“The house inspector was talking to me about flashing on the siding. ‘What is flashing?’ I have no idea how to take care of this,” Amelia Boone exclaimed, talking about the 1970s split-level home she just bought in Golden, Colorado. “Home ownership is very scary.” Boone’s got big plans for her cozy abode though.
It was just in May that she left the San Francisco Bay Area of California for Golden’s Clear Creek, Buffalo Bill grave site, and New Terrain Brewing. Months earlier, pre-COVID-19 pandemic, she’d approached Apple about a remote-work arrangement. She’s in-house counsel for the tech giant. They agreed, and settled on a then one-week-per-month return to the Apple Park office. Boone craved a community, and while the Bay Area has a strong group of runners, it was distant from where she lived and worked. “I was in the South Bay and struggled to feel at home. I traveled every weekend and was happier to be elsewhere, and I was always playing around with a move to the mountains.” Colorado was an option, but so too were Park City, Utah, Bend, Oregon, and Kalispell, Montana. “I really wanted to be around a lot of people,” she explained, and pinned down Colorado, in large part because of the friends she already had there.
Amelia Boone in Colorado. All photos courtesy of Amelia Boone.
“I was super nervous about working from home [at the time],” she said, but then COVID-19 happened and now everyone’s working from home. “The one thing I’ve learned in this pandemic is that I hate working from home,” Boone said, the isolation clashing with her charisma. Still though, she finished her Bay Area lease and found a short-term apartment in Golden. “This is where I want to be,” she quickly felt happy, and then somehow she beat out a dozen other offers for her home in what’s still a super-hot real-estate market. “Courtney Dauwalter, did you follow her to Golden?” Boone repeats an oft-asked question, though thankfully not by me. “‘Yes, if that’s what you think,'” she joked with a laugh, and I think a wink. Boone is incredibly gracious and easygoing. She laughs a lot, and she has had a short run with Dauwalter too.
Boone’s outside sitting where she promises the barrel sauna will eventually be. She says she needs it by winter and that it’s part of her post-run routine. “[The house] opens up to the trails, North Table Mountain,” she said, and then gets into the nitty gritty. “I like some character. With character comes more work. It’s got a good yard, but no sprinklers. Raised flower beds… for plant growing that I don’t know how to do. Luckily the inside is redone but it needs new, sexy stuff. Like concrete in the garage,” she exaggerates.
“I just put a pull-up bar in the bathroom door frame, so I do three pull-ups every time I go to the bathroom,” Boone said of her first-go at a home gym. I immediately react negatively to the three count and instantly feel bad, but she’s still with me. “Hey, I pee like 40 times a day, that’s a lot of pull-ups.” I do the math and she’s right, and that’s a lot of peeing too. She’s planning for an assault bike, a SkiErg, and a beefier garage gym soon. I stop her on the SkiErg, demanding a definition. “It’s like a rower that’s stood upright. I hate rowing,” she says with a nod to past CrossFit workouts. She’s puzzled how to make this garage geometry work though, and she’s already wary of Colorado’s car-hood-destroying hail storms and keeping the car in the garage.
Amelia ElitiptiGO-ing.
We quickly race through Golden’s best, like Bonfire Burritos, and she tells me there’s a great cidery downtown. “God I haven’t, I sat in it last week,” she said of tubing Clear Creek. “And then the next weekend they shut it down again.” It does get crowded in the summer. Boone’s just a few days back from a Four Pass Loop, a popular marathon-distance run outside of Aspen. “Phenomenal, it was my first real alpine run. Wow, just unreal. Oh my gosh, the wildflowers all over. I hadn’t gone that long that high before and how gorgeous it was, you forget how painful it is,” she’s still full of excitement and I picture a head shake or two on her end for emphasis.
Boone’s running five days a week, about 50 miles, and still has a soft spot for the Barkley Marathons. She talks about a Hardrock 100 qualifier, and a chance to race the Western States 100. She regrets that a past earned Golden Ticket wasn’t used because of injury. In part because of those past injuries, she rides an ElliptiGO bike, a lot. She put 40 miles in on it the morning we spke, but she’s mad. “I’ve ridden by the buffalo-herd overlook about 15 times and I have yet to see a buffalo,” she fakes anger. I promise her the I-70 wildlife is there, and she promises that she’s eager to race long distances again.
We talk about travel and she wishes for a trip to Europe. I mention that I just got back from an essential trip to see family. “So I need to marry someone from the European Union,” Boone realizes, for the travel possibilities. She doesn’t stop there and rattles off some strict criteria for marriage. “If they can be a handyman,” she pauses, before going for the ultimate wish, “and only eat the cookie part of an Oreo too.”
Amelia Boone, welcome to Colorado. I think you’ll like it here.
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On Colorado’s Four Pass Loop.
