“Apparently, I looked lonely or something, but two kids came up to me and said, ‘Come over and be with us and our friends,'” Brock recalled with a laugh. “I’m the only graduate with compression socks on and they’re wondering, ‘How in the heck did you get here?’

“My stoles said ‘student athlete’ and so they asked, ‘What sport were you in?’ I told them football. And then they were really confused. Like, how’s an old guy like you a student athlete?”

Brock, 71, was who went on to an accomplished NFL career with the New England Patriots. After that, he found success in broadcasting, served for 25 years as the founder and president of the Patriots Alumni Club, was a software entrepreneur, and was also involved in the mortgage industry.

But one “unchecked box” in his life brought him back to Folsom Field on May 2, when he graduated with a bachelor’s degree The feat came exactly half a century after he left CU, when the Patriots selected him in the first round of the 1976 NFL Draft.

“My degree was something I started and never finished, and it’s bothered me for a long time,” Brock explained. “There was a time when, after my rookie year with the Patriots, I bought a home in Longmont so I could go back to school. But it didn’t come to fruition. Then, life happened, and it never got it done.”

Brock explained this backstory to his newfound group of friends on graduation day, and they were stoked for the former offensive lineman. Especially considering Brock stuffed the 42 credit hours he needed to graduate into a single year, starting with 12 hours last summer, 15 in the fall and three in a compressed winter-break course before finishing with 12 this spring.

Brock’s wife, Emily Brock, sees parallels between her husband’s football achievements and his determination to finish college.

“He learned that discipline when he was a pro football player and he carried that through his whole life, no matter what he’s done, in any endeavor he’s taken on,” Emily Brock said. “It’s that discipline from those years that has carried him through to the greatness that he is, including accomplishing this degree 50 years after he should’ve finished it in the first place.”

CU great, ‘Mr. Versatility’

When the Patriots selected Brock with the No. 12 overall pick in ’76, it was at that time the highest a CU offensive lineman had ever been drafted.

Brock, a first-team selection to CU’s All-Century team in 1989, played for He played in 154 NFL games, with 88 starts, and “Mr. Versatility” saw time at every position on the line, including tight end, long snapper, and wing back. Most of his starts came at center, where he played in New England’s loss to the Chicago Bears.

was highlighted by several accolades, including the Patriots’ Unsung Hero Award in 1979, the Jim Lee Hunt Award for best Patriots lineman in ’84, the Ed Block Memorial Courage Award in ’85 after coming back from midseason knee surgeries and the Miller Lite NFL Lineman of the Year in ’86. All of that led to Brock being named to the Patriots’ All-Decade Team for the 1980s.

“Pete was one of the all-time great players in CU football history,” said Cherry Creek High School head coach Dave Logan, a wideout who was in Brock’s class at CU. “And you don’t play that long in the NFL unless you’re a hell of a player. Incredibly smart, very tough, a good athlete who could move around. Look at how many different things the Patriots asked him to do — that speaks to his football acumen.”

With the Buffs, the Portland, Ore., native was a pillar on the 1975 team as a senior when CU went 9-3, was ranked inside the Top 10 and lost to Texas in the Bluebonnet Bowl. Brock was one of 12 in ’75, including three in the first round. But there’s one game from that season he wants back — a 21-20 road loss to No. 1 Oklahoma, the defending national champions who went on to repeat.

“With about three minutes to go, we got the ball down 21-14 and we drove the length of the field just pounding them,” Brock recalled. “That was a tough defense, and we flat wore them out, we ground them down. When we put it into the end zone to make it 21-20, I’m thinking, ‘These guys are done. Let’s go for (two).’

“And out trots the kicker. I wanted to call a timeout and go discuss this with anyone who would listen to me. We missed the extra point. If it were up to me, we would’ve called a (smashmouth run up the middle) and I still believe we would’ve won the game on that play.”

Brock’s younger brother, Willie Brock, played on CU’s O-line with Pete that season. They were two of four football-playing Brock brothers, three of which (Pete, Willie and Stan) went on to the NFL. Three Brock sisters were also prosperous — two were executives at Nike, and one has run a daycare center for about 40 years — so Willie says it’s no surprise that Pete felt compelled to finish his degree.

