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Billy Rankin remembers a time not long ago when someone asked his 20-person guide team at Irwin Lodge in Crested Butte how many friends they’d had die in avalanches. 

Nearly everyone raised a hand for one friend, most kept it raised for two and Rankin left his hand up as the number soared to 10. Part of that was odds: Rankin has been a ski guide and avalanche course instructor for decades and lives in Crested Butte, which he said “has a pretty high tolerance for risk.” But it also shows how crushing the consequences of shaky decision-making in the backcountry can be, which is why Rankin encourages his students to study every active avalanche accident report published by the Colorado Avalanche Information Center in a given winter, looking for “the skull and crossbones, the red flags” that are always so much easier to see in retrospect than they are in the mountains.

CU Boulder and Ball Aerospace have been collaborating for decades to solve mysteries of the universe. That partnership was also the university’s first commercial spin-off and it greased the gears of an entrepreneurial engine that continues to power innovation within the university and far beyond. 

This week we said goodbye to our favorite Southern Jew in the Mountain West and most subtly voracious eater of life, Joe Lefkoff. Joe loved people and things so fiercely and yet so quietly: he loved a fluffy matzah ball, Moe’s BBQ, and spending hours moving between the hot tub and the swimming pool reading and sunning. He loved John Le Carre, Stephen Sondheim, Scrabble, and a well-crafted dirty joke. He loved grilling the perfect steak, going to New York and London every year to see the new theater, and chasing a royal straight flush on poker nights with his favorite guys.

Marvin Caruthers, a prestigious University of Colorado Boulder biotechnology professor and researcher, has been named the first winner of the Richard N. Merkin Prize in Biomedical Technology for his work in DNA synthesis. The award, which comes with a $400,000 prize, was created by the Merkin Family Foundation and is administered by the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.