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TWAIN HARTE, Calif. –This is the tinderbox of the Sierra Nevada. It’s early June, the temperature is 97 degrees Fahrenheit and the air shimmers over dead trees choked in brush. In the Stanislaus National Forest, logging roads wind through firs and ponderosa pines, past 20-foot-tall burn piles — tons of scrap wood not worth bringing to a sawmill.

With the sun beating down and the temperature in the mid-70s, the Colorado State Patrol on Friday checked to see whether commercial truck drivers at a port of entry about 40 miles west of Denver had their snow chains handy. By noon, troopers had issued 13 citations at the Dumont port of entry for violating the state mandate that commercial motor vehicles carry chains on Interstate 70 in the mountains from Sept.

Around midnight in the parking lot of a Denver bar a quarter century ago, the Colorado version of a classic Australian sport was born. Paul Renouf and his buddies were watching the Australian Football League’s Grand Final that night and decided to have a kick under the light poles at halftime of footy’s Super Bowl. And thus the seeds of the Denver Bulldogs were planted. “We didn’t ever plan to start a team,” Renouf said.

It took a camel for us to find out Nikola Jokic has never ridden a horse. The Nuggets spent this week in Abu Dhabi playing a pair of exhibition games against the world-champion Celtics. Many of the Nuggets staffers made the trip, including their media team. As the players experienced life abroad, a few boarded camels, including Russell Westbrook and Peyton Watson. A Nuggets reporter asked Jokic if he had been on a camel. “I have never been on a horse, to be honest,” Jokic said.

In his comeback from Tommy John, Gabriel Hughes took cues from Camus. Hughes, the Rockies’ first-round pick in 2022, returned to the mound in instructional league a little over a month ago after missing all of the 2024 minor-league season. While he was recovering from surgery, Hughes dove into a heady, philosophic reading list that included “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus, “Existentialism Is a Humanism” by Jean-Paul Sartre and “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius. Camus’ work struck a significant cord with the right-hander and underscored his mindset amid a rehabilitation that lasted over a year. “In these books, we’re trying to figure out how to deal with the inevitable bad things that happen in life, and after surgery, those were really what I was trying to find an answer to,” Hughes said.

Dear Eric: My adult son was a stellar athlete and scholar in our small Midwest high school. But as the years went on, he ended up suffering from chronic pain due to a back injury, which thwarted a career path after college. A year ago, he was diagnosed with long Covid, which he and his partner still have.