Profile: Erin Fowler

By Dawne Belloise

Erin Fowler moved to Crested Butte from Vermont at the magical age of 10, mostly because her father, who was into hunting, fishing and skiing, wanted to be in Colorado. She feels her mom was probably just along for the ride. It was 1995, and they drove around the mountains a bit in their old hippie van, looking for a place to call home and almost settled in Steamboat Springs until they discovered CB and decided this must be the place.

Erin is the eldest and only daughter of her parents’ four kids, but she had a large extended family who lived nearby so she was used to having a constant source of built-in playmates. When she arrived in CB knowing no one, it was a bit of a culture shock. It was summer so school was out and Erin recalls, “It was a bit of a transition since all the kids had been going to school together since kindergarten. I was going into fifth grade and the youngest person in my class. I made friends with the other weirdos,” she grins. Erin became one of CB’s free-range kids about town, having been an outdoor child in Vermont, building forts in the woods. Here, she continued her adventures. “I lived close to Gothic Field, so I spent a lot of time down by the river. I was building forts under the bridge and probably being a troll,” she laughs. 

Erin attended ski school for several years before switching to snowboarding. “I don’t think it was my passion though because I didn’t continue the sport.” But she boasts, “I’m an avid snowman maker.” By middle school, Erin had an awesome group of friends. “We were very lucky to grow up here because we could go out camping for the weekend and this was a time before cell phones, but our parents always knew we were safe.” Dating for the youth can be a challenge in a small community when you become a teen and the hormones kick in and you’ve known all your classmates since you were kids. “I didn’t date much until my senior year and started dating an underclassman for a little while. He was part of my weird little friend group,” Erin smiles.

In high school, her interests revolved a lot around music. “I was one of maybe three alternative music kids. At that point I liked Disturbed, Stain, Godsmack and groups like that.” So she and a couple of best friends decided to form a band. “I got a guitar and never learned to play it. Band practice was mostly us just hanging out. We had big dreams but not a lot of follow through,” she says. Erin graduated in 2003 with no idea of what she wanted to do next but, as most kids in a small town at the end of the road conclude at one time or another, she decided that a change of scenery might be good. She moved to Denver at the end of that summer with her Gunnison friend Anna Dutka. “I was mostly hanging out. I liked Denver but I wasn’t quite ready for the big city. I lasted about two months before moving back home. I was very glad to be back. I really loved growing up in CB and then living here through my 20s.”

Erin started working at Clark’s Market, which turned into a 12-year position while enjoying the CB lifestyle. “I was doing what every young person in CB does, which was hanging out at the Talk of the Town. And we were doing a lot of camping.” At one point, Erin and her close friend Elin Farrington decided to start an assassination-type water fight, clearing it first with the marshals. “We actually asked the CB cops if it was ok and they told us, it’s not exactly legal because you have a hit list, but we did it anyway. It was all in good fun and it was just water guns. Everyone got their target on a card that told them where they could be hit and where they could not be hit, like at work. It was very fun.”

It was in her mid-20s when Erin started coming to terms with her own sexuality. She explains, “CB was an amazing place to grow up but didn’t have a lot of representation for the LGBTQIA+ community. I didn’t have a lot of role models to show me what queer relationships look like. It wasn’t until my mid 20s that I began to realize that I was queer. I identify as bisexual, but I don’t really love that term so I just identify as queer. I think I was more in shock than other people when I started coming out to them. Being part of the queer community just means that your romantic or sexual preferences differ than what is considered ‘normal.’ I was one of the lucky ones, I don’t have a tragic coming out story in any way, no one treated me any differently, they were like, yeah we know.”

Despite that she was loving life here, around the time she was approaching 30 she began feeling that CB might be too small. “I was starting to resent it here which I never wanted to do because this place is magical.” She wasn’t really sure where she wanted to be but headed to New Orleans to check it out, prompted by a friend who was living there. “It took me all of three hours to decide that I wanted to live there. That city just has this crazy amount of energy and magic to it.

I remember one of my first days there, I was sitting at Aunt Tikki’s bar and I was writing postcards to my friends. I was having a great conversation with the bartender and I looked down and my name was carved into the bar where I was sitting,” she felt, “You have moments in your life where the universe says, here’s your sign.” She packed up and moved but, as she was rolling into town, Erin immediately had a panic attack. “I had just left every person and thing I’d ever known and I was thinking, what am I doing?” During her first couple of days, she took long walks and there was this imprint in the sidewalk that looked like lungs to her, “And I stared at it for a long time and felt it was the city telling me to take a deep breath, you’re gonna be ok.”

Erin took a sales rep job with John Fluevog, the company that makes super whimsical shoes. “The shoes were amazing and it looked like an incredible company to work for.” She was enjoying everything the Big Easy had to offer – the people, the food and the music. She enrolled and completed a 1,600-hour cosmetology course. Her plan was to hang in the Crescent City for two years and then head back to Crested Butte, but the allure kept Erin there for seven years. “New Orleans is one hell of a mistress and I love it.”  She styled hair in a salon for a while but it gave her anxiety to deal with people’s tresses so she signed up for a metalsmithing course, eventually selling her jewelry in shops and art markets. “My style of jewelry is very gothic and I use a lot of found elements like bones and teeth and bugs.”

Two years ago, Erin felt the tug of her mountain home, and even though New Orleans was amazing, she was homesick and missed her people. “I never found the same quality of friendships there as I have here. Peace Wheeler was about to have a baby and was getting married, it made me realize that I really wanted to be here and see that. I wanted to be a part of that baby’s life and I wanted to see my best friend become a mother.” She moved back in June of 2022. 

The first summer was a transition from the big city back to a small town at the end of the road. And things had changed, “My really good friends were still here but I didn’t know anybody else. The town had grown and the community changed. I hadn’t been in snow in the last seven years and it was one of the biggest winters – and it was a lot.” But she fell in love with the Butte again, “Moving back here let me reestablish my long-term friendships and it also allowed me to deepen newer friendships.” 

She’s currently working for Alpenglow Events, which sets up tents for events, weddings and nonprofits. “I was able to be outside all summer and it’s been really great. In the winter, we do all the stuff we don’t have time for in the summer, like organizing, updating the website and things like that.” Erin confesses that she may not stay here forever, but for now, in this moment, she says, “I really love my life here. I have an incredible group of friends and a wonderful partner, and we are 100 percent the feral children we grew up as.”