LAKEWOOD — Her gold was in the bag.

They all were, technically. The night before she rewrote Colorado’s record book, Addison Ritzenhein, the Niwot senior who’s run like almost no teen distance runner ever has, went into her closet and pulled out a dozen state medals. As she laid them out side-by-side, all the miles started talking back.

Addy and her dad had found themselves waxing about the moments and the memories during a Friday night drive. It was the eve of her final CHSAA state track meet. The last ride.

“I want you to bring them (Saturday) morning,” Dathan Ritzenhein, head coach at On Athletics Club in Boulder, told his daughter when he saw the medals. He suggested putting all of them in a big bag and bringing it to Jeffco Stadium on Saturday.

“And then we’ll take them out at the end (of the meet). And we’re going to line them all up. I want to take a picture of you with all of them.”

Dad had a hunch.

Company was coming.

At a record pace, too.

“I wanted to have a perfect ending to my entire high school career,” Addy said after setting a state mark in the 4A girls 1600 meters in her final CHSAA event. “And I just had to remind myself that I’d done everything I could up to this moment.”

Move over, Wendy Koenig. Make some room, Melody Fairchild. The Kaltenbachs? Scooch over. Emma Coburn, Katie Rainsberger and Elise Cranny? You, too. If Ritzenhein isn’t the greatest girls prep distance runner in Colorado history, her closing kick made one heck of a case.

• Viewers can observe the venomous snakes as they emerge from hibernation, bask and give birth.
• The camera provides close-up views of the snakes’ features, such as their pupils and forked tongues.

Guarantee you won’t stick your hand in a rock crevice without first looking while hiking after you watch the Colorado RattleCam livestream of a rattlesnake mega den.

Yikes! Viewing the livestream is like watching a scary movie, equally entertaining and terrifying.

The mega den on undisclosed private property in Larimer County is crawling with the venomous snakes now that sunny weather has returned.

Project RattleCam is a collaboration between Cal Poly, Central Coast Snake Services and Dickinson College that allows viewers to observe rattlesnakes a lot closer than you would ever want to get in an effort to educate the public about these reptiles with a reputation.

A high-definition camera continually scans and zooms in and out on the rocky outcropping, where rattlesnakes slither among the rocks, bask in the sun and will give birth to live babies at this rookery, or communal birthing site, in late August and early September.

Watching the May 12 livestream, which includes a live chat, was fascinating.

The camera zoomed to show the patterns on the snakes that slowly slithered among the lichen-splotched rocks, a rattlesnake resting its head on a rock while soaking in the sun and rattlesnakes hiding in the brush.

The highlight was the camera capturing a rattlesnake muscling along a rock shelf. It zoomed so close you could see the vertical, slit-like pupils; pit organs on the snake’s face used to detect heat from prey; and the black forked tongue probing the air to locate prey and check out its environment.

Unless you want to get some work done, the best way to view the livestream is checking in every so often to scan the stream and see when the camera detects a rattlesnake. Otherwise, the livestream can take you down a rabbit hole, or in this case a rattlesnake den.

Here’s a timeline for your rattlesnake viewing pleasure

• April-May: Rattlesnakes emerge from hibernation.
• Early June: Most of the snakes travel downhill from the den to nearby meadows and shrublands where they spend the summer searching for food.
• Late August-early September: Pregnant rattlesnakes return to the den to give birth.
• Late September-October: The rest of the rattlesnakes return to the den.

To improve food access and build a healthier community, Boulder County, Colo. Public Health’s Healthy Eating, Active Living (HEAL) team collaborated with the city of Boulder on its comprehensive plan. The HEAL team analyzed best practices in nutritious food access and sustainable agriculture in comparable communities across the nation to help inform its recommendations for city planning, according to Amelia Hulbert, Boulder County Public Health’s Healthy Eating, Active Living (HEAL) lead.

“A comprehensive plan is visionary, it’s long range,” Hulbert said. “It should not just be a document that fits on the shelf and doesn’t get used, so when you have the opportunity to either create something new or update it, how do you make sure it [outlines] goals and policies that are going to support the work that you know needs to happen?

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Boulder County’s “Improving Food Access and Health for Boulder Residents Through Municipal Comprehensive Planning” initiative was the 2025 NACo Achievement Award “Best in Category” winner in Planning. 

“We wanted a place to specifically call out public health priorities, so when it came time to talk about allocating funding or anything like that, we can point to it and say, ‘As a county, we said that food access is important. We said that air quality monitoring is important.’”

When starting the process of creating the city’s comprehensive plan, City of Boulder staff reached out to the state health department looking for subject matter expertise on food access, which is how the HEAL team got involved, Hulbert said. 

“I think there’s this through line of ‘planners are planners, and they’re usually not subject matter experts,’” Hulbert said. “And so, when they seek out subject matter expertise, how can we make sure those connections can easily be made to people in their own community who are going to not only know the content, but know the issues? I think it’s a cool process, and others could totally do the same thing.”

The HEAL team analyzed comprehensive plans from a dozen municipalities like Boulder, including Ann Arbor, Mich.; Asheville, N.C.; Burlington, Vt. and Provo, Utah. Factors considered when choosing the municipalities included population size, economic and demographic makeup and communities with a mix of urban, suburban and unincorporated rural land, according to Hulbert. 

Olivia Ott, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Public Health Associate working with the HEAL team, identified 34 model policies from the plans and categorized them into five themes to compare against the City of Boulder’s existing plan: healthy food access, sustainability, built environment, equity/culture and local agriculture. 

“We’re usually looking to a couple key cities across the nation that we would consider cutting edge and innovative,” Hulbert said. “So, we just applied that methodology to something very specific, of digging into, ‘How are their plans structured? What are they saying?’ And then thinking about, ‘Does it make sense for our community?’ And then [assessing] ‘What are other things that are really specific to our community?’”

Factoring in the identified best practices, Ott scored the city’s plan into three categories: “Present” in Boulder’s current plan, “Somewhat Present” and “Absent.” 

“That kind of grading system actually worked really well, and it really resonated with the planning team,” Hulbert said. “You could tell that they were like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re doing really well here.’ And then, it was really specific, of ‘Hey, other people are talking about this one thing, and you all aren’t.’ I think it was just put in a way that they could really absorb.”

The HEAL team’s research and recommendations were presented to the Boulder and Broomfield County’s Food Security Network (BBFSN), a community group made up of people with lived experience of food insecurity and organizations that serve food insecure individuals, that were providing input on the city’s comprehensive plan. The HEAL team’s findings helped inform the BBFSN’s recommendations to the planning department. 

While the HEAL team had the expertise and staffing to do the research, it was “critically important” to then integrate community engagement with the BBFSN into the work, Hulbert noted. Final recommendations for the city plan from the BBFSN address food access through six different categories: transportation, land use, housing, climate, economic development and food systems. 

“We did what was within our wheelhouse, and then we knew that there was another group who has a totally different wheelhouse, so it was how could we then pass off what we’ve done and have them take it a step further?” Hulbert said. “Because I think what they brought is more of that lived experience community storytelling. Olivia can say, ‘It’s important to emphasize culturally relevant foods.’ And then there’s likely a community member that can actually give real voice to that and why that matters.”