WOMEN OF CRESTED BUTTE

Celebrating 100 remarkable women in the small mountain town of Crested Butte, Colorado, USA who have had a profound influence on its culture, community, and lands—some for more than half a century. The imagery for ‘Women of Crested Butte’ is being created on location in the West Elk Mountains, intermittently through 2025/2026, and will culminate with the production of an art book featuring images and interviews with all 100 women. Take a look at the brand new Behind-the-Scenes Gallery here.

Amidst my international travels and a deep journey into my own health and healing, I’ve been working sporadically on a very special project since the fall of 2020, high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado’s Western Slope. It serves as a sub-project of my global work for The Humans Being Project and explores at its heart the power of women and community. I'm creating imagery for a book that will celebrate 100 remarkable women who have had a profound impact on the tiny mountain town of Crested Butte, Colorado, its culture, community, and lands—some of them for more than half a century.

I started off by canvassing women leaders in the community to discover which women ought most to be recognized. After sorting through hundreds of submitted names and stories, I began creating the 'Women of Crested Butte Project' to celebrate and immortalize these women. I'm asking each participant to envision how she'd like to be remembered by the people of this valley and her loved ones 100 years from now. Next, we'll go out and create that single Legacy Image together at the location of her choice.

I am very excited to be collaborating on this project with Crested Butte locals Shannon Mujica and Katie Joy Folz. ‘KT’ provided me with the seed idea for the project and is acting as a co-producer in several capacities. She also happens to be my best friend. Shannon had been collecting interviews with remarkable women of influence in Crested Butte since well before I got started. She was one of the first women I consulted about Women of CB and she and I concluded in the spring of 2021 that we were in fact working on different aspects of the same project— Shannon with words and me with photography. We have decided to tell the stories of the same 100 women, creating together something larger and more complete than either of us would have produced alone.

Crested Butte has given me a tremendous amount over the years. This project is a way for me to give some of that back and to say ‘thank you’ for all the support that I’ve received from this community, particularly as a single parent raising a young boy here in the mid-2000s. Additionally, I feel that it’s important at this time that we start taking direction from strong feminine voices, both in this valley and elsewhere. History has recognized men almost exclusively and done its best to exclude women. Our centuries-long embodiment of an aggressive masculine version of progress that takes the forms of imperialism, colonialism and industrialization has done an excellent job of delivering our world to the brink of environmental collapse. It's time for something different, something sane and life-affirming. Raising up remarkable women who have shown up for my longstanding community feels right and good. I also happen to love people and their stories and the intimacy of getting to know someone during a photo session. Our true selves come out on both sides of the camera, and I find it to be a powerful experience of mutual sharing and discovery.

It is a great gift for me to be able to enter into this project with so much support from the community and to get to work with such utterly remarkable women, with whom I now have the incredible opportunity to dive into the creative process with. This is a literal dream come true for me and I look forward to sharing my results with you!

—Merrick, THBP Founder and Photographer