Reporter, producer, cinematographer, editor
In downtown La Junta, a rural town with a population of about 7,100 people, businesses painted their front windows with spiderwebs and adorned their buildings with super-sized tarantulas.
The decorations came ahead of the town’s Tarantula Festival, an annual event that started in 2022 to celebrate the yearly mating season of thousands of tarantulas in southeastern Colorado.
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An accessible forest bathing group led by Serena Vogel allows those with mobility issues to practice forest bathing to decrease stress hormones.
Cinematographer, editor
Raising both neurotypical and neurodivergent children comes with its own unique challenges. Balancing attention, support, and understanding is no easy task — but it’s essential to ensure that every child feels seen, heard, and valued.
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More than a dozen volunteers planted willow trees October 25 to stabilize a river bank outside of Eleven Mile Canyon.
The project comes two years after a dam was removed from the river, which significantly lowered the amount of water, but also allowed trout to swim upstream, producing more quantity and diversity of offspring.
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Each spring, CPW catch and release hundreds of walleye fish, with a statewide goal of harvesting 120-130 million eggs from the captured fish. Walleye don’t have a high success rate of spawning naturally, so CPW fertilizes and raises the eggs themselves to make sure there are enough fish in Colorado’s waterways for recreational fishing.
CPW reached its statewide egg goal despite record low snowpack and uncertainty that warm water conditions brought, CPW aquatic biologist Carrie Tucker said. Normally, when CPW starts spawning walleye at Pueblo Reservoir, water temperatures are around 38 degrees; this year, the water temperature has been 43 degrees, with some parts of the reservoir reaching 50 degrees.
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Meet our latest Difference Maker: Brian Jordan.
When it came to sports, there wasn’t much Brian Jordan couldn’t do. On the baseball diamond, he was an All-Star, patrolling the outfield for the Cardinals, Braves, Dodgers, and Rangers. And on the gridiron, he was a take-no-prisoners safety for the Atlanta Falcons.
But the one arena where Jordan faced a truly uneven playing field was the classroom—where reading was a struggle, thanks to undiagnosed learning differences that went unnoticed for years.
Now, as a dad who’s gotten his son the help he never had, Jordan is going to bat for students with dyslexia, using his platform as a children’s book author and literacy advocate to rewrite the narrative.
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On the Poss family farm, portions of fields typically lush with wheat and other grains are dry and cracked. Many of the plants that did emerge are wilted and parched.
About a third of the land — 330 acres — is dedicated to dryland grain farming, including triticale, millet, rye and 10 varieties of wheat. This year, the family expects to lose about half of their normal grain yields due to the unseasonably warm temperatures and ongoing drought across the state.
Read the full article by Priya Shahi here.
Editor
The Rocky Mountain PBS news team has traveled over 32,000 miles throughout Colorado to bring you over 380 original stories this year. This is the 2025 RMPBS sizzle/year-in-review video.
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The Trump administration rescinded more than $1 billion of previously allocated funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, cuts that have an outsized impact on rural radio stations.
Cinematographer, editor
Zachariah Ohora was already a famous children’s book artist celebrated for his unique art style.
But mix a personal experience with inclusive education with his passion for treasuring and you’ve got the inspiration for a kid’s cartoon series that is making a significant impact helping neurodivergent kids see themselves in Carl’s collective adventures. For this, Ohora is our latest Difference Maker.