When it comes to home, chimneys feel quintessential… a fixed part of home architecture that signals charm without explanation. But the earliest homes had no such crowning accouterment. Before the stack became a mainstay, fire lived at the center of the room while smoke drifted upward in search of an exit that rarely amounted to more than a hole in the roof. Warmth was uneven, and breathing was compromised. 

Colorado’s holiday season has a habit of sneaking up in plain sight. One week the grocery store is still rearranging squash, and the next, you’re driving past a cul-de-sac where someone has committed to a lighting display that could power an entire mountain town. Invitations multiply. Events return from hibernation. Local shops try to outdo themselves with cheerful efficiency, which is honestly much appreciated.

Holiday shopping has a way of testing a person’s resolve. One minute you’re circling a mall parking lot while visions of peppermint mochas and steep discounts dance in your head. The next, you’re questioning every life choice that brought you to a big-box checkout line moving at the speed of your mom that one time she tried to hang the holiday lights.

Colorado wolf reintroduction started with the narrow 2020 ballot initiative that required the state to restore gray wolves by the end of 2023. It passed by a margin tight enough to reveal a state split not on science, but on identity. Urban counties voted yes. Rural counties voted no. The mandate stuck.

Every house listing in Colorado comes with square footage, school-district ratings, and maybe a view. Rarely does it mention the land’s deeper history. Yet the terrain beneath our yards, the ridge lines behind our homes, and the plains beyond our fences have been shaped for centuries by Indigenous nations who called them home long before property maps appeared.

When people picture Colorado architecture, they tend to think of Denver’s glass angles, Boulder’s solar confidence, or the politely rustic modernism of every new build from Golden to Fort Collins. But move a few hours in any direction, and the geometry changes. The skyline shrinks, the materials simplify, and design stops trying so hard to impress. Outside the Front Range, architecture isn’t an act of expression so much as an act of endurance.

Colorado remembers its dead in style. The state’s history isn’t tucked away in textbooks so much as it’s carved into granite and lichen, on windswept hillsides and beneath improbable aspens. Every grave tells a version of how the West was lived and, as the case may be, how it wasn’t (lived). Some markers honor ambition, others rumor; a few hold the weight of courage, injustice, and unfinished reckonings.

From the gunslingers and silver barons to the diplomats, abolitionists, and soldiers of conscience, Colorado’s graves tell the story of how we got here.