Profile: Alice Krist

By Dawne Belloise

Alice Krist and her husband Travis had just broken ground on the home they were building in CB South and on that very day, Alice was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer. Despite the fear and all the emotional consequences dimming what should have been a joyous day of celebration, Alice’s cancer journey since then has been, as she tells it, “One of the most beautiful unfoldings of life I have experienced. I’m not afraid and my healing will hopefully touch others in ways that will heal them as well.” Her life has been an interesting, wild ride since then and she feels that cancer came into her life as a wakeup call. “I have truly divorced my old self and have been reborn into this person I always knew I was.” 

Alice grew up in a small, rural farming community in Columbiaville, Michigan, as the eldest of four kids. Her dad was a dentist, and her mom was a nurse who retired after the fourth child came along. She loved being outside, riding her bike and generally being free to be herself, which she says was a tomboy. Alice attended a small private school about 13 miles from their home, because her parents felt that the public schools had issues, plus it was close to her dad’s practice. As a freshman in high school, she played on the varsity basketball team. But school was challenging for Alice. “I never really liked school. I didn’t feel like it was ultimately for me. I don’t feel like I learned much at that school.” Nevertheless, she graduated in 1998.

Alice didn’t have a clear career path but she decided to pursue massage therapy right out of high school and discovered that she really enjoyed it. However, at that time in a rural community, she also found that people weren’t spending money on things like massage. “It was difficult to build a clientele, but I didn’t have a lot of interest in leaving at that time,” she recalls. Alice ditched the idea of having a massage business since shortly after finishing the program her dad had an office opening for a dental assistant. She had worked throughout high school in his clinic learning from the experience, cleaning the rooms and helping with patients so she was already trained. Alice worked with her dad for nine years. 

Alice met Travis in October of 2000 at a motorcycle dealership where he and some of her friends were working. She smiles recalling that day because, “I was so swollen from a wisdom tooth extraction and he kept making me laugh.” The group of friends would all head over the border to Canada, “to go drinking, clubbing, stay the night and return the next day.” Alice and Travis married in March of 2006. Her paternal grandparents lived right down the road from her childhood home and she and her husband bought and renovated that home in 2005 after her grandparents had passed. Alice had a love of landscaping and gardening, which enabled her to have the most beautiful perennial gardens at their home. “It made me so happy along with the remodeling of that house. Travis was amazing because the things I dream up, he helps me manifest it and makes it happen.” Alice was working at her dad’s dentist office four days a week, which allowed her to tend to her gardens. 

They weren’t planning to leave, and certainly not so soon, but in 2008 her hubby had a job opportunity in Dallas so they moved to Texas. “The job opportunity offered much more financially than we were making in Michigan between the two of us.” So, they uprooted their lives and settled in Sachse, Texas, a little town about 40 minutes north of Dallas. Life there was different, Alice remembers, because in Michigan the crash of the 2008 real estate market was felt heavily and many homes were in foreclosure. “Our Michigan house lost 50% of its value so we couldn’t sell it. We rented it out to ride out the storm.” 

In Texas, they lived in a little track home with a swimming pool and Alice tells that she always had an interest in real estate and houses. In fact, “When I first got my driver’s license I drove around looking at empty houses or those for sale,” she says of her fascination in old homes. “I wondered about their story and I was interested in architectural styles. How did they get to the point of not being taken care of?” They moved 13 times in 10 years while living in Texas. “It’s been a wild ride,” she muses. “The most amazing thing is that we’ve never been sad to leave any of the places we’ve been because the new experiences were so exciting. We are super grateful that we’ve ventured all over. It’s been one adventure after another.”

 In Dallas, Alice was doing dental reception work but wasn’t enjoying it. So, in 2011, she started her own landscaping and personal organization business. “It was full home, top to bottom declutter and organizing.” They had bought a home in Forest Hills, which is in Dallas proper near White Rock Lake that has a 10-mile uninterrupted hiking and biking trail around it. “The neighborhood was funky with an eclectic combo of artists and musicians,” she says. They were there from 2012 to 2016, moving to Crested Butte on Memorial Day weekend in 2016. 

They discovered CB when Bob Hunt had invited Alice and Travis to stay at his vacation rental next to Camp 4 Coffee in 2011. They arrived for their first visit in March to ski. “Driving in from Dallas, the first views were incredible. We didn’t know what to expect because we hadn’t looked it up, so we knew nothing about CB. We brought the dogs and had the best time for five days, snowboarding and cross-country skiing.” In 2016, they stayed at another friend’s townhouse on the mountain from May through November. “It was the best summer of our lives. We went back to Dallas, had a huge garage sale, packed up everything we owned and came back to Crested Butte.” They returned to their friend’s townhouse but when it sold, they did the CB housing shuffle, first to CB South before moving to a place on Whiterock Avenue. It was 2019 when they bought their lot in CB South and started building.

 Alice had been doing landscaping and property management and then started her own property management company, Alice Krist Management, LLC. “I was lucky to have built great relationships early on and I could always find workers to do what I needed to do.” Alice was biking a lot, skiing, landscaping, learning to forage for mushrooms, play tennis and in general, living the dream in paradise. She had felt a thickening in her right breast but as active as she was in sports, she wasn’t alarmed by it, and she thought it was just a muscle. Covid hit so she missed her yearly physical exam. In April of 2022, Alice was able to get in to see her doctor for that missed exam, who recommended a mammogram and ultrasound. The radiologist immediately felt it was cancer and recommended a biopsy. It was the day they had started building their home and the biopsy showed an invasive form of breast cancer, but Alice explains, “An invasive form of stage two cancer can lead to stage four. Gunnison was unable to care for this advanced type of cancer in their facilities.” 

Alice chose to go to UC Health Anschutz in Denver and opted to have a double mastectomy even though the mammogram showed no cancer in the left breast, “until they removed it and did the pathology on the removed breast.” Her intuition proved correct as that breast also showed cancer in the further testing. Since she was diagnosed and took immediate action at stage two, and the four lymph nodes they removed also showed no spreading of the cancer, the oncologists felt that Alice didn’t need chemo or radiation. 

These days, Alice says she’s concentrating on her healing journey. She retired her management company in 2023, “to work through all my stuff,” she says. “It was the biggest wakeup call and I get to live my life completely different. I’ve made major changes in my body, soul and life and I’m not afraid. It’s been so freeing in so many ways, even though it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever experienced. But it’s allowed me to come home to me.”