Profile: Brett Henderson

By Dawne Belloise

Brett Henderson didn’t have a plan after college but he knew what he liked, which was fishing and climbing and generally just being in the great outdoors. Friends who were attending Western State College suggested he come out to fish the gold medal waters of the Gunnison Valley and Brett did just that, falling in love with the area. He had lived in the rural Fort Worth, Texas, area all his life but traveled internationally quite a bit, and it was that sense of adventure that spoke to him when he moved to Crested Butte in 2009.

Enrolling at Western he earned a second B.A. in 2010, this one in financial accounting. After graduating, Brett applied to every job listed in every newspaper in the valley and landed a position at High Country Conservation Advocates (HCCA), where he remained until last year. These days, you’ll find him at the Crested Butte Center for the Arts as the director of finance.

Brett grew up running around in the woods of his Texas home where there were grasslands with big patches of oak and mesquite trees. He began his early education in the Montessori preschool his mother owned and operated. It was a business he later helped to build and still returns to help out with all their financial accounts. After his preschool days, Brett attended a public Montessori school. His father’s travels accrued lots of airline miles working for Lockheed Martin as a program manager for the F16 for Southeast Asia, so the family was able to take many international trips during Brett’s elementary school days. “That’s how our family was, very international travel oriented,” he says of their trips to places like South Korea, Thailand and Japan. Brett continued to feed his travel bug through college, doing excursions throughout Europe and once to Peru.

His first degree was a B.A. in Studio Art from Texas Christian University in 2007. It was there where he met the friends that would ultimately get him to the Gunnison Valley to fly fish. “I remember coming over Cottonwood Pass and thinking it was the ultimate freedom out here. You could camp anywhere,” he recalls of descending into Taylor Canyon after a fishing trip to Montana with those friends. “I decided to move and get the other degree from Western,” as he only needed two semesters to complete that degree. “I think I just needed a reason to move to Colorado,” he smiles. 

The plan was that after finishing up his degree, Brett would return to Fort Worth to help with his mother’s Montessori school. “But I could tell coming out of my first winter here that was no longer going to be the plan. I fell in love with the place.”

He took a long solo road trip, climbed Mt. Rainier and returned to the incredible summer of Crested Butte, camping out of his car to do more fishing and climbing. And that’s when HCCA made him an offer as administrator and outreach coordinator in September of 2010. “I didn’t really know anything about what they did,” he laughs. “I knew they had the prayer flags. I was doing their books and they told me I had to put on the Red Lady Salvation Ball, get a band and a bar, but I didn’t even know what that was. In an interview, KBUT asked me what I felt about the mine fight, and I said, ‘We’re against it!’ I knew very little about what HCCA did, but I wound up as executive director in 2016 and was with HCCA for 12 years total. By the end, I sure did know a lot about public lands,” he muses. 

Another perk to the HCCA job was that he met his wife Alli there in 2013. “She was the Red Lady program director and one of our attorneys. They were going to hire her for the position, and they said I had to meet her. We hit it off. She was looking for a place to live and I said, ‘You could live with me,’ and I flipped her a key. I was a CB single guy, living at the end of the world, living the CB lifestyle and I just thought she was super smart and interesting. She didn’t have a lot of outdoors experience but had a great interest in doing more outdoors so we started influencing each other. We’ve done a great job encouraging each other to grow into our full potential in different ways.”

They married in 2017. Brett and Alli were on a remote hike in Big Bend, Texas, when they got the satellite call that his father had passed away, quite unexpectedly. “It changed a lot for me. I had just become executive director and I also needed to go help my family at the same time. It was a tough thing to be in. Life happens and you have to grow up real quick.” 

Brett left HCCA in September of 2022. “I felt like I had given everything I could, implemented all my ideas and I felt like our team accomplished many things, everything we set out to do and I thought it was time for new ideas and energy. It was time for a career change,” he shared. 

Responding to an ad for director of finance for the CB Center for the Arts fulfilled both his passion for arts and music and his logistical side. “It was a great combo using the analytical side of my brain with my passion for the arts. My first degree in studio arts encompasses painting, sculpture and photography and that’s still a big driving force in my life. I’ve shot hundreds of thousands of photos from Montana down to Mexico since I’ve lived out here. I’ve done a lot of big outdoorsy adventures and brought my camera every time.” 

Just for fun lately, Brett’s been shooting portraits of his friends and he enjoys capturing his friends in their space. He had his own art shows while he was in college and he feels, “It’s something I need to make more time for.” Sometimes, when he has down time, Brett wants to reflect on his time here in the West, “To try to draw a story and some meaning to share with everyone. It’s been an unexpected life. Things that I’ve done, things I didn’t know existed, things I didn’t even know people did, like rowing the Grand Canyon,” and sometimes he even questions how he got here. “Someone will talk me into doing some other kind of adventure that I didn’t know existed. Never in a million years did I think I would have these kinds of experiences but I’m super grateful for them. I’m grateful not only for the experiences but for all the people who’ve helped me have them or given me the trust to run a nonprofit.” 

Brett and Alli live in CB South, and he says, “I don’t see myself leaving Crested Butte and the three things that keep me here are the adventures, my friends and family, and this community. It keeps you alive, keeps you young. When I leave here and return and I turn that corner and see up valley into Crested Butte, it gets me every time and I’m so grateful.”