In October 2011, Laura was invited to be a guest on Colorado Matters, a news program on Colorado Public Radio, to discuss the city of Boulder's attempt to break away from Xcel Energy and start its own municipal electric utility. Listen to her interview 
In January 2008, Laura was also a guest on the NPR program The Bryant Park Project. She discussed an initiative in Boulder County designed to limit home sizes. Listen to that interview Here are a few of the stories I’ve written over the last few years. Read more by using the navigation tabs at the top of the page.
Voyager sails across cosmic doldrums:
Out at the eerily still edge of our solar system, where the solar winds have calmed, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is sailing across the cosmic doldrums and preparing to punch through the boundary between the part of the universe that falls under our sun’s control and the part that does not.
And when the spacecraft — launched along with its twin, Voyager 2, in 1977 — crosses the boundary of our solar system, a hard-to-pinpoint demarcation known as the heliopause, it will be the first man-made creation to send back information from interstellar space.
Now 11 billion miles away from the sun, Voyager 1 is flying quietly through a zone described by NASA as a “cosmic purgatory,” and scientists expect the spacecraft — about the size of a sub-compact car — could officially leave our solar system in as little as a few months or as long as a couple of years.
“Every piece of data that Voyager currently takes is helping refine the models that we have,” said Suzanne Dodd, the current project manager for NASA’s Voyager mission. “No spacecraft has been there before.”
Read the full story here.
10 Things you didn’t know about avalanches:
Avalanches have killed some of climbing’s most luminous stars. In 1979, Willi Unsoeld—who summitted Everest in 1963 as part of the first American expedition—died in an avalanche while leading a winter ascent of Mt. Rainier. In September 1999, a massive avalanche triggered by a serac fall killed Alex Lowe and David Bridges on the flanks of Shishapangma. More recently, an avalanche on Mt. Edgar in China in 2009 killed young alpinists Jonny Copp and Micah Dash along with cameraman Wade Johnson.
Avalanche danger will always be a hazard for those seeking to climb some of the world’s most sought-after peaks. Here’s a look at some facts about the deadly snow slides.
1. Avalanches have killed 165 climbers in the United States since the winter of 1950- 51. Slides also killed 212 snowmobilers, 291 skiers, and 56 snowboarders during the same decades, according to statistics published by the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Survival statistics are harder to come by, since avalanches that do not result in death are heavily underreported.
2. The avalanche responsible for killing the most climbers in the U.S. was triggered by a massive icefall on Mt. Rainier (14,411 feet) on June 21, 1981. Eleven climbers—including one guide—were swept into a crevasse and buried under 70 feet of snow and ice, making it impossible to recover any of the bodies. The remaining 18 members of the party survived.
Read the full story here.
Trabant cars roll in Longmont:
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, scores of East German families flooded across the border to a new life in their tiny, rattly Trabants — the spare-yet-iconic cars that were thriftily manufactured for decades in the communist country.
Once across the border, many families abandoned their “Trabis” — which sported sputtering two-stroke engines akin to a souped-up lawnmower’s and bodies sculpted out a type of plastic that was reinforced with cotton or wool — leaving them scattered across no man’s land or dumped in the streets.
But one man’s trash is another’s treasure.
More than two decades after the last Trabant rolled off Sachsenring’s production line in Zwickau, Germany, at least three have found a welcoming new home in Longmont — two with Charlie Bigsby (though one is mostly cannibalized for parts) and one with John Short.
With only an estimated 100 or so Trabants in the United States, that makes Longmont a hotspot of East German car culture.
Read the full story here.
Diverting the Colorado:
When Kirk Klancke’s daughters were young, they swam — or tried to swim — in the clear icy waters of St. Louis Creek, a tributary of the Fraser River in Grand County.
“I used to go on picnics with my daughters,” said Klancke, who lives outside the town of Fraser on Ranch Creek. “They would go swimming in the streams and their lips would turn purple and they’d be out in a minute.”
These days, when Klancke takes his grandkids to the same spot, they sometimes splash around for an hour in the tepid water, occasionally losing their sandals to the sucking sediment layered on the stream’s bed.
Warm water temperatures, which can be lethal to trout, and the buildup of bug-smothering sediment in the once-rocky river bottoms — caused by the lack of strong spring “flushing flows” on the river — are two of the changes that Klancke has noticed over the decades. Since he first moved to Grand County as a teenager in 1971, more and more of the water that once was bound for the mighty Colorado River has been sucked across the Continental Divide to slake the Front Range’s growing thirst.
Read the full story here.
Meet Mercury:
It’s not easy to get to Mercury.