“There’s a lot of grit and determination in the Brock family,” Willie Brock said. “Once he set his goal and once he told the family that he was going back to school, we knew it would get done. I just didn’t think it would get done that fast.”

An ‘above-and-beyond’ student

Pete Brock, who lives in Kingston, New Hampshire, finished his degree over the last year by taking classes online. He took advantage of the for retired players, so the league paid for his classes.

, who taught Brock in an introductory geology course this spring, noted online classes are “generally all about distance” with little or no interaction between the professor and the students. But that wasn’t the case with Lester and Brock, as the professor found his senior-citizen pupil eager to engage.

“He went above-and-beyond to interact in this class, whether it was chiming in with cool discussion posts or just talking about geology with me,” Lester said.

“… You go to college because you get exposed to a lot of different subjects and it helps you learn how to think. And it’s all about perspective. That’s what I think was driving Mr. Brock when he went back to get his degree. He wanted the (degree) to put on his mantel, of course, but he really wanted to dip his toes into a bunch of different knowledge.”

, who taught Brock in tropical marine ecology over the fast-paced, condensed winter semester, also says Brock stood out in her course for his paper on an anthropogenic effect on the ocean. He studied “the dual value of oyster aquaculture in both food production and ecosystem improvements.”

“He had such a passion for the project that it was a pleasure to work with him and fascinating to read the final product,” Furman Dougherty said.

Efforts like that led to a 3.57 GPA over the last year, a stark improvement from his approach in the classroom at the end of his CU playing career, as Brock lamented how he “goofed off and blew off my senior spring” while skipping classes and letting his GPA slide. His academic prowess at age 71 raised his cumulative GPA to 2.5.

“I didn’t go into this to (show off) or to evangelize the world of an education,” Brock said. “But I hope that it might inspire somebody like me, someone who is maybe thinking it’s too late to finish college, to do this.”

Now what?

Brock, who is retired, has no intention to use his degree in the workforce. But what is for sure is you won’t find him loitering in his recliner anytime soon.

In recent years, he’s become a budding carpenter and has recently built a greenhouse in his backyard. Brock plans on spending lots of time in there this summer, planting a vegetable garden and helping his wife cultivate a collection of annual flowers. He’s also got big plans for trips into the wilds of New Hampshire with his “best friend,” a German Wirehaired Pointer named Jäger, hunting upland birds.

“He had never built anything before in his lifetime before he built that greenhouse, and that’s only the start,” Emily Brock said. “He’s going to build a bed for the spare bedroom. He’s going to build shutters for the home. That’s just how he’s wired — you put it in front of him, he’ll do it.”

Stan Kroenke, the owner of the Colorado Avalanche and the Denver Nuggets, became the nation’s largest landowner in December, holding 2.7 million acres of mostly sprawling ranch lands in Texas, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, and now New Mexico, according to .

His purchase of 937,000 acres of ranchland across New Mexico from the heirs of Henry Singleton, founder of the tech and industrial conglomerate Teledyne, allowed him to vault ahead of John Malone, chairman emeritus of the Liberty Media empire. Malone, who for years sat at the top of the list, dropped to third place with 2.2 million acres.

For anyone comforted when they see the vast Greenland Ranch Open Space when driving between Castle Rock and Colorado Springs, Malone had a big part in preserving that. And this Greenland isn’t for sale.

In between Kroenke and Malone is the Emmerson family, who are behind the lumber and wood products company Sierra Pacific Industries. The family owns 2.4 million acres of timberland in the Pacific Northwest.

Further down on the list is Colorado’s wealthiest resident, Philip Anschutz. The Land Report has him at 198,000 acres. His Overland Trail Ranch in Wyoming spans 320,000 acres, although about half of that represents public lands he operationally controls through federal leases and grazing rights.

Unlike Kroenke, Anchtuz is divesting rather than investing in land. Prior reports had incorrectly listed him as the largest landowner in his native state of Kansas, with 250,000 acres in Baughman Farms. But a representative for Anschutz told the Topeka Capital-Journal in November that those farm parcels, many of which were actually located in southeastern Colorado, had been sold.

