Profile: Roxie Lypps

By Dawne Belloise

I’ve never been out of Crested Butte for more than a month since moving here,” says the recent octogenarian firecracker who retired as a CBMR snowboard instructor only three years ago. Roxie had started doing volunteer work for public relations for CBMR in 1988. Gina Kroft had her take ski lessons to become skilled enough to conduct mountain tours, which Roxie did a lot of, mostly to journalists or filmmakers who were discovering and promoting CB. Roxie recalls that not many people came here back then. She then transitioned to ski school in 1991, teaching alpine skiing. Later in 1996, she became a snowboard instructor. “I was an early snowboarder,” she says, having begun riding in 1995. “When you’re working for ski school you can take lessons from other disciplines,” and Roxie enjoyed both skiing and boarding. Retiring at the youthful age of 77, Roxie earned her lifetime ski pass at CBMR.

Born in 1944 in Long Beach, California, Roxie grew up as the eldest of four children. Her dad was in the U.S. Air Force, so the family lived in Guam where she went to a British school from kindergarten through second grade and she learned really good handwriting skills. “My memories of living there was that we all went to the same school with some of the locals,” she recalls that post WWII in Guam there were still Japanese soldiers hiding in the jungle. She also remembers the fierce typhoons that blew through. 

The family returned to Long Beach in 1953, and in high school Roxie was involved in theatre and participated in competitive swimming. “Every high school in Long Beach had two swimming pools. Swimming is big there,” she says, and she lived only 10 minutes from the beach. 

Roxie’s early employment was at Disneyland where she worked at a walk-up hamburger joint called Yacht and also the Space Bar before being upgraded to Fun Fotos. “People got behind cutouts and we’d take a Polaroid, which the customer then bought. I earned $1.10 per hour back in 1963.” She loved it and stayed on for five summers and holidays.

Roxie graduated from high school in 1962 and enrolled at California State University at Long Beach, where she says that all her friends majored in Home Economics, so she followed suit. “It was fun. I learned a lot about family life and early childhood education. I never really learned how to cook or sew,” she laughs, but it did allow her to get a part-time teaching job while going to college.  

She still has five women friends from her time there and the clutch meets up to travel together. “We met each other roller skating in the neighborhood as kids. This past August we went on a river cruise from Budapest to Prague, upriver on the Danube.” It was this same group, along with other students, who signed up for a college semester abroad in 1964 to Uppsala in Sweden. They were on a chartered flight seated alphabetically when she and Nick Lypps struck up a 13-hour conversation on that long flight. He was also attending Cal State, but she had never met him. “We hung out together from then on,” she smiles. The couple married 1965 and had two sons, Aaron in 1966, and Andrew in 1968. Although they went their separate ways in the ‘80s, the two are still good friends.

Roxie graduated from college in 1966, had Aaron that summer and then began her teaching career in early childhood education at Long Beach City College. She was simultaneously attending grad school for early childhood education and child development at California State Long Beach. She earned her master’s in 1968 and was then hired at Rio Hondo Community College in Whittier, California, in 1970. “It was a 25-minute commute back then, now there’s a lot more people and it takes an hour and a half,” she says. She taught there until 1977. Roxie lived in Long Beach until she was 30 years old.

“I was planning to stay in Southern California. We had bought a nice house by the beach. Mom was helping with the kids. We had lived in Aspen in the summers of 1969 and 1970. We had gone to Aspen with our good friend Jeff Keyes, who was working there in restaurants. We camped all summer in Aspen with the boys, back when you could drive up to Maroon Lake. Now you have to take the bus. Back then there were only cloth diapers and I’d go into the laundromat to do five and six loads of laundry because we were camping with a one and three-year-old.” That next summer they decided to live in the town of Aspen. Roxie worked at the Hickory House, a breakfast and lunch place with barbeque at night. “I loved Aspen back in the ‘60s. We thought about moving there but I had a teaching job in California, so it wasn’t practical.”

But in April 1976, Nick went on a road trip and, calling Roxie from Crested Butte, told her that he had just bought a restaurant. “He bought Soupçon with Jeff Keyes,” she laughs and explains that Nick and Jeff had always talked about having their own eating establishment. “I thought, well, there goes my teaching career, even though I had spent two years in grad school. But we were young.” In fact, Roxie was only 32 when they packed up the family and moved to CB in 1976. They had been to town once, hiking over from Aspen for a few days with their young boys in backpack carriers over West Maroon Pass. Roxie started working at the restaurant immediately. They ran Soupçon from 1976 through 1982 and she continued to work there after they sold it. 

Roxie learned to ski in 1982. She had gone up a few times with the kids on the family passes, “But I never really focused on it because I was busy with the restaurant.” Through the years, she worked at other restaurants as well – the Artichoke, The Eldo, Slogar, Stargazer Cafe, Bacchannale and Lasky’s Place. She also worked in property management. 

Roxie was working at the Crested Butte State Bank when the explosion destroyed the bank and killed three beloved locals in March of 1990. “The whole building came down on us. I spent six weeks in the St. Mary’s Hospital burn unit in Grand Junction,” she says, having sustained third degree burns on 40% of her body. The possibility of a bomb quickly made national news; however, it was an odorless propane leak from an underground pipeline coming from across the street that seeped into the bank’s crawl space and caused the tragic blast. When Roxie had recovered enough to return, she was given the big CB welcome home party with everyone coming to her yard on First and Elk. It took her two years to fully recover. 

At 80, Roxie is engaged in life to the fullest and travels a lot – trekking in the Pyrenees and Peru, kayaking in Chile, and she’s visited several places in Mexico and throughout Europe and Great Britain. She’s been an active board member for the Crested Butte Mountain Theatre as well as an actor there. She also worked for Fat Tire Bike Week for almost a decade. Although it’s been five years since she’s done any singletrack mountain biking, Roxie still pedals her townie around. 

Having been here for just under half a century, Roxie mostly skis these days since most of her friends in their 70’s ski instead of snowboard. Last season she clocked 45 days at the resort, 10 of which were snowboarding. “One thing I really enjoy now is that I can ski and board with my grandchildren when they come to visit. I live on the Bench so I Nordic ski out my door.” She hikes with two different Gunnison Valley groups in the summers, and practices Tai Chi and yoga. Roxie figures that when she gets tired of shoveling snow or is unable to ski anymore, she’ll probably spend winters in California, although she especially appreciates the free senior transportation available here. “We need a senior center and housing. But I love it here. CB is my home.”