Monica LaSalle, Peak to Peak. She was raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. By the time she was 15, Stephanie Andelman spent her weekends away from boarding school on the ski slopes and hiking trails whenever she could. This upbringing would cultivate a deep love and concern for the outdoors and the environment. 

As I watch her walk up to our appointed meeting place, she is stopped by at least four people that call out to her for a friendly chat. Her dog, Coda is along for the ride and she drops him off at her car before sitting down for a nice beer and chat. 

Stephanie runs her own business, Stephnet, performing tech start-up services for businesses as well as holding events with lots of music bookings that usually have themes involving the environment, the community or alternative transportation. 

You may recognize her from her MC gig during the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival this year, from running around town putting up posters for events, or from networking with people around the Front Range and beyond. For that is what Stephanie does best and is most passionate about, helping people make connections with each other, especially when they don’t even know where to begin. Judging by the number of people who walk by our table and stop to say hello, she is very good at it. 

Stephanie started very young with her networking and planning skills. From an early age, her parents would attest that she was constantly organizing and leading activities with all the neighborhood children in between completing homework and chores. Very self-motivated, she never had to be reminded to complete anything. Her father spent some time in the corporate world as an executive, something she says may have been passed down to her. But she has always been more concerned with environmental issues, driving her to major in both anthropology and zoology at the University of Michigan. 

She was always interested in evolution and ecology. She wanted to know why humans today behave the way they do based on how “cave men” behaved. People expected her to earn a Ph.D. and become another Jane Goodall, however her father told her during her senior year that she is way too social of a person to spend all her time in the jungle talking to primates.

After graduating with 30 extra credits, she jumped into a van with some friends who were heading to Colorado and promptly fell asleep. She slept nearly the whole way to Boulder, where she and her friends spent weeks skiing all over the state. She was so moved by her time in Colorado that she had a revelation to move to Vail. Her parents caught up with her in Telluride, where despite a broken thumb she was skiing all day, every day. They told her she was going to have to wake up, and she can’t have her cake and eat it too. Steph heard the message alright; she decided to start checking out the rest of the country, starting with Boston. 

She proceeded to spend the next several years bouncing around the country between San Francisco, where she was born, to Maine to Boston to Colorado, and back again. All the while, she cultivated relationships in the music industry. Stephanie is actually good friends with Super Diamond, having worked collecting money at the door of some of their earliest gigs. She was involved in the tech industry with Rhapsody when it first started up, as well as Napster once they became legal. All the while, she was constantly developing relationships and networking with people around the country and somehow managed to be on the edge of paradigm shifts the whole time. 

As Stephanie talks to me about her life experiences, I realize they are so numerous it would take the space of a novel to describe it all. She has truly been involved in everything from helping to create a place for international soccer in the United States to rolling out the red carpet to the American public for the digital music era. Listening to her speak, she has more enthusiasm and energy than two average people, so it is easy to see how she has managed to get so much done in her young life. 

Suddenly, we shift gears and I hear her describe how in 2014 she was diagnosed with a heart murmur and had to have surgery to repair her heart valves. She was forced to leave her home in Eldora, where she had been living, since an epiphany to move on 6/6/2006, at 6 p.m., she says with a laugh. She went to Boston for surgery and to recover. She then bounced back to San Francisco before finally feeling burned out on the digital music scene and moved back to her house in Eldora. 

These days, Stephanie is all over town helping with not just Frozen Dead Guy Days, but also Salto, the Pioneer Inn, Nederland Farmers Market, the Carousel of Happiness (helping with their business program) and many more places. She says she feels her soul is more nurtured here, surrounded by nature and friends from all walks of life who all have one thing in common with her; they have all made the decision to be here in this magical place where even the youth who grow up and move away eventually come back. 

Will she live here forever? Stephanie says she does not see a forever anything. Who knows what she will be up to next? One thing is for sure, wherever you see Stephanie Andelman, you can bet something big is about to happen.

(Originally published in the June 27, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)