Profile: Carolyn Phillips

[  by Dawne Belloise ]

Carolyn Phillips loves her new job at Dog Cabin Resort, a doggie daycare in Gunnison, where work is more like play because she gets to watch over and frolic with dogs all day while their parents are working or having other adventures. She came to Gunnison four years ago from Silver Lake, Wisconsin, at the suggestion of her twin brother Eric, who was living in Gunnison at the time. She had visited him a few times to ski during her college days when she was enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Stout (UWS).

As a kid, Carolyn was in Girl Scouts and ran around the neighborhood with friends in the greater Chicago suburbs. She was an avid reader, and in high school was in the art club where every year they’d put on a wearable art fashion show. One year she built a dress out of uninflated balloons on a chicken wire dress form. “I was looking at wedding dress magazines and as a kid I was making my own fake magazines, even creating ads and drawing in them. I was really into the show Say Yes to the Dress, a TV show on TLC network,” she tells. That creative high school event piqued her interest in fashion design. Carolyn graduated from UWS in the spring of 2019 with a Bachelor of Science in Apparel Design and Development. “The classes are 70% focused on engineering and 30% design. The engineering aspect is the pattern design, the process used to construct, the textiles, fabric and the fit engineering,” she explains.

By her senior year of college, Carolyn was, in her own words, “Super burnt out because my major was so rigorous.” She had spent 1,000 hours working on her senior collection. “I had to design a collection of clothes and then put on a runway show.” She spent that summer after graduation at her parents’ lake house at Silver Lake, somewhat looking for jobs but mostly taking a well-earned break. She was hired in the late fall as a rental ski technician at Wilmot Mountain, a Vail Resorts mountain in Wisconsin, which also gave her an Epic Pass so she could come ski CB and visit her brother.

It was then, after Wilmot closed for the season the second week of March, that her brother suggested she relocate to Gunnison, ski CB for a few weeks and take over his apartment because he was moving in with his girlfriend. Carolyn arrived to sublease but COVID hit the day she arrived and CBMR announced their early closure. ”I had just driven 18 hours, it was March 14,” she recalls. But Carolyn figured she’d just ride it out, “Because at that point, we didn’t know how bad things were going to get.” And as it is known, it got 

really bad. But luckily, she had driven out with a large bulk of TP and she was able to get some groceries here. “Because we had one of the largest percentages of COVID-infected populations, Gunnison County Health Department decided to kick out all non-residents and second homeowners. I got an exemption from the county to stay. I had older parents at home whom I would be putting at risk if I traveled back across the country,” she says, and there would be more of a chance of contracting COVID if she had to drive cross-country. 

Her parents helped with her rent and groceries for a few months since there was no work available and she didn’t qualify for unemployment. “I was really a hermit, afraid to leave my apartment because locals in the valley were very anti-outsiders at that point, especially because this valley doesn’t have a lot of ICU beds or grocery stores to handle an influx of outsiders and a lot of people were trying to flee the cities. I remember in one of the Facebook groups in the valley, people were talking about out of state plates being around and not wanting them to be here. I had out of state plates. I binged a lot of movies and TV, made some art and was finally able to get a job in June of 2020 when things started to reopen.” 

Carolyn was hired as a server at Tin Cup, the pasty shop (now Tin Cup Ice Cream). “That was one of the busiest summers on record,” she tells. “No one could travel internationally so we had a huge influx of tourism that summer because everyone was trying to get away.” She worked there for two years and was promoted to manager with a ski pass perk. In the winter of 2020-21, Carolyn got a job as a ski rental technician at the CB Rental and Demo Center on the mountain. She left Tin Cup to work in retail and then as an assistant manager at Crested Butte Mountain Outfitters on the mountain in the summer of 2022. However, the commute was exhausting, and she couldn’t find housing in CB. She was spending 10 hours a week on the bus. Since her rental was affordable and secure in Gunnison, she decided to pursue employment there. “It’s great because I live a two-minute bike commute from where I work at Dog Cabin Resort.  It just made more sense to try to find work down-valley since my housing was affordable.” 

But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t spend time at this end of the valley to enjoy CB events. Carolyn recently completed her DJ training stint for KBUT, which she’s quite excited about. She’s also on a coed softball team, The 99ers. “We’re a rag-tag crew,” she smiles, “the only softball team not affiliated with a local business. It started as a bunch of friends who worked in the rental shop on the mountain. We’re named after 99 proof liquor shooters, little bottles of liquor,” Carolyn laughs.

She also roller skates (quad wheels) at the skate park and at the outdoor rink in Gunnison and CB. Last summer, she discovered that she liked mountain biking. “I’m still pretty new to it.” Carolyn frequents her favorite theater, The Majestic, for flicks and their monthly karaoke and she is passionate about making homemade pizzas with everything from scratch. “I’m not Italian, I just love pizza,” she confesses.

Carolyn feels it’s all about the community here. “I’ve made a lot of friends here and it really feels like a place I can express myself—singing my heart out in karaoke, all the live music events to dance at, and I recently took a break-dancing class at the CB School of Dance and loved it.” 

On Sundays at 10:30 a.m., you can sometimes find Carolyn at the Ecstatic Dance at Sanctuary Somatics in Gunnison. “Basically, you just dance and move as you feel compelled to do,” as she describes it. And then there’s the skiing that she actually moved here for. “I’ve gotten into snow blading, which are really short skis that are more like skates. I spend more days on blades than skis on the mountain. They’re easier to maneuver but they’re less stable at high speeds. It’s more like dancing and roller skating. You can go on the most mellow hill and have the most fun time regardless of the terrain.” 

Carolyn still wears a lot of fun, colorful clothes and what better place for that than Crested Butte? “Even though I’m not actively pursuing a career in fashion, it’s still a pretty big component of my life. My mentality is to have more fun and I feel like I’ve found my home.”