And then there is Louis Bacon, a New York hedge fund manager, who owns the Trinchera Ranch and Bianca Ranch near Fort Garland in the San Luis Valley. He purchased Trinchera from the Forbes family in 2007, and they had owned it since the 1960s. Bacon’s Colorado land covers 172,000 acres. It is Colorado’s largest ranch, and most of it is under conservation easements. Other holdings bring Bacon’s total closer to 222,000 acres, according to the Land Report 100.

“They have been buying and owning properties for a long time. They like aggregating land,” Ken Mirr, owner of real estate brokerage , said.

Finding such large parcels is nearly impossible back East and becoming much harder in Colorado. But it remains doable in New Mexico and Wyoming.

From Colorado’s founding, people bought land for the economic use they could get out of it, whether it was to mine minerals or coal, to raise crops and livestock, or to cut timber. Anschutz in some ways reflects that older style of land ownership.

He is building wind turbine projects and raising cattle on his Overland Ranch Trail in Wyoming, and before selling his Kansas and Colorado farmland, he grew row crops on it. Ted Turner, the cable entrepreneur and the nation’s fourth-largest landowner, also has tried to generate cash flow from his land holdings.

He owns the world’s largest bison herd and uses their meat to supply his chain of restaurants called Ted’s Montana Grill. Cattle are common on many of the ranches.

But most of the new breed of buyers are more conservation-minded, purchasing land for land’s sake, even if it means locking up money in an illiquid asset. Raw land can rise in value, but over time, those gains don’t keep pace with stocks, private equity or the original businesses that generated the wealth to begin with.

But land does offer a hedge against inflation, diversification against economic upheavals, and provides a certainty that isn’t available with assets whose value can evaporate in a short time span, like Washington Mutual or Enron. There is also a beauty or aesthetic that comes with large land holdings, sometimes described as “psychic income.”

“We are facing uncertainty with what is going on in the marketplace and in the world. Things are a little unstable. People return to land as a stable form of property,” Mirr said, who said the motivation at times can be comparable to those who purchase fine art and jewelry.

The land holdings of the four billionaires add up to 5.32 million acres. To put that into perspective, they hold more land than that contained within four of the largest national parks — Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Glacier.

The square mileage they control would rank as the country’s 41st state, behind New Jersey, and it is comparable to the territory Israel covers.

And this may come as a surprise. Their land holdings are just shy of the span of the 10 counties that the federal government defines as the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood metropolitan statistical area. Metro Denver covers about 1,000 more square miles than all of New Jersey, something to think about on the next layover at Newark airport.

All that is to say, they own a lot of land. And as humorist Will Rogers famously said, “Buy land. They ain’t making any more of it.”

Even Colorado’s newest billionaires aren’t immune to the land bug. Alex Karp, CEO of Denver-based Palantir Technologies, purchased the St. Benedictine Monastery in Old Snowmass in December for $120 million. The purchase included 3,700 acres of Colorado’s most prime land, senior water rights and several monastery buildings.

John Malone, who for years was at the top of the private landholder list, explains what motivated him to devote most of his accumulated wealth to land in his recently released biography “Born to be Wired.”

“You can’t appreciate what a precious commodity open land is until you see it vanish over time. And then one day you look, and it����ap gone. Forever,” he wrote.

Malone describes moving to Denver 50-plus years ago with his wife, Leslie, and falling in love with the beauty of the Rockies, the cowboy culture, the clean air, and the ethic of freedom dominant in the West at the time.

Bob Magness, who hired Malone to run his cable company, hosted him at his Hidden Valley Ranch in the foothills near Golden. The Malones eventually purchased their own spread southeast of Denver. The financial engineer learned how to run a tractor, to plow fields and plant oats, to paint barns and work with horses.

But over the years, metro sprawl kept encroaching on the isolation they were seeking, forcing them to move three times. They always held onto the land. And Malone, who for long stretches outperformed even Warren Buffett in generating returns for his investors, poured much of his family’s net worth into buying more land.

