunted here. Business-savvy settlers commercialized the prairie chickens and shipped them east for food by the hundreds of thousands. “We have fewer than 30,000 lesser prairie chickens left” in the U.S., Augustine noted. “I feel (that by) coming and sitting on a prairie chicken lek, you still have a piece of that history left. And I’m just so worried that we’re going to lose it.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, an Oklahoma festival that focused on lesser prairie chickens shut down. When organizers thought about restarting it, there weren’t enough birds left to guarantee people would see them.

At the time, Augustine was new in her role but didn’t hesitate to act. “I was like, ‘Well, OK, this is the time to start it here then.’ And the Oklahoma Audubon Council was so helpful. That first festival we got a lot of people who were planning to go to Oklahoma but then they came to Kansas because we had the opportunity and they didn’t.

“I felt so privileged being able to study these birds. My second date with my husband was at a prairie chicken lek.”

That evening, our drive home was less windy, and our minds less settled. At her door mom summed it up, “We probably won’t look at birds the same way anymore will we?” I don’t know how anyone who had this experience could. And now we too will worry that our photographs and memories might outlive this priceless species.

Kristen Kidd of Littleton is the communications director at Dinosaur Ridge, part of the Morrison-Golden National Natural Landmark. 

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Eggers’ most recent book appears to be a throwback to the days when books were our most treasured possessions: tangible entertainment in the form of beloved stories, memorable characters, settings that enchanted us, stylish writing that rewarded us for being bookish.

The accomplished author (“Zeitoun,” “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” “The Circle”) and artist — who has his own publishing house, McSweeney’s, as well as a nonprofit youth writing center, 826 Valencia — has become an influencer in an intentionally non-social-media manner. As a 53-year-old husband and father of two teenagers, Eggers is interested in creating experiences for readers of all ages, while helping young writers develop skills that are fully human in this time of ChatGPT.

His newest novel, “The Eyes and The Impossible,” simply looks unlike anything else on a contemporary bookshelf. A bamboo hardcover laser cut to create the fringe of a forest framing a golden meadow where an unleashed canine bounds joyfully sets the tone. The pages have rounded corners and gilded edges. (Who does this in 2023?) At an inch thick and with child-holdable dimensions of 8-by-6 1/2 inches, Eggers describes the book as “heavy in the hand.” That’s the feel he wanted after spotting a fancy bamboo greeting card in a post office lobby.

“I’ve been publishing for 25 years now, and I’m always looking for new techniques or resurrections of old techniques,” Eggers explained. “So I sent the greeting card to the printer and asked, ‘Can we do this?’ We went back and forth for two years on this design.”

Large, 19th-century typeface supports the old-fashioned aesthetic. The crowning touch is a series of classical landscape paintings by artists of centuries past, chosen to adorn the cover and endpapers, making cameos throughout the book about every 25 pages. Artist Shawn Harris embellished the paintings with images of the main character, Johannes, within each pastoral scene.

Johannes the fast-running canine is known as “The Eyes” of an urban park that he and his animal friends inhabit. It is his job to give daily reports to a trio of bison corralled in one ranger-controlled section of the park.

The wild animals, with names like Sonja, Freya, Sharif and Bertrand, are wary of human activity encroaching from the surrounding city. Captivity is to be dodged daily and escaped from. This becomes the seemingly impossible mission that Johannes adopts with the help of his furry and feathered friends.

“I had more fun writing this story than any book, maybe ever! There was no research to do or facts to check,” Eggers said of the adventure one might assume was dreamed up for children. (Amazon advertises it for ages 8-12.) It wasn’t Eggers’ intent. “There should be a category of all-ages where you could be 8 or 78 and ideally the story delights and entertains. My goal was to make an every-age book.”

Advanced vocabulary words like “concavity,” “cavorting” and “chartreuse” pepper every page like knowing winks at bookworms who appreciate clever word-smithery. This book is begging to be read aloud to oneself and to others. You’ll want to use your most special bookmark and find an honored place to keep this gem.

Eggers’ most recent novel for adults, “The Every,” published in 2021, also addresses the loss of freedom and will have you chuckling at the absurdity of a cultish tech monopoly’s rise to power, and squirming while you ask yourself whether human survival could ultimately depend on surrender to a tech-guided future. Is resistance futile? The follow-up to his 2013 novel “The Circle” works as a standalone, but builds on the trajectory established in the world where personal privacy was aggressively being usurped by a tech company’s power-hungry leadership.

