Good Colorado Sunday morning, friends.
I’m a gatherer, not a hunter. I’ll eat anything grown in my yard — or yours — and have zero qualms about consuming foraged berries or mushrooms or bread made from a culture that sat in a jar on the counter for weeks. I used to casually hang around my aunt’s garage freezer, hoping she’d share a slab of fish or a bear tenderloin shipped to her by my cousin in Alaska, but the closest I’ve gotten to actually hunting or fishing for my dinner is my grandfather griping about the risk of breaking a tooth on birdshot accidentally left in a pheasant by my great-uncle the wildlife officer.
People around me are great at hunting and fishing, but the truth is, I just don’t know how to do it. That’s why I loved this week’s cover story by Tracy Ross, which explores the surge of women hunting and fishing in Colorado and the few opportunities there are for them to get really good at the craft.
The Cover Story
Taking a shot at learning to hunt
When I was a kid growing up in southern Idaho, my dad would drop me off at his friend’s house to hang out with his daughter while the two men went hunting. This house was in the country and extremely boring. My friend and I complained we had “nothing to do” even though there were horses and cows and acres of fields to run around in. We stayed inside, talking, watching cartoons or sometimes heading to the barn for a change of scenery.
On one of those visits, I found myself lounging on a newly skinned deer pelt, whereupon a tick found a patch of my skin and burrowed in. I can vividly remember discovering it, screaming, waiting in terror until my dad returned and him using a match to try to coax it back out — a technique I have since learned makes the tick regurgitate the blood it just sucked back into your body. That was a good, good time.
The reason I bring it up is because of the hunting.
I grew up in a hunting family, and got my hunter’s ed card at age 12. The person who issued it spelled my name wrong — Tracie — and probably thought I’d never use it. I did not until a few years ago. But then something came over me. I yearned for agency. I wanted to experience the outdoors in a way I hadn’t in a lifetime of skiing-backpacking-boating-mountain biking. To feel less jittery about firearms, particularly the .357 Roberts rifle and pump-action shotgun my grandma left me. And I embarked on the long, intimidating, frustrating, often boring, sometimes exhilarating and ultimately self-empowering journey of becoming a hunter.
But what I’ve come to enjoy almost as much as learning to hunt is meeting women like me who are learning to hunt. It turns out there are a lot of us in Colorado, and we all have our individual reasons for hunting. What we’ve also faced are barriers to getting into the sport because, let’s face it, it’s still largely male dominated.
That’s why I was excited to get out on a hunt with some really cool ladies last month, and write about the efforts of one “adult-onset hunter,” firecracker and entrepreneur with big (and realized) dreams of helping more women become more self sufficient with a little bit of overt feminism and a lot of hard work.
READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE
The Colorado Lens
A lot of things got going this week, including the National Western Stock Show, Stock Show weather, the state legislature and the Denver Broncos’ first trip to the playoffs since back when Peyton Manning was quarterback. We’re counting on you, Bo Nix. Here are a few of our favorite images.
Flavor of the Week
Local star returns to help promote women’s pro hockey to Colorado
Almost a year ago, I wrote the story of Nicole Hensley, who grew up in Colorado watching Avalanche star goaltender Patrick Roy, and began her own journey guarding the net in competitive ice hockey. She grew into a youth, then collegiate and then international star — but like so many women before her, had few viable options for a professional career in the sport. Then, last January, she helped launch the Professional Women’s Hockey League, a six-team venture sturdily bankrolled by Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter.
A few months later, in late May, Hensley spun a 17-save shutout as Minnesota won the first PWHL title, and the league produced an average of nearly 5,500 fans per game, including some record-setting individual games played in larger arenas.
Fast forward to this weekend, when Hensley and her Minnesota Frost will face off at 1 p.m. Sunday against the Montreal Victoire in a PWHL game at Denver’s Ball Arena. It’s been quite a journey from her Lakewood cul-de-sac, where she was introduced to the sport, to the big stage. Hensley, the only Colorado player in the PWHL, will take the ice at the very same site where she took inspiration from Roy’s netminding those many years ago. The matchup is one of nine games PWHL teams are playing in cities across North America, in part as auditions for possible expansion. League officials will be gauging the fan response to the contest as one factor in growing the women’s pro game.