“This pursuit will consume most of the material wealth that Leslie and I have built up in our lifetime, a key reason we formed the Malone Family Land Preservation Foundation. We will designate a vast portion of the 2.2 million acres in six states with a protected status that will ensure it stays natural and utterly undeveloped forever, and I hope to expand this even more,” he wrote.

Mirr said many buyers are motivated by the desire to protect something they consider valuable, to leave a legacy that will last beyond them.

The Trappist monks oversaw their monastery lands in old Snowmass for nearly seven decades, and when their time to say goodbye came, Mirr said one of the brothers told him after the closing, “We don’t own the land, we are custodians and stewards.”

People may buy land, even vast acres of it. And they may enjoy it. But in the end, they never truly own it.

“It’s not like you can take it with you,” Mirr said.

Russell Hardy, 55, arrived in Colorado Springs on Tuesday, June 10, with plans to hike and explore Pikes Peak, .

Hardy was supposed to return home by Thursday, sheriff’s officials said. When he didn’t and couldn’t be reached, his family reported him missing.

The sheriff’s office used Flock license plate cameras and social media posts from Hardy to track the man to the Crags Trailhead, that hikers can use to summit Pikes Peak.

Deputies found his rental car at the trailhead, and other hikers reported seeing Hardy in the area at about 10:15 a.m. on Wednesday, June 11, sheriff’s officials said.

The sheriff’s office and multiple search and rescue teams combed the area, using both drones and dogs to help search, but couldn’t find the New Hampshire man, according to the news release.

Then, at about noon Monday, another hiker found Hardy’s body near the summit of Pikes Peak, sheriff’s officials said.

“There is no indication of foul play,” sheriff’s officials said. “This appears to be a tragic outcome of a man confronting the challenges of nature.”

The search included more than 100 volunteers from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, Teller County Sheriff’s Office, U.S. Forest Service and Colorado Search and Rescue Association, sheriff’s officials said.

The El Paso County Coroner’s Office will determine the cause of death.

“Oh, yeah. Now it’s a whole other level of this,” Carter King, loquacious captain of the DU Pioneers hockey team, reflected recently. “No one wants us to win. I think that’s pretty clear. Especially when you win a lot recently, teams get a little sick of you winning.

“So it’s an honor to have that. And we appreciate almost the increased intensity we get from opponents, so it’s prepared us for going to the tournament this year.”

The really fun part? The way the Pios (31-11-1) have used that hate as jet fuel from the University neighborhood to New Hampshire to the Gateway City, where they’ll begin defense of their national championship at the 2025 Frozen Four against Western Michigan (32-7-1) at 3:30 p.m. Thursday in the first of two NCAA national semifinals.

The winner of Thursday’s semi will take on the winner of Penn State-Boston University in the championship game at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday.

“We’ve talked about it in the sense that we have guys in the room that were a part of the ’22 team (that won the NCAA championship) and the ’23 team that failed to do it,” DU coach David Carle, whose Pios are seeking back-to-back titles and an 11th national crown, said at the start of his squad’s NCAA journey. “But they were able to get back there in ’24. So we have a lot of experience in the room with trying to navigate this season because it’s not an easy season to go through with getting everyone’s best and having that target squarely on your chest.”

Especially when the targets are internal, too. If DU wins out Thursday and Saturday at the Enterprise Center in downtown St. Louis, the program will have become the first since 1961 to win three NCAA crowns over a four-year span.

The last team to pull that off? DU, which notched three titles between 1958 and ’61. The only other program that can match that stretch of dominance is Michigan, which won five titles over six years (1951-53, 1955-56).

“There’s no doubt that I think the guys are excited for the opportunity to try and do it,” Carle said. “It’s certainly on our mind. But we’re very focused on just staying in the present and trying to make sure that we’ve grown as much as we can throughout this whole season.”

DU was able to power through the Manchester Regional on the wings of defense, goaltender Matt Davis and a little spite. All of that is still in the lunch pails they’re lugging to the banks of the Mississippi River, as well as a month of egos bruised by the Broncos, who won two of the three head-to-head meetings during the season. And every contest was decided by a single goal. Western Michigan’s most recent win over the Pios was probably the most galling, as the Broncos erased a 3-0 DU lead in the third period and rallied for a 4-3 victory in overtime of the Frozen Faceoff Championship.

