Today's Sports

We have very little in the way of red fall colors in this area. However, we do have a native heuchera, closely related to the coral bells that are known to every gardener.

It bears a spike of greenish-white flowers in summer and grows in a dinner plate-size clump of leaves that turn a bright orange-red in fall.

Wild strawberries also produce a few red leaves in fall, and some of the many varieties of potentilla also have red leaves, but all of these are so well concealed among the grasses and other plants that they are often overlooked.

By Craig Harper
For the Courier

THORNTON — Evergreen became this year’s Murphy’s Law poster child for high school gymnastics in Colorado.

“We just had a rough season,” second-year coach Chancey Hines said after the Lady Cougars, who won the 2011 title in 4A, finished fifth out of six teams at the Oct. 31-Nov. 1 state meet at Thornton High School.

Evergreen senior point guard Nathan Haas will miss the first month of the 2014-15 boys basketball season after being diagnosed with a hairline fracture of the L4 vertebrae. He also injured the L5 vertebrae after landing wrong on a 360 dunk attempt during open gym basketball practice in mid-October.

He’ll be sidelined eight weeks from the injury date, putting him on the shelf through the Christmas break. Evergreen opens its season Dec. 2 at Gateway.

“I feel like I let my team down a little bit, (but) they’ll be fine,” Haas said.

While hiking through the winter woods, the persistent call of chickadees will often alert you to the presence of a mixed flock of winter birds. These flocks usually consist of only a few chickadees, two or three nuthatches, and possibly a song sparrow, a downy woodpecker and a few dark-eyed juncos.

Juncos are small, mostly gray members of the finch family, which are regular winter visitors at most local feeders. In 2000, the many species of juncos were brought together as only two species: the dark-eyed junco and the yellow-eyed junco.