The weekend has featured a smorgasbord of opportunities for fans and girls who may one day fill Hensley’s skates. On Saturday, both teams held open practices followed by autograph sessions, and an Avalanche-sponsored Girls Try Hockey For Free event — registrations filled up fast — offered skills instruction from PWHL players and local youth coaches. Whatever ends up determining expansion to additional cities, Hensley told me last year: “It’s still the person-to-person that I think will sell the league.”
SunLit: Sneak Peek
“Esperanza’s Way” opens with backstories of three healing women
EXCERPT: In her previous book “Finding the Way,” Cindy Burkart Maynard reached back into 13th century Spain to explore the life of Amika, who became a healer through knowledge passed down from a “wise woman” in her Basque homeland. She raised an orphan, Esperanza, with an uncanny grasp of illness and healing. In “Esperanza’s Way,” Maynard focuses on the young girl Amika took under her wing in this novel that was a finalist for the Colorado Authors League award for Historical Fiction.
THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: Maynard, who has competed in triathlons and long-distance walking, leaned into that experience for inspiration to research a time and place that eventually became the setting for her writing. Here’s a slice of her Q&A:
SunLit: Tell us about creating this book. What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
Maynard: Several years ago, I walked the Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile pilgrimage route across northern Spain. Along the way, I learned that 200,000 people walked the Camino the year that I made the trek. I also learned that 800 years ago, in the mid-1200s, 200,000 people walked the Camino. I was thunderstruck. I couldn’t stop thinking about how their experience would have been different from my own. That curiosity sent me down the rabbit hole of reading and research about 13th century Spain and Italy. The more I learned the more fascinated I became.
READ THE INTERVIEW WITH CINDY BURKART MAYNARD
LISTEN TO A PODCAST WITH THE AUTHOR
Sunday Reading List
A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.
🌞 First things first, state lawmakers were sworn in and the legislature gaveled in. First-day positioning included six House Republicans declining to vote to certify the 2024 election results (that sent them to the statehouse) and Senate Democrats offering a bill described as a means to enforce Colorado’s large-capacity magazine ban that has much broader implications.
🌞 Gov. Jared Polis delivered his seventh State of the State speech, which was studded with commentary likely oblique to people not following state government 24/7. Jesse Paul and Brian Eason, plus a cast of many other reporters and editors, annotated the speech to provide context and point out the spots where news was quietly broken.
🌞 Ugh. Colorado was one of four states where homelessness among families with children more than doubled in 2024. Jennifer Brown dug into the stats in the HUD report and learned that the causes aren’t particularly shocking, starting with the affordability of housing.
🌞 ICYMI, Boulder still is in the running to nab the Sundance Film Festival from Park City, Utah in 2027. A decision is expected some time after Feb. 2, so it makes sense that state lawmakers would introduce a bill dangling a fat economic incentive for an unnamed global film festival. Jason Blevins unpacks the details.
🌞 In other Park City news, striking ski patrollers there reached an agreement with Vail Resorts, just in time for Sundance to start. Now we wait to learn how negotiations in Utah influence wage talks at Vail Resorts ski areas in Colorado. Jason Blevins is keeping tabs.
🌞 It could happen today, it could happen next week, but the second wave of gray wolves translocated to Colorado will happen as planned, despite a demand by stockgrowers and their allies that the program be paused. Tracy Ross reported on the long Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting last week where the request was denied.
🌞 Erica Breunlin hiked up St. Mary’s Glacier on a cold winter day with people on skis and snowshoes guided by the nonprofit Sober Outdoors on the hunt for the kind of peace and sense of well-being they were unable to find at the bottom of a beer.
Thanks for stopping by today. Here’s to a great week ahead! If you would like to help expand the Colorado Sunday crowd a bit, please share the link to Tracy’s story with people you think might enjoy it. And our membership store is always open if you know someone who isn’t getting this newsletter, but should: coloradosun.com/join.
— Dana & the whole staff of The Sun
Corrections & Clarifications
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