So Thursday’s rematch isn’t just a matter of payback. It’s a point of pride.

“It’s the legacy that this program has,” King said. “It’s such an honor to play here and be a captain here. It’s truly so special. The names and just the quality of people that run through this program is unbelievable. The coaches, they pride themselves on recruiting good people. And it shows in our locker room and in the culture we have here.”

Even if no one wants you to win.

No one in Kalamazoo, at any rate.

“I mean, all year this year, it’s been tight,” Davis said. “It’s been hard, and it’s certainly something that is going to be really valuable for us in the tournament here.

“I mean, these one-and-done games, anything can happen. And whether you’re the underdog or not, it doesn’t matter once the puck drops. And, yeah, I think we’ve definitely got a chip on our shoulder here.”

JACKSON, N.H. — A skier since age 4, Thomas Brennick now enjoys regular trips to New Hampshire’s Black Mountain with his two grandchildren.

“It����ap back to the old days,” he said from the Summit Double chairlift on a recent sunny Friday. “It����ap just good, old-time skiing at its best.”

Behind the scenes, the experience is now propelled by a high-tech system designed to increase efficiency at the state’s oldest ski area. And while small, independent resorts can’t compete on infrastructure or buying power with conglomerates like Vail, which owns nearby Attitash Mountain Resort and seven others in the Northeast alone, at least one entrepreneur is betting technology will be “a really great equalizer.”

That businessman is Erik Mogensen, who bought Black Mountain last year and turned it into a lab for his ski mountain consultancy, Entabeni Systems. The company builds systems that put lift tickets sales, lesson reservations and equipment rentals online while collecting detailed data to inform decisions such as where to make more snow and how much.

“A lot of general managers will go out and look at how many rows of cars are parked, and that����ap kind of how they tell how busy they are,” Mogensen said. “We really want to look at that transactional data down to the deepest level.”

That includes analyzing everything from the most popular time to sell hot dogs in the lodge to how many runs a season pass holder makes per visit.

“The large operators, they can do a lot of things at scale that we can’t. They can buy 20 snow cats at a time, 10 chairlifts, those types of things. We can’t do that, but we’re really nimble,” Mogensen said. “We can decide to change the way we groom very quickly, or change the way we open trails, or change our (food and beverage) menu in the middle of a day.”

Transforming a small-time resort

Mogensen, who says his happiest moments are tied to skiing, started Entabeni Systems in 2015, driven by the desire to keep the sport accessible. In 2023, he bought the company Indy Pass, which allows buyers to ski for two days each at 230 independent ski areas, including Black Mountain. It����ap an alternative to the Epic and Ikon multi-resort passes offered by the Vail and Alterra conglomerates.

Black Mountain was an early participant in Indy Pass. When Mogensen learned it was in danger of closing, he was reminded of his hometown’s long-gone ski area. He bought Black Mountain aiming to ultimately transform it into a cooperative.

Many Indy Pass resorts also are clients of Entabeni Systems, including Utah’s Beaver Mountain, which bills itself as the longest continuously-run family owned mountain resort in the U.S.

Kristy Seeholzer, whose husband’s grandfather founded Beaver Mountain, said Entabeni streamlined its ticketing and season pass system. That led to new, lower-priced passes for those willing to forgo skiing during holiday weeks or weekends, she said.

“A lot of our season pass holders were self-limiting anyway. They only want to ski weekdays because they don’t want to deal with weekends,” she said. “We could never have kept track of that manually.”

Though she is pleased overall, Seeholzer said the software can be challenging and slow.

“There are some really great programs out there, like on the retail side of things or the sales side of things. And one of the things that was a little frustrating was it felt like we were reinventing the wheel,” she said.

Not everyone is a fan

Sam Shirley, 25, grew up skiing in New Hampshire and worked as a ski instructor and ski school director in Maine while attending college. But he said increasing technology has drastically changed the way he skis, pushing him to switch mostly to cross-country.

“As a customer, it����ap made things more complicated,” he said. “It just becomes an extra hassle.”

