Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2024 i 5280 Magazine

PERKINS COIE is proud to congratulate our Denver partners selected for 5280’s Top Lawyer recognition. For 26 years, Perkins Coie has served as a trusted advisor to clients throughout the Rocky Mountain region and beyond, with a focus on service excellence. We are privileged to assist the businesses and organizations that make our community a great place to live and work. PerkinsCoie.com Perkins Coie LLP Lawyer Advertising…

From 2019 to 2020, Colorado’s GDP remained static at $397 billion, leading many financial prognosticators to foresee a recession. They were wrong. Over the next two years, the Centennial State’s economy leapfrogged the pandemic, high inflation, and a war in Ukraine on its way to 24 percent growth. Now, in 2024, economists are predicting that the country will avoid a recession but finally experience a slowdown. So we spoke with local experts to find tips for weathering an idling economy—just in case the pundits are right this time. › Perfect Your Cooking Skills Although Denver’s inflation was higher than the national average this past September (5.4 percent to 3.7 percent, respectively), Bill Craighead, program director of the University of Colorado Colorado Springs’ Economic Forum, expects prices to level off in…

It was the last day of a tour in Italy’s Ortler Alps, and Jeff Banks was guiding his clients up a steep slope with crampons on their boots and skis on their backs. Once they reached the top, they’d click into their bindings and enjoy deep powder on the way down to well-earned beers and warm strudel. Another group, led by Banks’ mentor, was about five minutes ahead of them, and around 40 other guides and their wards had hiked the same slope in the preceding days. So when an avalanche broke right at his feet, Banks only had a second to be surprised. Then he thought, This is how we die. Banks wasn’t just worried that his group might be buried alive; the slide was sure to drag him…

Which attorneys did you survey? All licensed attorneys in the seven-county metro area were welcome to participate in our survey, which went live on 5280.com in May 2023. We reached out to more than 17,700 licensed attorneys actively registered with the Colorado Supreme Court’s Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel and connected with local bar associations to make sure we received a strong response to the peer-reviewed ballot. How did you ensure that big law firms didn’t stuff the ballot box? Good question! In order to vote, attorneys had to register with their work email addresses and Colorado attorney registration numbers. We monitored IP addresses to make sure one person wasn’t voting for everyone in a firm. We checked out any suspicious votes—and tossed them if necessary. Were the ballot results…

Summer at Kent Denver School summer@kentdenver.org kentdenver.org/summer24 With over 100 camps for Arts, Academics, Innovation and Technology, Athletics and our Tiny Farm Day Camp, Summer at Kent Denver offers exciting opportunities for all children ages 4-18. Adventure Quest™ with Renaissance Adventures renaissanceadventures.com | (303) 786-9216 Join a mythic quest! Campers read maps, solve mysteries & riddles, overcome dynamic challenges, & battle using foam swords. Designed to develop teamwork, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, & communication. Air & Space Summer Camp Nedra Hall | (303) 360-5360 x125  wingsmuseum.org/camp Take off for a lot of fun this summer at Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Summer Camp! Your camper will be immersed in a week-long aerospace experience. Colorado Watersports Summer Camps info@coloradowatersports.com  coloradowatersports.com Our camps include sailing, paddle boarding, kayaking, and more.…

It’s been more than five years, but I can still remember feeling the hot flash that coursed through my body the moment I realized I had barely escaped being scammed out of $1,000. The ruse had been so persuasive, so meticulously crafted, so professional—yet more than a sense of relief, I felt embarrassed. I was also very, very angry. It was that unpleasant experience, and a few others before and after it, that made me understand, even just a little bit, how Danielle Shoots, Regan Byrd, Brenda Herrera Moreno, and so many other Coloradans likely felt when they began to comprehend the level of deception they say they encountered at the hands of a person they thought they could trust—a man who went by the name Aaron Clark. In this…

