‘You have an entire culture, an entire community that is also having that same crisis’: Colorado coal town looks anxiously to the future

The Cooper family knows how to work heavy machinery. The kids could run a hay baler by their early teens, and two of the three ran monster-sized drills at the coal mines along with their dad.

But learning to maneuver the shiny red drill they use to tap into underground heat feels different. It’s a critical part of the new family business, High Altitude Geothermal, which installs geothermal heat pumps that use the Earth’s constant temperature to heat and cool buildings. At stake is not...