1931 – 2026
Connie Harvey, one of Colorado’s fiercest conservationists, cattle rancher, beloved mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, died peacefully in her home on Maroon Creek on Nov. 3. She was 95.
Born in Austria in 1931, Connie grew up in a world powered by steam locomotives, but lived to watch rovers land on Mars. To those who knew her, she was a loving presence who could recite pages of Shakespeare by heart one moment and wax philosophical on cattle selection and thistle eradication the next.
A voracious and frighteningly fast reader, she was curious about subjects from Marcus Aurelius to epidemiology, and relished good conversations about everything under the sun, including the sun itself. She loved the land, animals of every stripe and her family.
Connie’s devotion to animals began as a young child. When she was just 9, she talked her mother into converting her bedroom into a menagerie with a thick layer of sand on the floor. In her self-styled zoo, she kept skunks, snakes, woodchucks, chipmunks, mice, bats, raccoons, rabbits and turtles. Eventually, she conceded the bedroom to the animals and took to sleeping in the barn.
She studied at McGill University in Montreal and became an accomplished ski racer. Because women students at that time were not allowed off campus unchaperoned, Connie had to sneak off to races to avoid the wrath of the dean. She was eventually caught when newspapers ran articles about her many victories.
Connie married Dr. Harold Harvey in 1955. Their lives were almost cut short in the summer of 1956, when they were returning from a trip to Europe on the Italian ocean liner, the Andrea Doria. Traveling at night in thick fog, the Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish ship Stockholm. With their ship listing sharply and sinking, Connie and Harold climbed hand-over-hand down a rope into the Atlantic and swam to a lifeboat. They were rescued by the Ile de France, a French liner that had turned around when it heard the SOS. Three weeks later, Connie gave birth to her first child.
Connie and Harold moved to Aspen in 1959. She taught skiing for many years as an instructor for the Fred Iselin Ski School at Aspen Highlands. Besides skiing, Connie spent the majority of her adult life raising a brood of six children, fighting for wild places and wildlife, and ranching.
After Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964, Connie and her friends, Joy Caudill and Dottie Fox, organized a small army to explore and map potential wilderness areas, then lobbied Congress to add the land to the American wilderness portfolio. In 1967, they established Wilderness Workshop (still going strong today). They were largely responsible for the permanent protection of several hundred thousand acres in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass, Hunter-Frying Pan, Collegiate Peaks and Raggeds wilderness areas.
She is also the co-founder of Pitkin County Open Space and Trails, and helped shape it into an organization that has preserved thousands of acres and built hundreds of miles of trails.
As a founder of the Maki Foundation, she helped hundreds of small environmental organizations get started, survive and go on to become powerhouses in protecting the Rocky Mountains West. For over a decade, she wrote a weekly column for the Aspen Daily News, never afraid to express her strong opinions on complex political and environmental issues facing Aspen and the world.
Connie was tough as they come, both physically and morally. She rode horseback for hours over the roughest mountain country well into her eighties, swam ice-cold rapids when bucked out of a boat on rafting trips and gracefully skied the steepest lines on Aspen’s mountains. Faced with crooked operators, marauding developers or scoundrels trying to steal her ranch’s irrigation water, she set her jaw, gathered her considerable wits and sent them scurrying home to re-evaluate their life choices.
She loved the West through and through and ran three large cattle ranches in Steamboat, Brush and Snowmass. While cleaning out her old desk — a $40 hunk of crude sheet metal — her kids discovered that her personal photo collection consisted almost entirely of pictures of barbed wire fences, livestock scales, prize bulls and heavy machinery. There was nary a photo of school plays, graduations or baby showers.
Though she wasn’t given to sentimentality, her loyalty and devotion to friends and family were immovable and absolute. When things went sideways, her kids could call her at any hour on any day, and she would get in a truck on an icy road in the dark of the night to help them get back on track.
She is survived by her six children, nine grandchildren, three great-grandchildren and many friends.
Through her love of the West and
everything wild, she left her mark on the land, the waters, and the spirit of Colorado. She was fierce, tender and unsinkable. We will miss her beyond measure.