Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsOK Go’s Damian Kulash stands atop the stage barricade and greets fans as confetti rains down at Indieverse, Sept. 13, 2025, at Levitt Pavilion in Denver.
CPR News reported stories from across the state and beyond this year. From Alamosa to Yuma, Towaoc to Walden, the state Capitol in Denver to the nation's Capitol in Washington, D.C. Italy was even on the assignment list.
We witnessed Coloradans in some of their best and hardest moments, celebrating the highs and grappling with lows. Here's just some of what our photographers and reporters saw, along with links to the original stories if you want a deeper dive into our 2025.
January
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsIt’s about 5:30 p.m. in the barn on Jan. 22, and Tenley Weathers carries a bale of hay into a livestock trailer. Hay, food, stall equipment and animal care products all get loaded between the time Tenley and her brother Ty get home from school in Yuma, and when dinner goes on the table up at the house. They will leave for the National Western Stock Show in the morning.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteRussell Young picks up the "wind phone" he installed at Littleton's Columbine United Church to say a few words to his late wife.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsErnest House Jr., Ute Mountain Ute, delivers a land acknowledgement on the opening day of the Colorado Legislature.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsA member of the crowd rests during speeches ahead of the Martin Luther King Day Marade in Denver. The ceremony was limited this year due to the frigid temperatures, but still featured a prayer invocation, the passing of the torch and a roster of speakers including former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb and his wife, former Colorado state Rep. Wilma Webb.
February
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsDemocratic Rep. Jason Crow holds a town hall at an Aurora high school. About 1,400 people packed into the main auditorium, with a few hundred more watching from a screen in an auxiliary room. This was Crow’s first town hall since Republicans took over the White House, House and Senate.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteDenver7 chief meteorologist Lisa Hidalgo and Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner ham up the weather report in front a green screen at the TV station's studio. Hidalgo has become a regular guest on Colorado Matters for weather and climate conversations.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveritePastor James Bawk sings with his congregation during the Colorado Kachin Baptist Church's weekly meeting in Aurora's Village Exchange Center. Formerly St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, the center is now home to four congregations that meet there on Sundays for the past decade in the heart of Aurora’s immigrant and refugee community.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsCripple Creek High School has overhauled itself in recent years. One idea has been to create career pathway programs — culinary, construction, and fire science — where students could get industry certificates and get to work without having to leave their community. Here, local firefighter Randy Munch works with two students in the school's hallways.
March
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteCarol Smith holds a photo of herself as a little boy in the 1960s, asking Santa Claus if he could be a girl for Christmas. Carol was among those we spoke with in the weeks running up to International Transgender Day of Visibility, about President Donald Trump's efforts to roll back diversity and inclusion policies.
Kiara Demare/CPR NewsFirst time volunteer, Anna Gremling's mud-covered boots, next to some of the bags of trash collected by Richards Rubbish Roundup in Colorado Springs. The group meets weekly to clean up Colorado Springs. In 2024 the organization gathered 44,520 pounds of litter.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsAn elk herd crosses Highway 125 on the Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge in North Park on the wasy from Granby to Walden. What makes a Colorado park a park? We spoke to geologists and historians for an answer. The answer? It's a bit elusive.
April
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsGround crews watch as a Lufthansa German Airlines Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger aircraft, taxis after landing at Denver International Airport. The jet’s wingspan is wider than a football field. It’s the first time this super jumbo jet ever landed at DIA.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsGabe Wilson, a curious, happy and bold 2-year-old, digs through a photographer’s camera bag, and finds a pair of glasses which he puts on his nose. He's been diagnosed with Bloom Syndrome, a rare genetic condition that among other challenges carries a higher risk of developing cancer. Like some other Colorado families with complex medical needs, his parents Ben and Alisa worry about federal research cuts.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsDakota Mossbrook assembles a Borealis fat bike in the company’s shop in Colorado Springs. Steve Kaczmarek founded Borealis in Colorado Springs 12 years ago, and about 80 percent of the parts the company uses come from China. Back in 2018, during Trump’s first term as president, Kaczmarek said the 25 percent tariffs Trump imposed and which President Joe Biden maintained cost the company $300,000. Now Borealis is feeling the tariff bite again.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsDr. Kristina Steinberg, a family medicine physician with Valley Wide Health Systems. Looming cuts to Medicaid would shake the entire San Luis Valley health care system, and its economy, she says. The region is one of the state’s oldest and poorest. Two in five of Alamosa County’s residents are enrolled in Health First Colorado, the state’s Medicaid program.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsLate afternoon light catches the west side of the snow-covered Sangre de Cristo mountains in the San Luis Valley of Colorado.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsColorado author Craig Childs reads from his new book, “The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light,” at the Mountain Words literature festival in Crested Butte, May 23, 2025. He describes the night sky as “not an absence of light; it is the presence of the universe.”
