Delta coaches Luis Meza, center, and Clayton Curtis congratulate 152-pound senior Hunter Brasfield after an upset win sent him into the 4A Region 4 semifinals.
Hotchkiss senior Joe Boyle controls Ruben Chagoya of Basalt to win a 3A Region 1 title. He is one of 7 Hotchkiss state qualifiers.
Hotchkiss and Paonia boys will square off this week on the basketball courts. Both are 6-4 in league play.
Delta senior Brooke Taylor scores two of her 12 points against Summit after grabbing an offensive rebound.
Paonia 195-pounder Tyler “TK” Kendall sets Rangely’s Drew Collins up for a pin.
Paonia freshman Bo Pipher sets TJ Richard of North Park up for a pin in Saturday’s regional semifinal round. He is one of 13 Paonia wrestlers headed to state!
Surrounded by coaches and his dad, Conner Beard signs Letter of Intent to play football for the University of Nebraska Kearney.
Hotchkiss' Jacobe Galley signed a Letter of Intent to play football and study engineering at Colorado Mesa University.
Hotchkiss senior Cody Bartlett signed his National Letter of Intent to run cross-country for Hawaii Pacific University.
Last week's regular-season baseball finale in Gypsum was a victory for the Panthers as they rolled past Eagle Valley 12-1. The win left Delta with a league record of 12-2 and an overall mark of 16-3.
It was a tale of two games for Cedaredge's baseball team last week. The Bruins were on the road in Bayfield to face Peak to Peak's Pumas in game one of elimination play.
Photo by Tamie Meck Kylie Hodges releases the discus at the Bruin Invitational. Hodges will compete in both the discus and shot put at this week’s state 2A track meet in Lakewood. Teammate Daryl Batt had her best throw of the season and is going to state in…
Photo by Tamie Meck Senior Josiah Spano, of Paonia, was an All-Conference first team selecton in the 2A WSL for the 2012-13 hoop year.This year's Class 2A All-Conference and All-State honors in the 2013 Photo by Tamie Meck Paonia High School senior Annavah…
What grows on our dry slopes and plateaus? Well, often it looks like nothing much! But there are "basic bushes" and most of them are saltbrush.
Photo and drawing by Evelyn Horn Four-winged SaltbrushAnd most of the time, they don't look like much — like the photo to the right, taken along 2600 Road. But they are crucial to our landscape for, without them to hold the soil and the scarce moisture, no other plants could survive.
This plant has the male and female flowers on different plants. In the spring, you might (if you're lucky) notice the three-millimeter-wide clusters of yellow pollen of the male flowers. The quarter-inch-wide leaves are up to an inch long. And from a distance, the whole plant looks gray-green giving us the botanical name Atriplex canescens (Atriplex is an ancient Latin name and canescens means "whitish").
These two-foot-tall plants are hardly noticeable most of the year, but when fall-winter comes, the female plants are covered with yellowish-tan seed heads. Each seed head has four half-inch membranes expanded outward, and in the center is the tiny seed, one to two millimeters wide. It's almost invisible to the human eye but a real attraction for birds. I've watched them carry off a seed head and peck it to pieces to get the seed. Most bushes on the 'dobes are members of the Goosefoot Family (Chenopodiaceae).
Interestingly, among the many small herbaceous members of this family are domestic spinach, sugar beets and table beets. But the alien weed Russian thistle is in the family too, as well as our native greasewood and shadscale.
No doubt many uses were found for this worldwide plant family, but to me, its greatest value is stabilizing our 'dobe lands. Right now, four-winged saltbrush can be seen along barren road cuts and steep 'dobe slopes. When we don't have flowers, we can still admire the seeds.
Four-winged