Sally Ann Meadows-Shanks
November 9, 1942 – October 20, 2026
Born in Pueblo, Colorado, Sally grew up with her mother, Bernece, and her sister, Catherine. It was in Pueblo’s schoolrooms that she first met Robert Shanks, a friendship that would wait half a century for its second act. She graduated from Centennial in 1960.
On a blind date with friends in Colorado Springs in 1963, she met Stephen Lee Meadows, a Tennessean in his final year as a cadet at the Air Force Academy. They married soon after his graduation. Several bucolic years followed at Air Force postings, among them Cape Cod’s’ Otis AFB, before sorrow found them: their first son, Douglas Scott Meadows, was lost shortly after birth. Steve flew combat missions in Vietnam, and came home to train the next generation of pilots at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi. Their second son, Mark Stephen Meadows, was born there in 1968. The following August, Hurricane Camille came ashore on the Mississippi coast and tore their home apart. Then, on a test flight over Mobile Bay, Steve was killed when his aircraft came apart beneath him; a wing separated and the plane went into the water. In 1971 Sally and Mark returned to Colorado Springs under the protective wing of the Air Force.
These profound tragedies, all of them before she turned thirty, transformed Sally from a military wife into a naturalist and self-described hippie. As if rising from ashes, her joy of life flickered up out of what she had suffered, and her remarkable path warmed everyone lucky enough to be near her light.
Sally earned her degree from the University of Colorado (Boulder and Colorado Springs) in a blend of her own design, biology, psychology and fine art, and went on to graduate studies in communication and geography. In 1975, a friend, Julian Ludwig, pointed her toward the US Forest Service, and she walked into the woods and found her passion. She directed environmental-education workshops for the Pike and San Isabel National Forests, fought forest fires, wrote the national staff-training manual for the Youth Conservation Corps in Washington, DC, and in 1977 ran a YCC camp in Wyoming’s Wind River District: a summer of teenagers, trail tools and alpine sky, with Sally hiring, training and mothering the lot of them.
In 1978, Sally moved to Fort Kent, Maine, with Chris Bandy, superintendent of the Pike Hotshot fire crew, and with her son Mark, where they built a house and lived off the land with no electricity or running water for three years. In these pioneering conditions she learned to tap maple syrup, cook conserves on a wood stove, shear sheep and pick berries, all while keeping an eye on the bears.
Returning to Colorado in 1981, Sally returned to her first love, education. Not for status, which bored her, but for the people on the other side of the lesson. She managed community-research programs at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and by 1987 was executive director of the Colorado Springs Clean Air Campaign, a climate-awareness effort years ahead of its time, where she built a speakers’ bureau and trained a small army of volunteers. In 1990 she served as a National Park Ranger Naturalist at Glacier National Park in Montana, yet again spending her days among bears and trees.
In 1992 Sally founded Meadows Mountain Walks, leading visitors from the Broadmoor and the surrounding communities into the foothills, often with a string of llamas carrying the lunch. She trained her own guides, worked alongside the Cheyenne, Ute and Arapaho tribes to tell the land’s older stories, and ran the whole thing under a slogan that could have been her epitaph: “Got enough stuff? Try collecting experiences!” She later co-created a weekend retreat for women at Penrose Hospital, because of course she did.
Then, by chance, at a Pueblo high-school reunion, Sally found Robert Ray Shanks again: the boy from her grade-school classroom who had grown into an Air Force and commercial pilot flying out of Denver. They married in 2001 in Colorado Springs, and Bob gave her the one thing her first marriage never got the chance to: time. Twenty-five years of it. Summers on Lake Temagami in Ontario, where they canoed, fished, swam, spent time with their neighbors, friends, grand-kids and listened to the loons; the rest of the year spent planning the next trip. Together they walked Patagonia, Peru, France, Thailand, Argentina, Iceland and others. Bob flew, Sally navigated, and neither of them ever got enough of the view.
Sally is survived by her husband Robert Shanks and his sons Steven and David; her sister Catherine; her son Mark, her daughter-in-law Amélie, and their sons Zephyr and Sirocco; and her cat, Blu. She is survived by all of us reading this. She is remembered as a bright light among the trees and the bears.
As Sally said: “Normal is a setting on the dryer.”
A celebration of Sally’s life will be held in Colorado Springs; details will be shared at http://markmeadows.com/sally/ and with family and friends.