“Every so often, I have to tell a story that scares people into remembering we are animals not meant to live indoors staring at screens,” Eggers said. After “The Circle,” he kept taking notes on developments until he felt he had enough material for another book. “I tried to give this one more satire and jokes to keep it light.”

Eggers’ longtime collaborator Dion Graham performs the audiobook version of “The Every” to perfection. “I do love the audiobook form; it’s in such a renaissance state,” Eggers said. Graham has recorded all of Eggers’ books since “What Is the What” came out 15 years ago.

Will there be a sequel to “The Every”?

“This is the only follow-up I’ve ever done. My wife, Vendela, who is also a writer, said some of the saddest words in the English language are ‘planned trilogy,’ and she’s right,” Eggers laughed. “I don’t know what’s next. I’m surrounded by tech here in San Francisco; it’s in the air I breathe and the water I drink. It keeps getting weirder.”

Dave Eggers will be at Boulder Books for a book signing on May 7 at 5 p.m. He is the final author in The Denver Post Pen & Podium’s sold-out, five-part lecture series wrapping up on May 8. If you are interested in becoming a subscriber for the 2023-24 season, get information at penandpodium.com and sign up for Early Bird Advanced Ticket Information here.

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If you have read even one of Ian McEwan’s 17 books — perhaps the contemplative “Atonement” (2001, Jonathan Cape) that was adapted into an Oscar winning film in 2007 — you know the British novelist brings an insightful and eloquent style, often with a dark edge, to his storytelling.

“Machines Like Me” is a ruminative mix of science fiction, romance and alternate history set in 1980s London. The political backdrop is built around the loss of the Falklands War. Londoners are in shock after the military defeat, alarmed by high and growing unemployment, and conflicted about a proposed withdrawal from the European Union. This unsettled larger context frames a personal story marked by the tensions that come when wading into unknown territory.

“I’m always a little bored of sci-fi set in the future,” McEwan said in a telephone interview in mid-April. “I rather wanted Alan Turing to be alive, and also considered how the present could so easily have been otherwise. The Falklands War could’ve been a terrible failure. I wanted to conjure a world of politics and reality that is sort of familiar, but different.”

In this divergent timeline, self-driving cars transport people around a country where Margaret Thatcher’s embattled Tories and the rising Labour Party, led by a popular Tony Benn, are grappling over what to do, including the possibility of taxing robots based on the number of human workers displaced.

And so the stage is set for single, broke 32-year-old Charlie Friend, who impulsively uses his mother’s inheritance to purchase an Adam, one of 25 newly launched artificial humans quietly made available to private buyers around the world. Charlie had hoped for an Eve, but was nonetheless excited to see how one of the planet’s most advanced machines might improve his life.

Despite the branding of these pioneering creations named after the first man and woman depicted in the Bible, McEwan said the story is not meant to be an allegory.

“I suppose it overlaps with some religious themes but it wasn’t in the forefront of my mind,” McEwan said. “If we want to play God and make a humanoid creature so that we put ourselves in that Godlike position, it would be a big step for us. At the same time, we will be casting ourselves out no longer as the cleverest things on Earth.”

Even so, these modern-day Adams and Eves were designed to be decent and wise as well as our physical and mental superiors: “There was hope that our own creations would redeem us.”

Charlie and Adam’s relationship is soon strained by the complicating factor of Charlie’s budding romance with his upstairs neighbor. Miranda is a university student with a secretive past that Adam quickly uncovers through his access to online public records. From that moment forward, the three struggle with undefined rules of engagement and feelings of trust, loyalty, love, jealousy and how to view justice and morality.

Charlie and Miranda worked together in choosing the personality traits for Adam after his delivery as a sort of blank slate packaged within an attractive and lifelike mature caucasian male body. (Adams and Eves, like their namesakes, do not get to experience a childhood.)

Even as he is attempting to pass as human, Adam is constantly studying and assessing human behavior, and finding it lacking. Other people come into play, including Miranda’s ailing and once famous father, an abused boy, a violent ex-con, and the aforementioned Alan Turing. In our reality, the late mathematician is now widely considered to be the father of artificial intelligence who died by suicide in 1954.

In this story, Turing’s work with A.I. has largely contributed to the creation of this first iteration of  Adams and Eves, and he is following their experiences with a keen, behind-the-scenes interest. These are not the monsters or machines of popular entertainment, but the most sophisticated of consumer electronics built to last 20 years before having their data transferred to fresh new devices for an immortal and ever-improving evolution.