At the tiny, sun-scorched planet’s closest approach to Earth, Mercury is only 48 million miles away — not so far in cosmic distances. (The shortest distance between Neptune and Earth, by comparison, is a whopping 2.8 billion miles, which is 58 times farther.)
But for the astronomers who have been working for more than a decade to put a spacecraft in orbit around Mercury for the first time, it was no simple feat to figure out how to get it there. That’s because a spacecraft launched from Earth and pointed directly toward Mercury would be traveling far too fast to slip into orbit when it reached the planet.
So in 2004 when NASA launched Mercury-bound Messenger, which is carrying a University of Colorado-built instrument, scientists sent it on a planet-circling journey that wound through the solar system’s inner planets for 4.9 billion miles — more than 100 times the shortest distance between Earth and Mercury. (See video below that shows Messenger’s path.)
Read the full story here.
A mysterious and deadly mountain:
In the past few days, reports sent back from searchers scouring the flanks of Gongga Shan, a spectacular mountain on the rim of the Tibetan plateau, spelled out the latest tragedy in the mountain’s mysterious and often-lethal history.
Three Boulder-based climbers are presumed to have been buried by an avalanche. The bodies of two, Wade Johnson and Jonathan Copp, have been found. Micah Dash is still missing.
The expedition to Gongga Shan was planned by Copp and Dash, who were considered by the climbing community to be outstanding alpinists. The pair, who had teamed up for other serious climbs in the past, were the kind of mountaineers drawn to the mystery of an unclimbed peak and not often daunted by either the risks or the dangers of forging a new route — which likely made the mountains of southwest China an appealing challenge.
The Gongga Shan massif sits east of the territory technically considered to be Tibet, but its position at the far eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau means that, culturally speaking, the mountain is far more Tibetan than Chinese, according to Galen Rowell’s 1983 book, “Mountains of the Middle Kingdom.”
Read the full story here.
Fourmile was prone to catastrophic fires:
In the last five years, Tom Neuer cut down hundreds of trees on the couple of acres that surrounded his home on Nancy Mine Road in Fourmile Canyon.
Over the long Labor Day weekend, he was at it again, removing unhealthy trees, clearing the underbrush and doing whatever else seemed necessary to mitigate the chances that a wildfire could one day destroy his home.
But on Monday, when Neuer and his wife, Anna, were cleaning up the debris from their weekend efforts at about 10 a.m., they smelled smoke. An hour and a half later, their house was gone.
“It was so windy that day — there’s no mitigation in the world,” Neuer said, trailing off. “It was a firestorm.”
No one could say that Neuer, a former firefighter, didn’t understand the risks associated with living in the densely forested mountains. He was so aware of the risks, in fact, that he bought an old fire truck that used to belong to the Four Mile Fire Department and stationed it at his house. He already had an 8,000-gallon underground water tank at his home, but he needed the truck — which provided an extra 1,000 gallons of water storage — for its pump and its water hose.
Read the full story here.
Finding Everett Ruess:
The e-mail was not particularly interesting, and had it not been for the persistence of its sender, the mystery — that for some has become an obsession — of a young adventurer’s disappearance in the lonely Utah desert 75 years ago might still be unsolved.
The request appeared in anthropologist Dennis Van Gerven’s inbox last summer: Could he have a look at a mandible found somewhere on the Navajo Nation?
“That was not particularly unusual,” said Van Gerven, a researcher at the University of Colorado, at a Thursday news conference in New York. “I often get questions about bones and requests to look at bones that someone somehow has found. I was actually not interested.”
But David Roberts, a contributing editor at National Geographic Adventure magazine, insisted. He believed this fragment of a jaw bone could belong to Everett Ruess, a talented young artist and writer whose descriptions of his frequent wilderness wanderings have earned him comparisons to naturalist John Muir.
Read the full story here.
Top 7 trail towns:
From all points of the compass, Trail Runner magazine selected the best trail running towns you may not know about.
UNDER THE BIG SKY
Bozeman, Montana
By the Numbers
30 trailheads located within an hour’s drive of town.
11.25 hours to fill the Bridger Ridge Run to its 300-runner capacity.
38 price in dollars for a can of bear spray, essential running gear in Bozeman’s high mountains.
GO IF … You want to run every day of the week in a different mountain range. Within 100 miles of Bozeman, a hip college town of 32,000, you can be at a trailhead in the Bridgers, Crazies, Gallatins, Absarokas, Beartooths, Madisons or Tobacco Roots. But you needn’t stray far from town to get a taste of the area’s delicious singletrack, which often peeks above the Douglas firs to traverse alpine meadows and drink in the Big Sky state’s huge views.
Read the full story here.