Shirley used to enjoy spur-of-the-moment trips around New England, but has been put off by ski areas reserving lower rates for those who buy tickets ahead. He doesn’t like having to provide detailed contact information, sometimes even a photograph, just to get a lift ticket.

It����ap not just independent ski areas that are focused on technology and data. Many others are using lift tickets and passes embedded with radio frequency identification chips that track skiers’ movements.

Vail Resorts pings cell phones to better understand how lift lines are forming, which informs staffing decisions, said John Plack, director of communications. Lift wait times have decreased each year for the past three years, with 97% under 10 minutes this year, he said.

“Our company is a wildly data-driven company. We know a lot about our guest set. We know their tastes. We know what they like to ski, we know when they like to ski. And we’re able to use that data to really improve the guest experience,” he said.

How the big guys battle meager winters

That improvement comes at a cost. A one-day lift ticket at Vail’s Keystone Resort in Colorado sold for $292 last week. A season pass cost $418, a potentially good deal for diehard skiers, but also a reliable revenue stream guaranteeing Vail a certain amount of income even as ski areas face less snow and shorter winters.

The revenue from such passes, especially the multi-resort Epic Pass, allowed the company to invest $100 million in snowmaking, Plack said.

“By committing to the season ahead of time, that gives us certainty and allows us to reinvest in our resorts,” he said.

Mogensen insists bigger isn’t always better, however. Lift tickets at Black Mountain cost $59 to $99 per day and a season’s pass is about $450.

“You don’t just come skiing to turn left and right. You come skiing because of the way the hot chocolate tastes and the way the fire pit smells and what spring skiing is and what the beer tastes like and who you’re around,” he said. “Skiing doesn’t have to be a luxury good. It can be a community center.”

Brennick, the Black Mountain lift rider who was skiing with his grandchildren, said he has noticed a difference since the ski area was sold.

“I can see the change,” he said. “They’re making a lot of snow and it shows.”

___

Ramer reported from Concord, New Hampshire.

The statniks up in the Grading The Week cubicles didn’t believe it, either, frankly.  But then somebody sent them details of Devin Larsen’s prime-time inaugural appearance for CSU-Pueblo up in Rapid City, S.D.

Larsen’s record-breaking debut — A

Making his ThunderWolves debut, the senior transfer from Western New Mexico (’21-’23) by way of Garden City Community College (’21) and Iowa State (’19-’20) piled up 508 passing yards while to power CSU-Pueblo to a 35-6 victory.

The 6-foot-4 Arizona native completed 30 of 45 throws on the night. His 508 yards were a school record and the most by any collegiate QB at any NCAA level for the week.

While Sanders has showcased his talents as a singer, writer, rapper and performer, it turns out Larsen is something of a renaissance man himself. In April 2023, the future CSU Pueblo signal-caller won a creative writing contest held by the Western New Mexico humanities department for his poetry. Larsen’s winning entry was titled “To Find My Great Perhaps,” and was described by the university as a work that “celebrates the adventure of living in nature.”

If Larsen’s initial appearance for the ThunderWolves is any indication, CSU-Pueblo fans could be in for more than a few celebratory adventures this fall.

PS2’s reign as NFL’s highest-paid CB — B

Pat Surtain II will always have Wednesday. And Thursday. And … well, that’s pretty much it. Turns out PS2’s reign as the NFL’s highest-paid cornerback, while deserved, also became fairly brief. So brief, it lasted about two days.

This past Wednesday, the Broncos’ Pro Bowl defender inked a deal worth $24 million per year. On Friday, the Dolphins gave Jalen Ramsey a three-year deal worth a reported $24.1 million a season, just pipping Surtain over the finish line.

Dollander’s dominance — A

More than 13 strikeouts per game. A K-to-walk ratio of almost 4-to-1. A 2.38 ERA overall, and a 1.65 ERA over his last eight starts.

Sounds a lot like Paul Skenes, you say? Darn straight. Only those numbers belong not to the National League’s most exciting starter. They’re the latest stats for arguably the most exciting National League starter in the minors right now — and he’s a Rockie.

If you’re like the kids on the GTW staff, you’d sooner stare into the high desert sun than watch the pitching on 20th and Bleak. But would you believe help is on the way?