McEwan believes it may be another 50 years before artificial humans of the type imagined in his novel are viable, but he believes the time is ripe to start deciding how we are going to adapt to their inevitable existence.

“We’re not thinking about it enough. They will start taking our jobs and we are really going to have to reorient ourselves away from work. Stop defining ourselves by work. This could be a great opportunity for mankind,” McEwan said.

And this is why McEwan chose to center his 18th book on the consequences of artificial intelligence for humankind, rather than leaving it up to the movies and popular television series like “Westworld” and “Humans.”

“There have been many robots in the arts, but I always feel they don’t examine closely enough what it’s like to be in an intimate relationship, or what it’s like to have a creature like Adam in your house. And what it means to be human as opposed to being a machine. This needs the close examination a novel can provide,” McEwan said.

This thought-provoking cautionary tale based on McEwan’s sharp observations of our flawed human nature is detailed with a vocabulary that will have you reaching for a dictionary at least half a dozen times.

The story ends on a note that leaves the reader thinking ahead and wondering what might come next. Of course, the possibilities are endless, and impossible to direct. As McEwan noted, “The one thing the internet has shown us is it might be us who devises the technology, but we’ve got no control over it as a human invention — it runs with a mind of its own. We really are hopeless at predicting our own future, and that’s the thing that really fascinates me.”

IF YOU GO

Ian McEwan will discuss “Machines Like Me” with author and journalist Helen Thorpe at New Hope Baptist Church in Denver, hosted by Tattered Cover bookstore, May 1 at 7 p.m. Tickets are available online and include a pre-signed book.

Robin Sloan is taking the long way to Denver for his book signing event at the Tattered Cover this week — by railroad. Traveling the scenic route from San Francisco by rail fulfills a longtime wish for the tech-savvy author, who has a fascination with the old ways of doing things.

Sloan will read from and sign copies of his sophomore novel, “Sourdough,” a follow-up to his bestselling debut, “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” (Picador, 2012), with some themes that will feel familiar to fans.

Both stories are set in the San Francisco Bay area and follow young tech-industry professionals who find themselves the unexpected keepers of ancient and mysterious secrets — stories involving the kinds of scenarios that any reader who loved “The Hobbit” or enjoyed “The Da Vinci Code” will appreciate.

In “Sourdough,” burned-out robotics programmer Lois Clary finds herself the unwitting owner of a crock of sourdough starter when her favorite dinner delivery service abruptly closes and the owner gifts his “Number One Eater” with a portion of his special ingredient. Having subsisted largely on a slurry of nutritive gel before the Clement Street Soup and Sourdough menu appeared on her front door, Lois is determined to keep the starter alive and learn how to bake fresh sourdough bread for herself.

However, she soon realizes this starter is no ordinary mix of flour and water. The wild yeasts and bacteria that live within the glutinous mix respond to a certain ethnic music (Mazg) and form telltale shapes in her baked loaves.

When Lois finds her newfound baking skills in growing demand, she puts her programming knowledge to use in designing a robotic arm to mix dough and automate the process. As the pressure to produce rises, Lois seeks help from an increasingly odd cast of characters, including fellow members of the local Lois Club, a group of women who all share the name that peaked in popularity in 1929 (according to babycenter.com).

With “Sourdough,” Sloan has written the kind of story you might expect from a 37-year-old self-described “library kid” who is equally into dabbling in machine learning and artificial intelligence as he is his new venture of producing extra virgin olive oil.

“I am comfortable combining the old and the new,” Sloan said. “It’s an interesting space to play in, and in putting the old thing in a new setting I hope to show how the old is actually really high tech as well.”

While San Francisco is arguably the North American mecca for sourdough bread lovers, Sloan is looking forward to tasting the Rocky Mountain version when Golden’s Grateful Bread Company co-sponsors his book signing with samples of their own celebrated sourdough for people to taste while they wait for an autograph.

In shifting from a background of journalistic writing for the likes of The Atlantic and Motherboard to fiction, Sloan, who also worked for Twitter, is playing with ways to make the process of writing novels a mix of imagination and automation with a software he is developing. He’s perfecting a program that operates like an AI co-writer, offering suggestions to writers much the way texting apps offer words to help speed up the process of phone messaging.

“I will be able to use it, not in my next couple of stories, but maybe in book number five,” Sloan speculated. And if those stories play out the way his first two have, they will feature a  blend of fantasy and reality, with a juxtaposition of contemporary and vintage technologies in starring roles.

