Snapshots from Grand Junction & Greeley.

• Position: ENERGY OUTLOOK - Brief article

In 2008, when natural gas prices hit $14 per million Btu, trucks were crawling all across the Piceance Basin, an area that stretches from Carbondale to Rangely on Colorado's Western Slope. Many of the workers commuted from Grand Junction.

Then, they tumbled to $2 at the start of the recession and haven't gone up much since. You don't see many drilling rigs there now.

Mesa County estimated 8,000 jobs were lost. Date Beede, who leads the Coldwell Banker Commercial team, thinks closer to 15,000 jobs were shed. Halliburton, one of the support companies, laid off employees, and Schlumberger left altogether, as did others. Not all jobs are gone, however, as existing wells must be serviced.

Grand Junction has been much slower to emerge from the recession than the Front Range, Beede says. Real estate prices continue to drag. But Grand Junction is altogether in far better shape than after the oil shale bust of the early 1980s, when about...