Nancy Craft
By Deb Dion
Catching up with Nancy Craft gives you the same feeling you might get in the Serengeti, binoculars pressed to your face, getting a rare glimpse of an exotic animal. Despite being a Tellurider since 1978, Craft is far from a stay-at-home local-she is a travel guide who spends much of her time in Asia. When she is home in Telluride, she's usually hiking in the desolate reaches of the high country or cross-country skiing on a quiet trail in the woods.
Craft has always been fascinated by hard-to-reach places, and her devotion has helped preserve them. As a student at C.U. Boulder in the '70s, she was given a state vehicle, a gas card and five dollars a day to study the wilderness areas around Telluride in support of legislation that would eventually protect the acreage surrounding Lizard Head and Sneffels from development. She helped form the roots of Telluride environmentalism-San Miguel Citizens Alliance-a group that sent her to Washington to lobby on behalf of their legislation. The group's victory created a vast pristine playground that sets the region apart from other resort communities.
As Telluride continues to change and grow, the mountains are still amazingly empty, says Craft. Even as the summers get busier, you can go out on the trails and see nobody. Isn't that kind of what binds us all together here? The outdoors, the beauty of the wilderness? And then in 1986, after a stint doing the KOTO radio news to justify her journalism degree and finishing a volunteer project to build Ophir Town Hall, Craft departed to explore a new frontier. Eschewing graduate school in art for an infusion of culture, she decided to hone her skills in Japanese textile arts. She spent seven winters in Kyoto, Japan, studying art, teaching English, selling her artwork-and taking advantage of the travel hub to visit Thailand, Nepal, India and Indonesia. That was when I got the travel bug, says Craft. But I always came home to Telluride.
The intrepid adventurer moved back to town in 1992 after marrying another globetrotter, journalist Rob Schultheis, in a monastery near Mt. Everest. Craft feared finally settling in Telluride. I thought, 'My traveling days are over,' says Craft, but I decided that I might as well use what I'd learned. Her experience gave her the tools to become a successful travel planner. She won the Conde Nast award for three straight years as the top travel specialist for Japan.
She also knit together her passion for sharing the travel experience with her fervent appreciation of fabrics. In Nepal, she helped start a weaving cooperative, which does more than just wrap rich cashmere scarves around the necks of people here. It also provides a market and precious revenue for the struggling weavers in a region where politics have dulled the tourist economy. I've always been a weaver, says Craft. She is happy to connect the Nepali weavers with consumers in this country. This project just helps to keep a little income in their pockets.
She uses her love of textiles to tailor trips for groups of people interested in exploring the fabric arts of places such as Japan, Laos and Thailand. Craft says it is satisfying to be able to share her intimate knowledge of Kyoto and introduce people to the artists she met while living there. We can expose people to our circle of friends. It goes beyond sightseeing, so it's exciting, says Craft of the specialized trips she does for Esprit Travel. I just love color, texture, design. In Japan, the design sense is so advanced. There's an amazing textile heritage.
The blank pages in a passport for visas and stamps are intended to last the passport's life-ten years. Craft's lifestyle necessitates getting more pages every five years. But when she does come back home, she continues to champion the arts and protect the wilderness. She's on the artist board of Ah Haa School for the Arts and served on open space commissions in both the Town of Telluride and San Miguel County. Now she is the open space coordinator for Ophir and, for the past ten years, has been working to preserve more than 1,200 acres of high country surrounding the Ophir valley. The jagged granite peaks and tender alpine forests have been named a priority for acquisition and will become public land as soon as the funding becomes available. Craft can take some credit for the fact that San Miguel County is now 68 percent public land.
It's rare to be able to piece passions together into a career, but in both her determination to protect the outdoors and in her ambassadorship to faraway places, Craft has taken the road less traveled. Her ambitions have been to help people and respect the beauty in the world, and in this spirit of selflessness, she was able to carve out her niche. Some people will do anything to get there, says Craft. That's not me. But I think I have the best job in the world.
