Profile: Katie Thomas

By Dawne Belloise

Born and raised a Buttian kid to long-time local parents Beach and Jane Thomas, Katie still spends many summer weekends boating Blue Mesa with her folks when she’s not teaching her Vinyasa Yoga classes at the CB Club. She started kindergarten at the old school (now the town offices) and by fifth grade was in the newly built Crested Butte Community School CBCS. 

Katie proudly claims that she and her sister were probably more feral than the rest of the CB kids because they lived up at Nicholson Lake. “If we wanted to go to town, mom said we had to ride our bikes,” she says, which meant taking the long route via the Lower Loop. “We didn’t have ski passes because dad said if we wanted to ski, he’d take us anywhere on his snowmobile,” she adds, which was usually up the hill behind their house. “We’d ski down, and he’d shuttle us back up.” She was raised essentially without much TV influence, mostly they’d take advantage of the Flying Petito Sisters Video store’s deal of five movies for five days for $5 from the pink video cases.

During those teenage years, where kids in a small town grow up together, Katie recalls that she only really had two serious beaus in high school, “I’m a serial monogamist,” she laughs and says that she was, of course, friends with those boyfriends’ former girlfriends. As a self-proclaimed theater geek, she hung out at the Mallardi Theatre a lot, “Goofing off with my friends, playing with the light board, trying on costumes, putting on silly shows.” She was part of all the Teens On Stage productions and took every high school theater class available. When the Creative Arts program came to town, she signed up for that as well. “It was like a summer camp for kids.” Later she became a camp counselor for the young theater kids. Katie graduated from CBCS in 2005.

“I thought I was going to be a veterinarian. Ironically, I also knew I was going to be a yoga teacher someday,” she smiles, even though she didn’t really do yoga at the time. She had taken a handful of yoga classes here and although she currently teaches at the Club at Crested Butte, she plans to expand to Gunnison in the near future.

After high school graduation, Katie enrolled at Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins and two years later transferred to the State University of New York (SUNY) Cortland in New York. She felt that her time spent in New York was like a little study in culture. “It’s so different living in upstate New York,” where she honed her city driving skills and fell in love with the crisp, upstate apples. “I can’t eat Colorado apples anymore,” she laughs. 

Taking her first anthropology class opened Katie’s eyes. “I felt like I could see outside the matrix – everyone, race and gender, were so surface level until you study people’s cultural background and realize we’re all just humans and none of our differences should matter that much. Looking to love the uniqueness about everybody made me realize how much we all have in common,” she surmised. She graduated in 2010 with a degree in Anthropology.

Katie moved to Denver from 2010 through 2013, working a handful of odd jobs and trying to decide if she was going to grad school. Instead, she decided to return to CB and be a ski bum to feel out her next move in life. She got a ski pass job at Flatiron Sports and jumped right back into her love of theater, directing and acting. “It doesn’t matter what role in the theater as long as I’m in the theatre,” she says of her time with the Crested Butte Mountain Theatre (CBMT). The ski bum year turned into a realization that this was home. “I never left,” Katie smiles. “My one winter turned into 11 years even though I was originally only returning to reset.” 

Katie tells that she wouldn’t change a thing about her awesome childhood growing up in Crested Butte but reflects on some later lessons. “When I was living there in 2013, I was in my twenties and single. I owned a pair of skis, a mountain bike and a Subaru. I was living this whole other CB life that I had never gotten to live. It was the uber lifestyle of last call and first chair, balls to the wall. It was the best time of my life, having too much fun and rediscovering myself.” But all that changed and came to a screeching halt in the spring of 2018, when she blew out her ACL at the infamous CB Sleds and Kegs party. “I’m on a saucer on my ass, not on the Headwall or anything like that. It’s pretty classic. That’s when I got into yoga. I started going for my knee rehab. My whole lifestyle shifted from play-party-play-party to learning to be gentle with myself and take care of my body and mind,” Katie confesses. 

She began regularly attending yoga classes, which she acknowledges, “Are hard to do when you’re hungover.” She got involved with the yoga community, started eating better, and essentially slowing down for her health. “My athletic life became more about quality than quantity.” In past party days, at the end of a ski season, Katie would mark her success by how many punches she had on her ski pass. It was a competition of sorts, “Everyone compared who had the most days, but it became more important to me to do a few laps with a good friend than just to ski for the sake of skiing. It was more about what my body was able to do after a ski injury than keeping up with the Joneses.”

It was after this revelation that Katie began teaching yoga and set out to learn more about it. She received her yoga instructor certification in 2019. Around this same time in 2018, she met her partner Peter Viets. “We met in theater on the Mallardi stage,” she tells of her now hubby who hails from Golden, Colorado, and who moved here in 2008. They married in 2021. “I am a childless cat woman and happy,” she laughs. “We had our wedding on our property on Cranor Hill in Gunnison. We had sold our CB condo and now we’re renting in Gunnison while we build our house.” Conveniently, Katie’s dad is a general contractor and her husband is an electrician so they’re building their own home themselves, which she figures will take a couple of years. “For now, we’re enjoying living in the town of Gunnison. It’s a fun experience.”  

Katie was bartending and doing various restaurants jobs but teaching yoga was truly her passion. At the end of 2022, she was hired as the Director of Advocacy for Project Hope, a nonprofit that serves victims and survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking and stalking. The organization works in Gunnison and Hinsdale counties and Katie supervises the team of advocates who work with the victims and survivors. 

“I was done with the restaurant life and I wanted to do something that I felt was meaningful, so when I found this job I knew it was going to be something I wanted to get out of bed for. I really love my job, we have such an incredible team and it’s incredibly hard work,” she says and feels that to get to the root of some of the problems, “We have to shift the way we talk about consent with teens. There are a lot of people doing that great work here, there are people going into schools and talking about consent. It’s got to be on a national and global level of how we tolerate violence against women, and men. My passion is education and awareness of sexual violence. The reality is that everyone wants to believe we live in this little bubble where nothing bad like that happens,” she says of the Gunnison Valley. “The reality is, our county stats are on par with the rest of the nation, so there’s definitely a need for Project Hope. The more that we decrease the stigma, the more people are able to come forward.” She is also passionate about women’s rights, and Katie will be directing the Firebird Theatre production of The Vagina Monologues this February. 

In her fun time, Katie tries to be outside as much as possible and she’s even taken up golf, “Which my dad loves, and we play together.” She married a mountain man, she grins, so they do a lot of camping, mountain biking, skiing and are enjoying exploring the south end of the valley.

Their two cats share the house with them. Baz, an orange tabby, short for Calabaza, which is Spanish for “pumpkin,” and a calico, Bruja, which translates to witch. “We adopted the sisters on Halloween, five years ago.” 

Home is definitely where Katie’s heart is, and that home is here. “The community is my family. It’s where I want to live out the rest of life.”