Profile: Darby Sullivan

by Dawne Belloise

Darby Sullivan has been helping ranchers and cattlemen keep their livestock and horses healthy since becoming a veterinarian in 1993 and she says she’s also, “fixed a lot of kitties along the way.” A long-timer in the Gunnison Valley, her family moved to Crested Butte in 1976 when she was in seventh grade. This past October, Darby moved into her own clinic in a new building, located on Highway 135 just north of Gunnison where her practice sees both small and large animals. Darby intends to hire another vet, and she’s got her eye on the future. “I’m thinking ahead to retirement someday,” she smiles.

Born in Stoughton, Massachusetts, her parents moved to New York City when she was two. Her father was in the corporate world of publishing and so the family “migrated” with his work. However, most of her childhood was spent in Arlington Heights, Illinois, outside of Chicago, where her dad mostly worked. She arrived in Crested Butte when her parents decided that living in a small western town was the life for them. They weren’t happy with suburban or corporate life. They found CB while touring around Colorado exploring places to live, camping in Irwin and immediately falling in love with the area.

Darby’s childhood in Illinois was more suburban, hanging out at the pool, going to a school that had lockers and a class with 100 kids. In the fall, the back-to-school tradition was going to the mall for new clothes and supplies, but then she came to CB with no mall and only eight kids in her middle school class. “It was a huge culture shock for me. All of a sudden, I had to learn to chop and stack wood, and haul the laundry uptown to the laundromat in the basement of the old Company Store on my bike with my wagon attached behind the bike.”

They moved to a small house on Elk Avenue, which now houses Thai Chili. Her mom opened The Crystal Palace Silversmith and Antiques shop on the ground floor and they lived upstairs. “It was rumored to be a bordello originally, named the Crystal Palace which is where the name came from,” she explains. Darby recalls the bathroom pipes freezing in the house because the bath was an uninsulated addition. “The house was covered in that fake brick, tar-like rolled siding and my parents gave me the job of sanding the wood siding on one side of the house,” but she, as an 11-year-old, procrastinated too long. “I left it for too late in the season and was standing out there sanding in the snow in my down coat,” she laughs. They also brought their friend Bob Matalon to CB and he and Darby’s dad Jim Sulivan bought CB Auto and Towing, eventually selling off the towing business.

“Being a new kid in a tiny class, you have to like everybody and get along. Socially, it was really good for me to get along with people in a small town. I certainly loved the outdoors, and we did lots of camping as kids.” As far back as she could remember as a child, Darby always wanted to be a veterinarian and work with horses, and, of course, she wanted her own horse. Then she got her first horse, a three-year-old mustang gelding she named Mariah, “after the song, They Called the Wind Mariah. He had never been ridden,” she says, and she kept him in Yaklich’s pasture up Peanut Lake Road. For a few years, during the winter, she kept him on Big Mine Hill where she had to snowshoe up to feed him. “The weather was challenging during the winter months so it wasn’t always fun,” she remembers. Mariah lived to the ripeness of 31 years.

At the time, all CB kids were bussed to high school in Gunnison, since the town didn’t have its own back then. At Gunnison High School (GHS), Darby played volleyball and ran track and field. She got to ski at CBMR on weekends with friends, “We had a family pass and my part cost only $60.” She learned to telemark with the Wednesday half-day school program where Rick Borkovec and Doug Bazel taught them the art of free-heeled, bended-knee skiing. She graduated from GHS in 1983 knowing she was going to be a veterinarian, so Darby enrolled at Colorado State University (CSU) in Ft. Collins. She completed the five-year curriculum with a Bachelor of Science in Equine Science in 1988. She was accepted back into the four-year program at CSU where she earned her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine in 1993. “I loved school. I still enjoy learning. Medicine is an ever-changing field. We’re required to do continuing education for a reason. There have been a lot of changes in the 33 years I’ve been out of school.”

Her first job was in McCook, Nebraska, at Red Willow Animal Clinic where there were three other vets. “It was a mixed animal practice, with a lot of cattle, some horses and a lot of small animals.” But her passion was horses, so Darby convinced them to build an equine business when the horse vet in the next town was no longer available. It was challenging as a new graduate, but Darby succeeded in developing their equine business. A year later, Gunnison’s Town and Country Animal Hospital was expanding their practice. Darby was hired and came home in 1994. The practice was very good she says and she remained there for three years.

Darby left Gunnison to practice at a small animal clinic in Montrose, “only cats, dogs and birds,” for five years where she learned homeopathic medicine, which is essentially Chinese medicine. She left the clinic to do relief shifts in different clinics in the region, for example, covering when somebody goes on vacation. Darby eventually returned to Gunnison, doing relief shifts at the Town and Country Animal Clinic. In 2003, she started her own mobile veterinarian business, Rocky Mountain Veterinary Services, doing farm calls, “It was mostly large animals – cattle, 4-H animals and horses.”

That same year she had a small office and lab with a darkroom up Ohio Creek. “We were doing x-rays that we had to process in a dark room. Now, it’s all digital. I can drive my truck into the middle of field, take an x-ray of an animal, take the plate (there’s no more film) and it registers it digitally and sends it via Bluetooth and the x-ray comes up on the computer. They are very precise x-rays and can be sent to a radiologist for review.” Her husband, Martin Klinowski, owns PCI Construction and he built her new clinic onto his existing building. They had met when he was at WSC, after being set up by friends. They married in 2009.

These days, Darby still works summers in CB. “I spend a lot of time traveling up there, working with Fantasy Ranch horses and doing cattle work for the Allen and Trampe ranches,” where her practice takes her up in the high country to work on cattle in their summer camps. “We have a great staff, and we do good medicine,” she says of her practice. As a longtime local in the Gunnison Valley, Darby says the things she’s most enamored of here, and what keeps her here is, “The ethics of the people. And it’s a pretty educated area and I like that. I love what I see out my bedroom window in Castle Mountain and driving up to Crested Butte. We get to see a lot of the country. I go to Lake City, Sargents, Powderhorn, Irwin and everywhere within about an hour radius.” As a committed community member in her field, Darby has emceed awards for the Stockgrowers Association, and she’s also received an award as a Friend of the Stockgrowers for her work. For the past 20 years, she was the main veterinarian for Cattlemen’s Days and 4-H, having just retired from that position this year. “But I’m still involved,” she smiles, “because I love being involved in this community.”