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsFalling out of the Scout River Surf Wave on the Arkansas River in Salida.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsHomeowners begin the job of cleaning up in the Elkhorn Ranch neighborhood north of Elizabeth, after a tornado touched down there the previous day. Numerous homes in the neighborhood were heavily damaged. No deaths or injuries were reported.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsDump trucks line up to receive loads of contaminate dirt at the site of a cleanup operation following a blowout and spill at a Chevron oil facility near Galeton. The spill was the largest in Colorado since at least 2015, and full clean-up may take 5 years.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsThe Bureau of Land Management held a wild horse auction on May 9-10, 2025, at the Greeley Stampede grounds. This round of 40 horses of varying age were held in pens for viewing on the first day. If you find yourself on a dirt road in a remote corner of Colorado, how can you tell if the horses you see are wild? Are they behind a fence? Probably not wild. If they approach you looking for a snack? Probably not wild.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsStudents at Warren Tech built a series of "homes," and under the supervision of firefighters and instructors, torched the structures, put out the flames, recovered a dead pig placed in the structures and examined it as part of an exercise for student firefighters and crime scene investigators.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsCharles Clements carries a rose and a sign saying “we don’t want a king!” Thousands of people took to Denver’s streets taking part in the No Kings protest.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteAriel Aramu, rapid response coordinator for Run For Their Lives, embraces Rachel Cohen as demonstrators complete a march into the annual Boulder Jewish Festival on Pearl Street Mall. The event came exactly one week since an attack on Boulder’s Pearl Street that injured 15 people and one dog.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsDebbie Hunsaker enjoys a drenching from a waterfall in the Yampa Mineral Springs pool at Glenwood Hot Springs. We were there to find out what different steps go into turning slightly green, semi-smelly fresh spring water into smell-free, safe, clean and soakable hot water.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsA summer mountain hiker passes a patch of yellow wildflowers on the Nystrom Trail in the Vasquez Wilderness between Berthoud Pass and Stanley Mountain.
John Daley/CPR NewsPaloma Masching, a high school student from Lakewood, played her cello for the dogs at the Denver Animal Shelter. She’s here through a program called Wild Tunes. The Houston-based nonprofit, founded in 2023 by a 10-year-old animal lover, organizes volunteers to play music to animals in shelters.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsA time exposure creates streaks out of car taillights at Buc-ee’s in Johnstown, at the intersection of Interstate 25 and Nugget Road. The business features a 74,000-square-foot building, fronted by 116 fuel pumps, is open around the clock. Now it wants to open something similar on I-25 near Palmer Lake.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsCausal Design CEO and Chief Economist Keith Ives carries his son past murals at the Posner Center in Denver, where he attends a support group for workers who lost their jobs as part of the Trump administration's layoffs. Ives’s company, which specializes in “making evidence-based programming affordable for NGOs, practical to field workers, and digestible to policymakers and the general public,” was dealt a “death knell” by Trump’s closure of USAID.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsIn this view from Great Sand Dunes National Park, early evening rain falls across the San Luis Valley, backlit and glowing by the low-angled sun.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsMovie Manor owner Shital Patelia scoops popcorn in the concession stand at the nearly 60-year-old Best Western Movie Manor in Monte Vista, a motel that overlooks its own drive-in theater. Three years ago, Patelia moved her family here from Aurora to buy and run both.
Lauren Antonoff Hart/CPR NewsNightlife photographer Shadows Gather had a new exhibition, "The Archives: 2019-Now," which was on view at the East Window gallery in Boulder. Gather has been photographing Denver’s queer, punk, goth and club scene since 2019.
Jenny Brundin/CPR NewsStudents across Jefferson County walk out of class to advocate against gun violence and in solidarity with students at Evergreen High School. An earlier shooting at Evergreen High School left two students injured and the shooter dead.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsOn aeronautical maps of Colorado, you will see it. Happy Butt Airport is in the unincorporated Arapahoe County town of Byers. It is not a misspelling of “butte” nor a vulgar joke. (Well, not too vulgar anyway.) The name is a tribute to pilot Robert Husted’s mother.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsYuma Old Threshers drivers mind four teams of horses harnessed to, and circling, a power unit that serves as the collective engine that drives vintage machinery that peels cob corn from its husks, and then separates kernels from their cobs. The demonstration is part of a weekend that celebrates historic farm life on the Eastern Plains.
Briana Heaney/KRCC NewsThis is what a "No Kings" protest looks like in tiny Westcliffe. Inflatable costumes were the order of the day across the country, and here on the eastern side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, as people from all over protested against the Trump Administration.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteBalloonists float over Albuquerque on the second day of the city's annual Balloon Fiesta. Many of the crews, representing 41 states and 12 countries, traveled thousands of miles to take part in the world’s largest hot air balloon launch — Mass Ascension at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Pagosa Springs pilot David Bair was among them.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsKatelyn Hemmer, in a greenhouse, trims onions for subscribers to Old Fort’s Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, program, at the Old Fort farm and campus in Hesperus.
Stina Sieg/CPR NewsA 10th Mountain Division soldier’s memory lives on in Italy, which he helped liberate 80 years ago. American Susannah LeVon smiles with Franco Torri, an Italian who knew her father, Hugh Evans, during World War II. The two met years after the war, and reconnected again this year, during a trip through Italy for descendants of the legendary U.S. Army unit that trained at Camp Hale in Colorado.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR News“Mustang,” the blue horse with red eyes rearing up on its hind legs that looks out over Peña Boulevard, Denver International Airport, and a landing Southwest passenger jet. Nicknamed "Blucifer," the sculpture has recently been spruced up.
Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteA Venezuelan couple embraces in their suburban home outside of Denver. They fled Venezuela in 2019 after she and her family were threatened while she was working at a local police department. Thousands of undocumented immigrants in Colorado could lose health care subsidies.
Bente Birkeland/CPR NewsIn this Oct. 12, 2025, photo taken in Denver, Colo., Jim Blane looks at his Joe Rosenthal photograph of Marines standing atop Mt. Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsA day of red, white, and blue - including the sandals. A voter drops off a ballot on Election Day in Denver’s Central Park neighborhood, Nov. 4, 2025
December
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsMariachi Las Dahlias takes the stage at the 10th annual Colorado Matters Holiday Extravaganza, held this year before a sold-out audience at the Mapleton Arts Center, Dec. 7, 2025.
Hart Van Denburg/CPR NewsStanding in a cloud of artificial snow, first-year Keystone snowmaking crew member Jake Lewis gives directions to a colleague, as crew boss Dylan Jenner drives away on a sled.
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