Each episode of HGTV’s Rico To The Rescue starts the same way. Footage of crushed concrete piles, half-demolished walls, and exposed plumbing plays while a dejected Denver-area homeowner explains that the chaos is due to a dodgy contractor. Enter the reality show’s protagonist, local home restoration expert Rico León, who, alongside interior designer Poonam Moore, saves the botched renovation. Securing a spot on the small screen was the result of León’s own disaster turned blessing. A Pittsburgh native, León landed in Denver in 2018 when his car broke down en route to Los Angeles. He decided to stay and began working in emergency restoration and construction. It didn’t take long for him to spot a new business endeavor. “There were a lot of contractors who meant well and were good…

Porchetta might translate from Italian to “little pig,” but the traditional dish—skin-on pork belly wrapped around a boneless loin and slow-roasted for hours—requires big effort. “You cook it on a spit, and then [to get the skin crispy], you ladle super-hot oil over it,” says AJ Paloni, chef-owner of the 10-month-old Porchetta House, a lunch-to-late-night sandwich shop in City Park West. While Paloni hopes to someday go full rotisserie with his recipe, his current oven-roasted adaptation doesn’t sacrifice the original’s crispy yet tender texture for the sake of ease. Case in point: Each day, the chef scores, rolls, trusses, and cooks two to three porchettas for the next day’s service. Then, he slices and sears individual portions to order on the flat top to regain that all-important crunch, an extra…

COLORADO • MARCH 9, 2021 The 10-tops were draped with dark blue tablecloths. White candles were aglow as centerpieces. Wine glasses clinked and applause filled the air in the ballroom at the Hotel Boulderado as Arron Clark strode across the stage. Wearing a pink sweater and dark-rimmed glasses and sporting a neatly trimmed beard that faded into an Afro, Clark listened as Boulder’s business elite took a break from their steak dinners to applaud as he accepted the Boulder Chamber’s Startup of the Year award. Equity Solutions, Clark’s nine-month-old company, which offered diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings, had just won one of Colorado’s most prestigious business awards. But Clark didn’t smile. Instead, the honoree began reading from a sober speech he’d prepared. “The year 2020 will be marked by history…

When the Illinois Holocaust Museum asked John Pregulman if he’d photograph a group of Holocaust survivors, the former fashion and dance photographer turned investment banker discovered that his subjects’ biggest fear was being forgotten. So John set out to document as many survivors as he could, a mission that would lead to an even bigger calling after John photographed a woman in Orlando, Florida, with the help of his now wife, Amy Pregulman. “Like most grandmothers, she wanted to feed me after I took her picture,” John says, “but when she opened her fridge, there was nothing in it.” Research revealed that around a third of Holocaust survivors in the United States live in poverty (or nearly so), inspiring the couple to found Kavod in 2015. Last year, the Denver-based…

After serving in the Iraq War, Sean Azzariti came home to Denver in 2005 with PTSD. Although Colorado had medical marijuana at the time, he couldn’t purchase it to treat that illness because PTSD wasn’t recognized under the state statute. The omission inspired Azzariti to champion pot for everyone. He was such a passionate advocate, in fact, that the framers of Amendment 64 arranged for Azzariti to be the first person in U.S. history to buy state-sanctioned recreational weed when Colorado commenced sales in January 2014. Ten years later, we spoke with Azzariti, now a chemist for a cannabis company, about the trip legal marijuana has taken after his historic score. 5280: You’ve been enmeshed in the cannabis scene since the beginning. How has it changed? Sean Azzariti: Colorado used…

Sometimes nostalgia is the greatest seasoning of all. Other times…not so much. Fifty-year-old Casa Bonita falls into the latter camp, where no one pretends the food they grew up eating inside the massive pink eatertainment venue was any good. You went for the experience of stepping into another world, one where cliff divers catapulted themselves off 30-foot waterfalls and a man in a gorilla suit inexplicably wandered around a faux Mexican courtyard. You did not go for the enchiladas. In what has to be the world’s longest soft opening, Casa Bonita is still not really open to the public, in the sense that you can’t make a last-minute reservation or stop in when you get a hankering for a puppet show. The only way to breach the heavy wooden doors…