“I like to take little bits of my own experience and remix them into some kind of fictional storyline, using some things that are straight up real, some that are exaggerated, and some invented together in a way so people can’t really tell what’s made up and what isn’t.”

Oh, the possibilities.

If you go

“Sourdough” author Robin Sloan will be at the West Colfax Tattered Cover in Denver on Wednesday, Oct. 4, at 7 p.m. Go to tatteredcover.com for details.

Jefferson County Open Space officials had declared high levels of E. coli from dog waste. That, plus parking problems, forced them to permanently close Elk Meadow Dog Park.

A week later, at one of four well-attended dog parks in Highlands Ranch, a visitor commented that the size of Elk Meadow, 107 acres, was bound to lead to issues with unscooped poop. After all, off-leash dogs can race out of owners’ views. Admittedly, that can happen in small dog parks, too.

Kyle Hurt and his 6-year-old son, Mason, lounged on a bench watching their energetic boxer, Jersey, duck and weave around a feisty Australian shepherd in the Hound Hill dog park near Quebec and Lincoln streets.

“Why is it shutting down?” Mason asked his dad, referring to the Evergreen park.

“Because of the poop.”

“Why don’t they pick it up?”

Hurt, giving pet owners the benefit of the doubt, shrugged. “I don’t think it’s intentional.”

Hurt then admitted that the moment he takes his eye off Jersey is often the moment the little rascal decides to do his business.

Dog parks have become an integral and even expected part of many communities as dog ownership grows. Next year may be the year of the dog in China, but in the U.S. it’s shaping up to be the century of the canine. In 2000, Americans kept 68 million dogs as pets. We are now closing in on 90 million, according to the American Pet Products Association’s 2017 National Pet Owners Survey. (The U.S. Census Bureau counts the number of children at 73.7 million, meaning American households now have more dogs than kids.)

No wonder dog parks are the fastest-growing segment of city parks in the United States. A 2015 City Park Facts Report lists 644 off-leash dog parks in the nation’s 100 largest cities, a 20 percent increase in five years.

Naturally, with more dogs and dog parks comes more doggie downsides.

“There are over 20 different bacteria, viruses and parasites in dog feces that can infect other dogs,” said Michael Lappin, the Kenneth W. Smith Professor of Infectious Disease at Colorado State University.

Lappin is himself a dog owner who frequents dog parks, despite the findings he and fellow researchers discovered in a pair of recent studies they conducted at dog parks in Colorado and California.

In 2012, Lappin led one of the first studies to discover whether dog park visitation is associated with an increased prevalence of parasites. Lab results showed dogs that visit dog parks were more likely to test positive for two common parasites (giardia and cryptosporidium) than non-dog park-attending dogs. The strains of these parasites were those that infect dogs and not people, and none of the dogs or their owners fell ill. Similar results were found in the more recent California study.

“When you have a higher concentration of dog feces in a contained area, you can expect to increase the likelihood of exposure to these agents. Even if the feces are cleaned up promptly, there are still the presence of these microbes in the environment,” Lappin said. And some of those infectious disease agents can persist for prolonged periods in the environment, posing an increased exposure risk.

But if the dogs are healthy with normal stools and are on parasite-preventative products, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says dog parks pose a minimal risk. People who become sick from these agents are usually the very young or very old and those who are immune-compromised.

Still, all that poop gives pause. What’s the attraction for dog parks, anyway?

“I’m a dog park proponent,” Lappin said. “My perception is that there are many more benefits for the psyches of dogs and their owners that are able to exercise and socialize in dog parks than there are downsides from infectious disease risks, provided simple precautions are followed.”

And it helps if the areas can be maintained.

Martha Scott Benedict Memorial Park, originally called Ohlone Dog Park, in Berkeley, Calif., is recognized as the first dog park in the world, created in 1979. The nonprofit Ohlone Dog Park Association partners with the city to maintain park quality, much the way the newly formed Friends of Evergreen Dog Park group had hoped to serve Elk Meadows.

Volunteers there had organized an effort to clean up the park and proposed other solutions, including a membership system that would require owners to register their dogs and include DNA swabs, so owners of the offending stealth bombers could be held accountable.

But Jefferson County decided to close the park on April 4. The area, officials said, was a victim of its popularity: Some 4,000 people were using the park each week; last fall volunteers collected 500 pounds of dog waste during three days.

