YOUR AD HERE »

Scott Stanford: Ready for a busy summer

Scott Stanford

School’s out for summer, and so is our Sunday education page.

No worries — our dedicated page of education news and notes will return when the school year does. But after watching us scramble to find relevant education topics to write about for five consecutive summers, I decided that we would be better served devoting that space to a different topic during June, July and August.

Our Environment page launches Sunday. It will be on Page 6A, where the Education page typically runs. Mike Lawrence, who covers education and politics for the Pilot & Today, will lead our environmental coverage.



This is not an effort to promote some green agenda. I’m far to the right of most on environmental issues — I don’t recycle, I care a lot more about the logger than about the spotted owl, and I believe that if it weren’t for man’s intervention there would be a lot fewer trees.

That said, I recognize the importance of our surrounding natural resources to this region. Topics to be covered on our environment page include management of our national forests, access to public lands, wilderness areas, wildfire risks, bark beetle infestations and climatology. We’ll kick off the page on Sunday with a Tom Ross story about thinning of national forest land in North Routt County.



Our Environment page is just a piece of what will be an extremely busy summer for us. Also on our schedule is the launching of At Home, a new quarterly magazine, and an in-depth reporting project about the Yampa River.

At Home is a full-gloss magazine that debuts in July and is dedicated to the Steamboat lifestyle. We have been working for months on the magazine’s first edition.

In it you can expect profiles of local residents, first-person narratives about outdoors experiences, workout tips from local trainers, profiles of area chefs with inviting recipes, tours of some of Steamboat’s finest homes and much more. Every member of our newsroom will have a hand in the magazine. Longtime photographer and reporter John F. Russell has done most of the photo work for the magazine, and veteran copy editor Allison Miriani is leading the design.

Since 2002, we have annually devoted significant space to an in-depth reporting series that runs for several weeks in the summer. Previous topics included affordable housing in 2002, issues affecting women and girls in 2003, the struggles facing ranchers in Routt County in 2004 and the impact of immigration on Northwest Colorado in 2005. This year, we will examine the Yampa River and the economic and social impacts the river has on the communities that are along it.

We will start at the headwaters and end where the Yampa empties into the Green River. In between, we’ll cover all the topics related to the river such as water rights, conflicts between recreational and agricultural users, development pressures, river health and the river’s future. Lawrence and Ross are the reporters on the project. Tyler Arroyo is the lead photographer and Jayme Elrod is the lead designer.

I’m very proud of the projects we have done in the past, and I promise this one will live up to those standards.

If you have thoughts or input about our reporting series, the new magazine or the environment page, you know where to find me.

From the Editor appears Thursdays in Steamboat Today. Send questions to Scott Stanford at sstanford@steamboatpilot.com, or call him at 871-4221.


Support Local Journalism

Support Local Journalism

Readers around Steamboat and Routt County make the Steamboat Pilot & Today’s work possible. Your financial contribution supports our efforts to deliver quality, locally relevant journalism.

Now more than ever, your support is critical to help us keep our community informed about the evolving coronavirus pandemic and the impact it is having locally. Every contribution, however large or small, will make a difference.

Each donation will be used exclusively for the development and creation of increased news coverage.