Profile: Aline Jatulis-Wight

By Dawne Belloise

Aline confesses to having professional FOMO, “Fear of Missing Out,” she laughs, but her dedication to her work is real. “I can’t say no and I am hyper efficient. It’s a thing.” But this long-time local does manage to have a life, squeezing in skiing and mountain biking between her shifts as a home healthcare nurse while trying to develop a specialized wound care program through the Gunnison Valley Hospital. 

She claims to have grown up somewhat feral in the 1970s in the suburbs of the Albany, New York, area. Her dad was a civil engineer and deputy director of the NYC health department, and mom was a college professor who taught nursing. Aline grew up with an outdoor enthusiast of a father, hiking and skiing the Adirondacks with him during high school. “We skied at Hickory Hill and raced all over,” although she claims she was a horrible racer. 

Aline was pretty artsy-craftsy throughout high school, making jewelry and painting murals of oceans, mountains and outdoor themes, and even sewed a tapestry into a ceiling. She’d cruise around in her 1971 VW bug attending Dead and Phish concerts as well as the first Lollapalooza. Aline graduated with a class of 200 other seniors in 1989, thinking she wanted to pursue biology or the sciences.

Having been to Boulder just once to check it out, she says, “It was beautiful and I wanted to ski,” so Aline enrolled at CU Boulder. She felt she wanted to be in the mountains instead of an East Coast city for school. “At that point in life, I knew I wanted to do science and environmental stuff. Back then, it wasn’t a thing yet, except in Boulder, the rest of the world hadn’t caught up to recycling or the whole ethic of conservation,” she recalls and adds, “Climate change was a new concept then and no one was really talking about it.” Initially she thought she’d focus on environmental studies, organisms in the wild and wildlife biology, and ended up with a double major earning a degree in Environmental Conservation and Biology in 1994.  

In 1992 while in Boulder, she met her now hubby, Noah Wight, one night at Tulagi’s on the Hill. “I walked by him and noticed he had his tie in his beer so I pulled his tie out and walked off.” But a year later, they formally met at a party and started dating. “We had friends who lived in CB so we came to visit a couple of times to ski. After graduation, we decided to take a year off to ski before starting life and guess what?” she laughs about their move to CB, “here we are, 30-plus years later.”

Initially, they arrived in Riverbend in 1994 with two other couples, where she recalls having to burn 10 cords of wood to keep the uninsulated house warm. Aline rotated through various jobs, working at Rafters, Grand Butte, Bacchanale and Angelo’s, mostly waitressing and doing other random little jobs, like sanding furniture for Michael Villanueva. At one point, she and Juliette Eymere started a catering company called The Saucy Spoons, “But it was short-lived,” she tells. 

Aline decided to return to school to get a nursing degree at Regis University in Denver in 2000, a one-year accelerated program since she already had her bachelors. “After living in CB for five years, I wanted a real career, one that was more fulfilling and challenging, and something which also allowed me to stay here and work in the valley. After living here, I felt like I wanted to be a contributing member of the community. I felt that these were my people.” She graduated with a BSN in 2001 and was hired at Montrose Memorial Hospital, doing the long-haul commute for two years. She’d spend three nights in Montrose and drive home for the rest of the week. She was then hired at the Gunnison Valley Hospital as a home healthcare nurse, working both Montrose and Gunnison until the Gunnison hospital hired her as a full-time RN in 2004. 

The couple married in 2003. Their son Cooper came along in 2004, and their second son Brier was born in Gunnison in 2010.  

When their son Cooper was only six, Noah was paralyzed after hitting a tree while skiing. Life changed exponentially for them. “My husband was an athlete,” she says. The family spent three months at Craig Hospital in Denver. “We lived in a three-story house in CB South built in the 1970s with narrow everything. It wasn’t going to work,” she said of their home that could no longer accommodate Noah’s needs. So their friends came together to build a hoist with a metal platform and a pulley system. “Ben Eaton built the frame and a platform. Our friends installed it on the outside of our house so it could bring Noah up to the second-floor deck.” They decided to build a more accessible home in CB South in 2008, just as the economy was failing, “We were able to hold on to our house when everything else was collapsing economically. Being a nurse was fortunate in helping with Noah’s recovery.” 

Aline was doing 12-hour shifts at the hospital and recalls that was hard, especially since Noah didn’t have a specialized car yet that he could drive, so she returned to working home healthcare. “The hours are more flexible, and I could go home to take care of the baby and be there for Noah.” She decided to return to school, specifically to become a wound ostomy continence nurse (WOCN). She explains, “For non-healing wounds, like in bad trauma, there are ways to maximize healing and nobody had that specialty or knowledge here.” Aline attended the Cleveland Clinic where she did her clinicals, but a lot of her classes were online. “At that point we were in our new house and Noah was independent.” She received her WOCN certification in 2014. 

During her time in home healthcare in 2010, Aline was also involved with hospice. “I didn’t want to do it because it was sad but it turned out to be one of the most rewarding jobs I’ve had in my whole career. I went into it kicking and screaming but you develop relationships with family members and people that you don’t get elsewhere in healthcare.” She worked in hospice for a decade. “It was an amazing learning experience that changes you as a person. Noah’s accident changed me. There are turns in the road that you wind up taking that you didn’t want to take, but it ends up being so rewarding, impactful and transformative.” 

Aline returned to school at Regis in 2018 to get her master’s as a nurse practitioner, graduating in 2020, after which she worked at a hospital in Alamosa running their wound clinic. “It’s a totally different kind of community. It’s a lot of rural ranching and agricultural and a large Hispanic population, which tend to have diabetes. So a lot more wounds.” She was commuting, working three days in Alamosa and then returning home to work for home healthcare. “It was really fricking hard,” she says of the exhaustion of the work and travel. “It wasn’t ideal.”

In 2023, Aline was working three jobs, she was hired as the medical provider at the Gunnison County jail, and working in both urgent care and the general surgery clinic at the Gunnison Valley Hospital. These days Aline is trying to develop a wound care program, through the backing of the Gunnison hospital. She feels proportionately, our area doesn’t have many elderly people who need the service, “Because they’re too healthy and a lot of the wounds come from obesity, diabetes and vascular disease,” but there is definitely a need for it within the area’s demographics.

Currently, Aline is working on work-life balance. She laughs, “I work too much.” Their son Cooper is now 20 years old and attending Lewis and Clark in Portland. Brier is a freshman at CBCS. Aline’s community and friends are so important to her. ”Around here you can still just be a person, without all those divisive barriers, and be community members and friends. It’s a really good place to be and focus on the important things in your life instead of all the crap.”