Businesses that offer poop-pickup services are popping up online, claiming to dramatically decrease dog waste in apartment and condo complexes and communities with HOAs. They are marketing themselves to dog parks also.

Longtime Evergreen resident Kris Johnson stopped taking her dog, Finn, to Elk Meadows in part because of the waste issue. “There were only one or two trash cans on the trail, so you’d have to walk for long periods holding the bag of poop. In all fairness, I don’t think they foresaw how popular this park would be.”Hopefully it can reopen at some point and others can also be created.

Nick Adamson, natural resource manager for Highlands Ranch Metro District, said he’s learned about the importance of regular maintenance and clear signage. “I think it’s cyclical mostly. During winter when snow is on the ground, we see more dog waste in the parks and on trails, but it’s not a huge issue here.”

The Metro District pays four technicians and a supervisor through funds generated by property taxes to maintain area trails, ponds and open space. Every Monday and Friday, techs refill the dog park bag dispensers and empty the sturdy metal trash cans (a.k.a. “poop ovens”).

Lappin likens dog parks for four-legged friends to children’s day care centers.

“Feces is part of our life. You just have to use common sense and good hygiene practices.”

If you are interested in taking your pup to a dog park, CSU Professor Michael Lappin recommends:

• Keeping your dog’s vaccinations up to date

• Following a deworming protocol

• Don’t bring young puppies, very old or ailing dogs to dog parks

• Wash your hands after visiting dog parks

The ASPCA supports community dog parks as a means for urban dogs in particular to exercise off leash and socialize with other dogs.

Ralph Johnson, CEO of the Colorado Veterinary Medical Association, said the CVMA does not have a policy specifically on dog parks, but veterinarians advocate responsible pet ownership, which includes proper waste disposal. For more information, click here.

Denver Dog Parks

• Berkeley Dog Park Berkeley. Sheridan & West 46th
• Railyard Dog Park Union Station. 19th St. & Bassett St.
• Little Box Car Dog Park Five Points. Broadway & Lawrence St.
• Sonny Lawson Dog Park Five Points, Park Ave West & California St.
• Fuller Dog Park Whittier, W. 29th Ave & Franklin St.
• Parkfield Dog Park Gateway-Green Valley Ranch, E. Maxwell Pl. & Idalia St.
• Green Valley Ranch East Dog Park Gateway-Green Valley Ranch, E. 45th Avenue & Jebel St.
• Greenway Park Dog Park East Colfax,
• E. 22nd Avenue & Syracuse St.
• Lowry Dog Park Lowry Field, E. 4th Place & S. Yosemite Way
• Kennedy Dog Park Kennedy, E. Hampden Avenue & S. Dayton St.
• Stapleton Greenway Dog Park Stapleton, E. 22nd Ave. & Syracuse St.

Suburban Off-Leash Parks

• Beaver Ranch Bark Park Conifer, 11369 S. Foxton Road
• Homer’s Run Dog Park Golden, 17651 W. 10th Ave.
• Grampsas Dog Park Golden, 4471 Salvia St.
• West Arvada Dog Park Arvada, 17975 W. 64th Ave.
• Little Dry Creek Dog Park Westminster Hills, 105th Ave. & Simms St.
• Trail Winds Dog Park Thornton, 13385 Holly St.
• Happy Trails Brighton, 1111 Judicial Center Dr.
• Grandview Dog Park Aurora, 17500 E. Quincy Ave.
• Cherry Creek State Park Aurora, 4201 S. Parker Road
• Bayou Gulch Parker, Fox Sparrow Road
• Devon’s Dog Park at Greenland Open Space Larkspur, 1532 E. Noe Road
• Matney Park Castle Rock, 5790 Lantern Cir.
• Glendale Farm Open Space Castle Pines, 12300 S. Havana St.
• Fido’s Field Highlands Ranch, 1042 Riddlewood Rd.
• Rover’s Run Highlands Ranch, 3280 Redstone Park Circle
• Digger’s Highlands Ranch, 3385 Astorbrook Circle
• Hound Hill Highlands Ranch, 9651 S. Quebec St.
• David A. Lorenz Littleton, 8560 S. Colorado Blvd.
• Wynetka Ponds Bark Park Littleton, 5875 S. Lowell Blvd.
• Centennial Park Englewood, 4630 S. Decatur
• Forsberg Dog Park Lakewood, 15900 W. Alameda Parkway
• Chatfield State Park Littleton, 11500 N. Roxborough Park Road