Dorothy “Dottie” Fox, who died at age 86 Monday at her Old Snowmass home, helped secure hundreds of acres of wilderness, co-founded the Aspen Wilderness Workshop and the Great Old Broads for Wilderness, and was featured in the documentary “Wild At Heart.”
Her particular form of intrepid idealism fit snugly into the germinal environmental advocacy movement of the early 1960s. Fox remained a passionate wilderness advocate throughout her life, reveling in hiking and camping until cancer left her too frail to tie her boots.
Dorothy Elizabeth Goodman Fox was born April 1, 1920, in North Platte, Neb., shortly before Grace and John Goodman moved their family to Colorado. She famously resented her parents’ timing. Had the move occurred just a few months earlier, Fox could have claimed to be a Colorado native.
After graduating from East High School and studying at the Parsons school of art in New York City, she married Revill Fox and moved to Boulder. Once a Republican committeewoman, in Boulder she became a firm Democrat. She remained active in politics when the Foxes moved from Boulder to Aspen, where her husband wanted to raise horses during what the family called his “semi-retirement.”
In Aspen, Fox founded the local chapter of the League of Women Voters and joined the local planning and zoning committee and other citizens groups, along with the Sierra Club. She hiked and camped insatiably.
“Her husband wasn’t a great hiker, and she’d just go off up into the mountains on her own expeditions, and the heck with him,” said Joy Caudill, who, along with Connie Harvey and Fox, formed a formidable trio locally known as the Maroon Belles. They established the advocacy organization then known as the Aspen Wilderness Workshop.
Shortly after Congress passed the 1964 Wilderness Act, the three began meeting in their kitchens, poring over maps to plot out the land they hoped to see closed to motorized vehicles.
From the late 1960s to 1980, they organized groups of volunteers who hiked into potential wilderness areas, collecting data, evaluating environmental conditions, circulating petitions and talking to ranchers and others they encountered.
Their campaign efforts included pasting pages of 3,000 pro-preservation signatures to a length of butcher’s paper that cascaded from the third window of the Pitkin County Courthouse, over an adjacent roof, down to the sidewalk and out into Main Street.
Eventually, their work added more than 400,000 acres of wilderness – including 103,000 acres to the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness – through the 1978 Endangered American Wilderness Act and the 1980 Colorado Wilderness Act.
“We are literally surrounded by their good works,” noted an Aspen Times editorial Friday on Fox’s legacy.
As Aspen became known as a playground for the rich and famous, and as their interest expanded beyond the Roaring Fork Valley, the Maroon Belles dropped “Aspen” from the Wilderness Workshop’s name. Fox, whose book “Below the Rim: Footsteps Through the Grand Canyon” illustrates that she loved the low desert’s stark vistas as much as she loved the mountains, threw herself into working with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
In 1989, Fox and about a dozen other women formed the Great Old Broads for Wilderness, an advocacy organization whose self-deprecating humor veils the considerable political clout that helped establish the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
“Dottie always held a vision of not only what was possible, but necessary,” said author Terry Tempest Williams, who sits on the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance’s board of directors.
“She was a beacon of light in these dark times and always found the line or humor or irony to move us forward through the labyrinth of politics to the open space she loved.”
Fox continued hiking and camping well into her 80s. She put up and took down her own tent, began her days with yoga exercises and concluded them with a tot of lime-splashed tequila at sunset.
When cancer left her too infirm to hike, Fox, who spent 18 years as a Colorado Mountain College art teacher, remained in camp to paint deft watercolors that became bidding-war subjects at fundraisers.
“For Dottie, it wasn’t just wanting to save everything but enjoying what was out there,” said longtime friend Suzy Ellison.
“From her deathbed, she could literally look out her window, because it faced Capital Ridge, and see what she’d helped accomplish.”
Fox’s marriage ended in divorce. Murray Pope, her companion of 20 years, died in 1994.
Survivors include daughters Jackie Chandler and Cici Kinney, both of Carbondale; sons Randy Fox of Boulder and Mark Fox of Santa Ynez, Calif.; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