While Bo Nix, Sean Payton, Deion Sanders and Travis Hunter are stealing all the digital ink to start the fall, Rockies right-handed starter Chase Dollander, Colorado’s top pick in the ’23 MLB Draft, is quietly making a case to be considered one of the top pitching prospects chucking it right now.

This past Thursday, the 6-foot-2 Georgia native posted his sixth straight appearance for the Double-A Hartford Yard Goats of at least five innings pitched, at least six strikeouts and with two or fewer runs allowed.

Late last month, he became the first Hartford pitcher to record back-to-back games of double-digits Ks, fanning 10 Binghamton hitters after recording 10 strikeouts against New Hampshire. The righty’s racked up at least 10 Ks in six of his 22 appearances this season for Spokane and Hartford. Other than the baseball gods, who says Rockies fans can’t have nice things?

Joseph Gray, 40, of Colorado Springs, won the Mount Washington Road Race on Saturday in a time of 1 hour, 2 minutes and 21 seconds. He was followed by Remi Leroux, 27 of Waterloo, Quebec, and Eric Blake, 45, of West Hartford, Connecticut.

Kayla Lampe, 31, of Sherlburne Falls, Massachusetts, finished with a time of 1 hour, 15 minutes and 9 seconds to win the women’s division, followed by Laura Manninen, 51, of Kuitula, Florida, and Amber Ferreira, of Concord, New Hampshire, who won last year.

The race had clear, beautiful conditions at the base for the first time in years, spokesperson Randy Zucco said. With a 6,288-foot (1,917-meter) summit, Mount Washington is synonymous with challenging weather.

Even with the clear conditions, runners sustained winds near 50 mph (80 kph) and wind chill values at the summit around or even below freezing, Zucco said.

Want more sports news? Sign up for the Sports Omelette to get all our analysis on Denver’s teams.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have officially secured the requisite numbers of delegates to be considered their parties’ presumptive nominees.

It was a foreseeable outcome. Biden faced token opposition in the Democratic primary. Several high-profile Republicans ran against Trump but didn’t come close to knocking him off course in his third straight Republican bid.

Here is a look at what that means, what����ap changed, and what still needs to happen before Biden and Trump can drop “presumptive” and just be their parties’ official standard-bearers:

The Associated Press only uses the “presumptive nominee” designation once a candidate has captured the number of delegates needed to win a majority vote at the national party convention this summer. For Republicans, that number this year is 1.215. On the Democratic side of things, it����ap 1,968.

The marker essentially ends the presidential primary season, though both Biden and Trump have been largely focusing their energies on each other for months already.

Sort of.

Generally, the national Democratic and Republican parties start coordinating directly with their presumptive nominees once their status is clear, although there have been some exceptions.

Last week, the Republican National Committee ushered in new leadership handpicked by Trump, in the form of a new chairman, co-chair and party chief of staff. Trump’s installed leaders then moved to fire dozens of RNC staff.

After Trump won both the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary — but still faced GOP opponents — an RNC member who is a longtime Trump ally floated a resolution that would have allowed the party to consider him its “presumptive nominee” and allowed some of that coordination earlier.

Trump actually spoke out against the measure — although he said it likely would have succeeded — which was ultimately withdrawn.

As for the Democratic National Committee, Biden is the de facto leader of the party, although any official leadership changes have to go through structured channels. During the 2020 campaign, the DNC shuffled its leadership and entered into a joint fundraising agreement with Biden in April, even though the candidate didn’t clinch the Democratic nomination until June.

A presidential candidate doesn’t officially become the Republican or Democratic nominee until winning the vote on the floor of the nominating convention, which takes place this summer. Delegates’ casting of votes is mostly a ceremonial procedure, but it hasn’t always been this way.

Decades ago, presidential candidates might have run in primaries and caucuses, but the eventual nominees weren’t known until delegates and party bosses hashed things out themselves at the conventions.

___

Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.

Griswold, joined by state lawmakers sponsoring the legislation, outlined the measures Thursday afternoon with just weeks to go before Coloradans begin casting ballots in what will surely be another contentious November presidential election. The state’s presidential primaries are March 5, with ballots going out in February.

