A mile wide and an inch deep: it's the Colorado news roundup!

So what's been going on 'round and about this smelly little cowtown while the D-blog was distracted by the soulful eyes of John Mark Karr? Guess we should start with a smelly little cowtown story:

"Family in a winner's circle formed by rainbows, love." Wouldn't know it from the pathetic headline, but the story does have cows in it, as demonstrated by the first, inauspicious sentence: "The sight of a 1,200-pound steer made Jim Vickland a little queasy."

You think the hippies were pissed? "Rally in the Rockies biker event banned":

Montezuma County Sheriff Gerald Warren is bringing in additional law enforcement officers, canceling days off for his own troops and bracing for trouble in the wake of a judge's order shutting down the annual Rally in the Rockies motorcycle event northeast of Mancos.

An estimated 8,000 bikers could arrive in the area for the Labor Day Weekend rally in spite of the district court order late Monday canceling activities because the rally organizers were denied a high-impact use permit by county commissioners.

On the other hand: "Colorado to tackle global warming":

"All too often, people turn away from the seeming complexity and distance of global warming -- climate changes, melting of the icecaps, rising oceans," [former Colorado State University president Al] Yates said. "Such things just seem too big, too daunting to contemplate or comprehend. And so we ignore them, deny their existence. And, as my colleagues have argued, we do so at our peril. But . . . we can solve this problem. And we must."

Oh, we must, must we?

Two stories showcase competent Colorado law enforcement: "Denver police solve two 'cold' homicide cases"; and, much more important: "Bear, DNA, phone tips lead to moose poacher."

Not Colorado, but close enough: "Indians celebrate famous expedition":

NEW TOWN, N.D. - Canvas teepees mixed with modern tents, and horses trotted among fancy campers on a Missouri River peninsula to mark the journey home of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their Indian interpreter.

"This is the homeland of Sakakawea," Three Affiliated Tribes Chairman Tex Hall told the crowd Thursday during the opening ceremonies.

But there's controversy. Once again, disagreements over indigenous oral history are causing problems:

The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes dispute the commonly accepted historical account that Sakakawea was a Shoshone woman who was captured by the Hidatsa as a youth, claiming her instead as one of their own. They hope to use this week's event to spread that word to the rest of the country, where she is usually known as Sacagawea.

Where's Ward Churchill when you need him?

Finally, two strangely related mountaineering stories: "Domestic sheep climbs Colorado 14er"; and "Texas professor dies after falling 300 feet."

Update: I probably should have read more than the first couple of paragraphs of Joel Achenbach's WaPo piece on CSU climate skeptic Bill Gray. Achenbach is remarkably condescending, not only to Gray but to all the skeptics he mentions, including the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at, uuuuhh, lemme see here--oh yeah, that's the place--MIT, Richard Lindzen. Achenbach even manages to find someone willing to call Lindzen a "fringe" figure.

Update II: Although it is a little weird that Lindzen categorizes his writings as "Publications" and "Other Publications."

Update III: The link that was supposed to go to the banning of the biker rally actually went to a story on Colorado's ranking among the 50 states for obesity. Easy mistake to make. Fixed now.