Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak.   For our interview, I meet Koley Gilbert half way between Nederland, where she was raised, and Longmont, where she can now afford to live instead, at the back side of the Boulder Reservoir. As if to make her feel at home, the wind has come to join us, whisking branches across the icy lake as if they were light as leaves. Bundled from head to toe in a full-length parka, I take one look at Koley in jeans and a leather jacket and frown, “aren’t you cold?”

“Nah,” she says, “I was raised in the frigid wind.”

Me, overdressed, and she, underdressed, head off together on the trail, but in just a few hundred yards and we’re already veering off-path, scrambling down piles of concrete blocks to get to the reservoir’s spillway, perchance to find a break from the wind. From behind me I hear Koley pipe up, her voice sounding further away than I expect.

“Sorry,” she says, slowly puttering down the uneven terrain in a pair of worn and tractionless Uggs, “I am famous for wearing the wrong shoes for the occasion.”

But as soon as she lands on the three-inch-thick layer of ice below her boots prove to be the perfect choice of footwear, allowing her to glide along, effortlessly weaving in and out of the dam’s angular divots. Seeing her so carefree and playful I stop her to take a picture and so she stops and stands stoically, blankly, at the camera.

“Just be yourself,” I say, and no sooner than I do, Koley breaks with who the camera expects her to be and goes off dancing with the walls, as if they were many suitors clamoring to take her to the Winter Ball.

“I’m a free spirit,” she says. “I can’t help it.”

“Duh,” I say, because free-spiritedness strikes me as the most obvious part of Koley. But just a moment later, when we’re walking toward a makeshift structure on the shore, it strikes me that Koley represents an evolution in my understanding of the term.

Before Koley, free-spiritedness felt light and easy, like a lullaby beckoning you to go with the flow, but even as the progenitors of the hippie ethos, the Grateful Dead, admit, life “seldom turns out the way it does in a song.”

Which is to say there is a knowing edge to Koley’s chill that feels important.

She gets that love and peace and joy are both the truth and the goal, but she also gets that the world needs to be slapped by those vibes before it can hope to wake up to them. And now that I think of it, I like the notion of a free-spirit with sting, like the Stooges’s “street walking cheetah” who won’t let us forget we live in a world on the brink of disaster.

Still Koley enjoys herself, now inside the structure, picking up its spare parts and waving them around playfully but studiously, like a warrior who, finding a new tool in her hands, must figure out how to wield it. The wind is swirling stronger than ever and yet she’s standing there, firmly and completely unbothered, as if she knows her stillness is, in part, what defines the chinook, as if Koley knows she is a goddess at the center of a changing world.

Later, we’ll sit and talk about what it’s been like to see Nederland change over the years, how hard it’s been to no longer be able to afford to live in her hometown. She embraces the change, saying she gets it, “Nederland has a gravitational pull,” and who is she to deny anyone its pleasures. But it also saddens her that a place she loves so dearly is now out of her reach. As an artist, she knows she’s chosen both the right path and the rocky one and, unwavering in her commitment to live her values, she accepts that living her bliss might come at the cost of living in the town that she loves.

She tried. And she’ll keep trying. But for now, she’ll live in Longmont where she’s works as an artist, painting and making jewelry, and taking the occasional day trip up to Nederland to sit by the reservoir and soak up the spirit of the place she loves. And eventually she’ll figure out what to do: whether to stand against the wind and march back up the hill, or to move with it, and see where else it might lead.

A weekly column about locals living along the Peak-to-Peak. To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.

(Originally published in the January 24, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)