Remembering Evelyn

Evelyn doing what she did best - teach!

If you can identify Pedicularis groenlandica growing near a glacial moraine while biking 75 miles across a snowswept Alaskan highway all while smiling and thinking ‘this is the best workout ever’, there is a good possibility that Evelyn Boggs was your teacher.
 
Born in Fort Worth, TX, Evelyn grew up in the Lone Star State, the wilds of Alaska, and the mountains of Colorado hiking with a rifle and a train of little brothers and sisters – Linda, Bob, Nancy, Frank and Candy - whom she helped to raise. She was a teacher before she was a grade-school student, and she took both so seriously that she never looked back when she had to relocate from Suntrana to Anchorage in order to go to high-school.  Hellbent on college, Evelyn broke all of the rules and earned a bachelors degree in Biological Sciences from CSU in 1967.
 
Evelyn was working at the Rustic Lodge outside of Fort Collins, CO in 1965 when she met the man who would become her lifelong best friend and husband. She wooed Dick Boggs with a propensity for serving a single uncooked bean on a large white plate, and an uncanny ability to cook rattlesnake. Dick and Evelyn made music together, the kind of music that lasted for 57 years. “What a babe!” Dick would say of Ev as she sung Blowing in the Wind and he played the guitar. Together the two completed their undergraduate degrees at CSU and were fully ready to head off to the Peace Corps, when their daughter Christi was a happy accident. Ev’s hands were full with a toddler who walked at six months and skied two months later so she decided a little sister, Holly, was just the cure. Evelyn raised Christi and Holly while teaching hundreds of students, first at the Leadville Junior High and then at Colorado Mountain College. A professor of natural history, biology, and math, Evelyn was so beloved that to this day, alumni still return to CMC to try to thank her. It seems quite possible that Evelyn invented Place-based Education before it was trendy. With Dick, she took hundreds of students down the canyons of Cedar Mesa, backcountry skiing in the Mosquito Range and hiking to Windsor Lake. She converted the sights and sounds of the earth to their scientific names, and allowed learners to envision the historical geomorphic events that shaped the very mounds, ditches, and rock piles on which they stood. Evelyn taught math to students who said, “Math just isn’t for me”. Long before Carol Dweck had an inkling of Growth Mindset, Evelyn Boggs convinced learners in a small mining town that with perseverance and the right learning strategies, they could grow up to be scientists. Evelyn danced with such grace, knitting her identities as mother, teacher, athlete, and scholar - earning two additional degrees, both Masters of Science degrees, one from CSU and one from Slippery
Rock University of Pennsylvania.
 
Evelyn raised her daughters using the curriculum of nature - the teachings of glaciers of Alaska’s Inner Passage, the yucca of McLoyd Canyon and the dry-stone walls of the Yorkshire Dales. She baked homemade bread in the rain on beaches that would be covered by the tide just after the plates were cleared and the tea was served. Even on vacation, Evelyn was a fierce competitor. She let everyone know that she had kayaked more miles, biked a bit faster or hiked a bit higher than Dick ever could.  At home in Leadville, Evelyn was the first women to compete in the epic Burro race. Evelyn’s curriculum of competition was to thank for her daughters state, national and international ski titles.
 
Christi and Holly also gifted Evelyn with hundreds of grandskiers. The grandskiers, sometimes as many as twenty, would gleefully camp at the house, piled like puppies in the giant upstairs sunroom of the Boggs’ Burrow. Evelyn would cook giant feasts of spaghetti, biscuits and gravy and BELTs. Evelyn would float around the giant table and prod each skier to eat more, “That is your last K(kilometer)” [of the next day’s ski race] she would say! After dinner the grandskiers would help Evelyn and Dick remove the dishes and the tablecloth and everyone would play blow ball. Evelyn’s laugh would fill the room as she shouted at the skiers, “Blow don’t suck”! 
 
Evelyn was never one to be bothered with high society; she would rather to make a dirty joke at dinner than to use the right fork. Raw, authentic, and unapologetically funny, Evelyn used the process of finding her seatbelt as an excuse to grab butts! A multitasker, she was capable of knitting a sweater, grading a paper and watching Wimbledon at the same time. Her capacity to care for family, students, grandskiers and the town of Leadville was immeasurable. Even in her last years of unremitting dementia, Evelyn continued to care for everyone around her. In the memory wing of the nursing home, she would find other patients who were sad, she would give them a hug and offer to cook!
 
Evelyn passed on the night of Wednesday, April 10th, 2024. Evelyn’s molecules will be returned to the earth to join the sands of the desert, the seas of Alaska and the Boggs’ shortcuts of the lesser-known trails of Leadville’s Rocky Mountains. Evelyn’s teachings will persist through the continued work of her siblings, daughters and grandskiers.