Moon Spotlight Colorado Ski Towns

Steve Knopper has lived in Colorado off and on since 1982. A native of Livonia, Michigan, he and his parents took twice-a-year vacations in the mountains and eventually bought an empty chunk of land in Evergreen. After falling in love with the foothills and laid-back college-town spirit of Boulder, they sold the Evergreen property in the early 1980s, bought a condo in Boulder, and set to building a house in the foothills on the outskirts of town. Steve attended Boulder High School and grew to love bushwhacking the trails and hills surrounding his house. Although he never picked up downhill skiing--a fact with which his classmates at the University of Michigan regularly tormented him--his primary driver's education was on a steep mountain road during a blizzard. By 1991, he had accepted a job writing about rock 'n' roll, homeless people, and hamburgers for Boulder's Daily Camera. After almost three years at the Camera,Steve decided to see if the world offered more than University of Colorado parties, hippie jam-band concerts, and a laid-back ski-bum culture. He took a job as a feature writer at the Gary, Indiana, Post-Tribune,covering AIDS, truck-stop prostitution, mob-style triple homicides, and segregation. After a year in Gary, he quit his job to become a full-time, Chicago-based freelance writer. For the next 10 years, he placed articles in Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, SPIN, New York, Backpacker, National Geographic Traveler,and Wired; wrote a daily online column for Yahoo! Internet Lifemagazine; appeared weekly as a technology correspondent for Fox News Chicago; edited music books on lounge and swing; and co-wrote 2004's The Complete Idiot's Guide to Starting a Band with his Denver neighbor Mark Bliesener, manager of the local rock trio Big Head Todd and the Monsters. Steve and his wife, Melissa, and 6-year-old daughter, Rose, live in northwest Denver, around the corner from excellent restaurants such as Julia Blackbird's and Mead St. Station. Now a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, Steve's latest non-Colorado-related book is Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, which was published in early 2009.