Profile: Sarah Quinlivan

By Dawne Belloise  

They met on Match.com right after COVID was deemed to have subsided in October of 2021, and that’s why Sarah Quinlivan moved to Crested Butte from Grand Junction (GJ) to be with longtime local Mike Arbaney. “For the longest time, I felt that the online dating world didn’t apply to me but lo and behold, there he was, and he looked like so much fun,” Sarah smiles and tells that a friend of hers from Gunnison verified Mike’s coolness after she thoroughly vetted him. “I found his Crested Butte News Community Profile online and all systems were go.” This past January, Sarah found a position at the Gunnison County Juvenile Service, helping to improve the lives of adolescents in the community. 

Sarah was born and raised in Denver to a dad with a fence business and a mom who was a public health nurse. She says that her late mom was inspirational for the work Sarah’s now doing. “My mother was involved in AIDS education, tuberculosis and STD work,” she says. Sarah’s childhood was spent riding bikes around the streets of Denver with her tight-knit group of friends who all lived on the same block and had lots of freedom in the Congress Park community. “I was always into nature. I liked to get dirty. I was more of a tomboy,” she says. 

Sarah claims to have been thoroughly rebellious throughout high school, managing to do just enough to get by. “I took full advantage of my 15 days of allowed absence,” she laughs about spending a lot of time in City Park, Red Rocks and in LoDo playing pool and hanging out in seedy coffee shops. She graduated from East High School in 1994. “I really had no idea what I wanted to do until my bestie’s mom suggested I become an ecologist. She knew I was really into science and I latched onto that.” Because her GPA had suffered during high school shenanigans, she wasn’t able to get into the colleges she preferred so Sarah spent a year at Metro State College getting the prerequisites out of the way. She then enrolled at Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, pursuing ecology. “But all they had was range ecology, like agriculture and raising livestock and that’s not what I wanted to do,” she says.

Sarah diverted to a degree in wildlife biology and after graduation, worked as a wildlife biologist, first moving to the Chiricahua mountains in 2000 for a three-month internship with the American Museum of Natural History. She was primarily focusing on a bird study of the nest structure of the Painted Redstart. She then went to Tempe to work for Arizona State University for Long Term Ecological Research, one of two urban ecology research sites. “We were looking at atmospheric deposition, basically studying pollution and the contaminants, and also looking at the heavy metals in the Salt River system.” 

During this time, she went traveling to Ecuador and Peru, “just to study Spanish and see the world.” Sarah was able to visit the Galapagos Islands while she was in South America. “For a budding biologist, for someone who studied evolutionary biology, that was a dream come true.” As an intern for the American Museum of Natural History, Sarah feels fortunate to have worked with many international researchers. When she returned from South America, Sarah reconnected with a Canadian biologist she had met in South America, who led her to Craig, Colorado, to work as part of the field crew for the study of the sage grouse. Afterward, she transferred to Grand Junction to the Colorado Division of Wildlife (CDW) to continue studying sage in 2002 and became involved with Gunnison’s sage grouse studies.

Very much a naturalist, Sarah spent her time hiking, camping and snowboarding while in Grand Junction. She also connected with KASM community radio. “A lot of friends had programs and that was the inner circle of people I wanted to know.” Sarah was traveling often to Norwood, Glenwood Springs and Gunnison, doing regional work for CPW. When her then husband was accepted at the University of Adelaide, they moved to South Australia for a year, where she met a Swiss researcher for bottlenose dolphins who hired Sarah to drive her boat on the Port River. “It’s like a raft with a motor. The river is one of the three largest populations of bottlenose dolphins in the world,” she explains. From that experience, Sarah became involved with the Australian Dolphin Research Foundation, educating kids from an old warship turned into a floating classroom on the water. “My role was to teach about whales and dolphins. It was a very magical year for me,” she tells.

During her time teaching kids about the sea mammals, she was hired by Hewitson Winery as a personal assistant, doing everything from accounting to running the wine labs and grape sampling. “This was the paying job but the dolphin research was more my passion.” However, the plan was to return to Grand Junction, which she did in 2004 and worked for the CSU agricultural extension doing viticulture research. She describes it as, “Studying diseases and pests in grapes and what varietals are best suited to western Colorado climates. I went from wildlife to wineries and viticultural but wound up becoming a science teacher,” Sarah smiles.

Sarah also enrolled at Mesa State College earning a teaching certificate. She taught secondary science for six years. “I loved being a teacher,” she says. “I loved that adolescent age the most. What’s more awkward than a 13-year-old? They’re just going through so much and seventh grade is a real pivotal time in life in terms of adolescent development.” She taught life sciences, biology, chemistry and geophysical studies from 2007 through 2013.

In 2013, Sarah was chaperoning high school kids on a trip to Germany and while there, had a tragic fall from a barn loft that sent her to the hospital for three months. Her injuries were pretty severe with multiple broken ribs and a punctured lung from which she developed a serious infection. “Thankfully, the tiny Bavarian town happened to have the best lung surgeon in Germany. They thought they were going to have to remove my lung.” Still, she went through many surgeries before she was well enough to fly home and feels she was very lucky. 

She decided to quit her teaching job and while she was lying in the German hospital had a lot of time to think about what she was going to do next. And that’s when she dreamed up Sassy Q’s Gourmet Ice Pops. “I had been mountain biking in Crested Butte the summer before I went to Germany and had met a woman who had a popsicle stand at the Farmers Market and I thought it was fantastic. Being a foodie, and not wanting to teach anymore is what led to the popsicle idea.” Sarah spent that winter planning and taking business classes at the Business Incubator in GJ. She imported a popsicle machine from Brazil, “because that’s where the best popsicles are made,” and launched her product at various Western Slope farmers markets, art and music festivals and small stores in 2014. However, she felt that she wanted to do something more meaningful with her life again, so she sold the business in 2016.

Sarah began substitute teaching during the off-season from October through April in Grand Junction. “It made me fall in love with kids again and I realized how much I missed that work.” She returned to Metro State College, enrolling in a Master of Social Work program in 2017 and graduated in 2019. While she was working on her master’s online, Sarah was working at a psychiatric hospital in GJ to learn about mental health treatment. She also had the opportunity to work as a school social worker. After graduation, Sarah says she was fortunate to get on a team of school social workers in GJ after which, an opportunity arose at the Youth Correctional Facility with the Division of Youth Services as a school social worker. “Working with a vulnerable population like that, these are kids who are institutionalized, our number one priority was to help them get their diploma or GED,” she explains. Of her work there for four-and-a-half years she says, “It really taught me how to compartmentalize work and not work. You have to become a master of self-care so you can sleep at night and come back and do it the next day.”

Sarah had met Mike halfway through that job, and she started looking for opportunities closer to CB. When a position opened at the Gunnison County Juvenile Service in Gunnison this past January, she took it. “We are engaged in prevention work to create better outcomes for families in the Gunnison Valley. We want them to have healthy lives.”

When she’s not working, Sarah and Mike do lots of Nordic skiing, bird watching, mountain biking, rafting and concerts. “Just being engaged in the awesome community we have here. CB South is simple and easy. I can take the bus to work, it’s so conveniently located and there are a ton of people here. It’s a built-in community and it’s really accessible. I love the skating pond, hockey rink, Zuni Brewing, Tully’s and having a bus stop, so for me, moving to the valley has been a very easy transition.”