Dean Krakel

Feb 15, 2025 | coloradosun.com | Dean Krakel |Jason Blevins

It’s a tiny bump in Colorado’s ski-country landscape, but the city of Gunnison’s Cranor Hill has kept locals on snow since the 1960s. Cranor Hill opened as a private ski area in 1962 and was sold to the city a few years later. The Poma surface lift climbs a little more than 300 feet and serves four runs and a bit of . It’s one of several city-owned ski areas in Colorado that thrive amid the giants of the U.S. resort industry. Steamboat Springs took over its downtown Howelsen Hill in 1937.

Mar 30, 2024 | durangoherald.com | Rachel Estabrook |Dean Krakel

Legislation under consideration would ease the way for new homes in Colorado to adopt water-recycling systems. It would change state laws that have made the state one of the slowest in the region to adopt the tool to conserve water in the drought-prone Southwest. The bill targets rules over in-home recycling of “graywater,” lightly contaminated water from the laundry, shower, bath, or bathroom sink that can be treated and reused for toilet flushing and outdoor watering.

Mar 10, 2024 | the-journal.com | Caitlyn Kim |Dean Krakel

Roby Myers of the Montezuma County Noxious Weed program uses a Cat 309 Excavator to clear a pasture of Russian olive and tamarisk trees on Red Canyon Farm near Cortez, Colorado on April 28, 2022. The Excavator grinds the noxious weeds down so that they can be sprayed and killed nearer to their root level. The Excavator can clear more land of noxious weeds in a day than a team of workers could do in weeks clearing the fields by hand.

Sep 3, 2023 | coloradosun.com | Dean Krakel

Gunnison — Paula wandered room to room in the newly constructed home in Gunnison’s Lazy K neighborhood, admiring the faucets, the dishwasher, the bathrooms, the storage closets, the window views, while her 5-year-old granddaughter Betsy spun through the spacious rooms like a tiny dervish. The freshly painted newness, the working plumbing and light fixtures, so different from the dilapidated mobile home in the Frontier Land mobile home park that her family called home for the past 13 years.