The elected officials warned that emerging AI technology and potential plots to replace Colorado’s presidential electors — as by then-President Donald Trump’s supporters after the 2020 election — could pose existential threats to the country’s system of self-governance.

“An attempt to overthrow a free and fair election is an attack on the people of this nation and an attack that undermines the strength of our nation itself,” said state Sen. Nick Hinrichsen, a Pueblo Democrat sponsoring a bill to criminalize schemes to install fraudulent slates of presidential electors.

The bills have not been formally introduced yet in the legislature, which reconvened this month. As described by officials, the draft legislation would:

• Require disclaimers on AI-generated media, including manipulated audio and video commonly called deepfakes, that feature Colorado candidates and officeholders. Violators could be subject to campaign finance enforcement and penalties, and the bill would open the perpetrator up to civil action, akin to libel law standards.
• Make it a crime to create, or conspire to create, a fake slate of electoral college voters or serve as a fake elector; and bar people convicted under the proposed law from holding future office in Colorado.
• Require the Secretary of State’s Office to convene periodic meetings with the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes to discuss voting rights and voting access on tribal lands.

The AI bill comes as deepfakes are already sneaking into political discourse, both in the United States and abroad. Just this week, an was allegedly used to deter New Hampshire residents from voting in that state’s first-in-the-nation primary.

“The future is already here, and the people of Colorado deserve to know what is real and what is manipulated,” said Rep. Junie Joseph, a Boulder Democrat.

Griswold, also a Democrat, said bill supporters were writing it to comply with First Amendment speech protections, while still holding AI election materials to the higher disclosure requirements of current campaign finance law.

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Re: “Trump rolls in N.H. primary,” Jan. 24 news story

“Trump rolls in N.H. primary” shouts the article on page one. Except he didn’t. Donald Trump, the former president who lies about having won in 2020, only got 54% of the primary vote. By any standard this is a disaster – 46% of voters in the New Hampshire Republican primary want someone else to be their candidate. A more accurate headline would have been, “Haley gets 43% – it’s a race!” Which is why Trump is trying so hard to get her to quit.

Guy Wroble, Denver

The failure was in ending the “uncivil war”

Re: “Biden should admit failings and enact real solutions at border,” Jan. 21 commentary

In the first hour of his presidency, and just two weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021 riots, President Biden stood in front of the American people and the world and said, “… to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity. … I pledge this to you: I will be a president for all Americans. I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did. … We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.”

I watched the inauguration address live in its entirety. At the end of his speech on Jan. 20, 2021, I had hope that We the People had made the right choice and elected a president that would bring peace and unity back to America. From then on, however, President Biden has only escalated “this uncivil war” and further divided us.

President Biden should admit his failure to end the “uncivil war.” He should immediately call for a “cease-fire” between the Democrats and Republicans and work with both parties “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations” (President Lincoln). Until there is peace in our government, we are helpless and hopeless in enacting real solutions at the border or anything else that really matters.

Daniel G. Zang, Lakewood

Vote to end slaughterhouses in Denver

Years ago, my friend was driving down Brighton Boulevard when a sheep ran in front of her car. She slammed on the brakes. He was running so fast and was obviously terrified. She couldn’t catch him even if she wanted to. Besides, what could she do if she did? Her thought as the sheep ran out of sight, she has told me, was that she hoped someone could catch him and return him to his loving home.

This was before my friend knew what happened at the National Western Stock Show, just a few blocks away.

Most animals brought to the stock show are strutted around, judged, sold to the highest bidder, and are taken to a local butcher or trucked off to a slaughterhouse, such as Superior Farms in north Denver. It����ap especially sad to see children raise an animal from birth, only to know what will happen to their best friend.

A few years ago, my friend joined a group protesting the Stock Show, and parading to the Superior Farms slaughterhouse a half-mile away, holding signs and stopping traffic. I recently joined her in the local animal community as well, where we try every year to bring awareness.

You can help animals destined for slaughter by voting in favor of the this November to close slaughterhouses in Denver. As Pro-Animal Future has argued, evolving away from slaughterhouses will protect both animals, workers, neighborhoods, water, and our climate.

Phoenix Huber, Denver

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