When Sue Anschutz-Rodgers drives from Denver to Carbondale several times each year, she isn't just traveling west. She's traveling to The West.

"I go over those mountains, get to Glenwood Springs, turn and I see Mount Sopris and can actually see part of the ranch," said Anschutz-Rodgers. "This feeling comes over me. I just feel like I'm home."

Somewhere along Interstate 70, in the vehicle she usually shares with the pair of dogs she adopted several years ago in a supermarket parking lot, a metaphorical changing of the hats occurs.

Off goes the one she wears in Denver as a businesswoman and president and executive director of the Anschutz Family Foundation and on goes the one she wears as owner of the Crystal River Ranch, a sprawling cattle and hay operation outside Carbondale in the Roaring Fork Valley.

Now, a third hat is appropriate to both city and country: Citizen of the West for 2006, the annual award given by a committee of community leaders to someone who "exemplifies the spirit and determination of the Western pioneer," according to the National Western Stock Show, which will honor Anschutz-Rodgers at a dinner on Wednesday.

A merger of rural and urban influences characterizes her personal and professional lives.

On her ranch, she herds cattle on horseback, although she is currently out of the saddle following surgery for a fractured vertebrae. At the office, she has been a leading voice in spurring increased funding by Denver foundations to nonprofits in rural Colorado.

"In traveling around the state, with my rural roots, it occurred to me that the rural areas were being left behind. Basically, all the large funders are on the Front Range," said Anschutz-Rodgers.

"With the help of the Community Resource Center, we started Colorado Philanthropy Days (at which funders and nonprofits have met in an out-of-state location twice each year since the early 1990s). It's my job to bring the funders to the rural communities. Each year it has grown and grown. I'm so proud of the funders for the way they have all joined in. It's important for these funders to go and see these nonprofits in their own environments. Most nonprofits, particularly in rural areas, would rather have a root canal than come to Denver."

Steve Graham, executive director of the Community Resource Center, credits Anschutz-Rodgers' leadership for a growth in funding rural charities.

"Seventeen or 18 years ago, 3 percent of all funding went to rural counties. When we did a study last year it was over 15 percent . . . It's been her commitment to rural communities that's made this transfer of wealth possible," he said.

The Anschutz Family Foundation, created in 1982 by her parents, the late Fred and Marian Pfister Anschutz, has given more than $25 million in grants. In 2005, the foundation gave more than $2 million to organizations from inner-city Denver to the farthest-flung corners of the state.

"The foundation's not huge but she's found a way to leverage it by being involved in the planning and helping people develop internal capacity. She's a champion for the underdog, the smaller one that needs help. She's not afraid to roll her sleeves up and help," said Tim Schultz, president and executive director of the Boettcher Family Foundation.

Among numerous board memberships, she chairs the board of trustees of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez.

"Her commitment is one of a real fascination and curiosity about the history of not only the last 200 to 300 years but in prehistoric times before Anglos settled the West. She's an advocate of making that available to students. Her heart is in it and she puts both her time and her money into it," said Ricky Lightfoot, the center's president.

Rural roots, parents instill values

Anschutz-Rodgers grew up in Kansas; first her hometown of Russell, then Wichita, where her father built a successful oil, real estate and livestock business.

"I would not trade my growing up in a rural town for anything. The values and traditions my parents instilled in my brother (Phillip Anschutz) and I were extremely important and it's what I tried to instill in my children: integrity, honesty, respect for others and having your own self-respect," she said.

Her zest for the outdoors, ranching and horses was sparked while her family spent summers in the Moraine Valley near Estes Park and later at ranches her family owned.

"There was a dude ranch down the road (in the Moraine Valley) and I headed straight to the horses. I was sort of the wrangler. When we had guests I'd go out and get the horses. I love horses, love riding, love working cattle. When the guys go out, I'd go out with them, whether they wanted me to or not," she said.

As a junior majoring in European history at the University of Kansas, she told her mother she planned to go to the Sorbonne and study French history, despite the small handicap of not speaking a word of French. Her mother suggested she switch her major to education.

"In those days people listened to their parents. Being a dutiful daughter I went back and changed to education," said Anschutz-Rodgers, who taught second grade for a year and a half in Kansas City. She married, gave birth to three daughters (Susan Rodgers Drumm and Melinda Rodgers Couzens of Denver and Melissa Rodgers Padgett of Lawrence, Kan.) and moved with her family to Searcy, Ark. Following her divorce, she settled in Denver in 1973, joining her parents and brother.

"My mom always told us that attitude was everything," said her daughter, Susan Rodgers Drumm. "If she was having a bad day, we never knew it. She taught us that 10 percent of life is what happens to you and 90 percent is how you deal with it."

"She was so influential in my life, instilled so many deep values that, now that I'm a mom, I can pass on to my children. She taught us to be very independent and independent thinkers as women."

She enjoys a close relationship with her billionaire brother; their offices are on the same floor: "We're both extremely strong-willed. He used to mind me a lot better when we were children."

Ranching is the heart of the West

In addition to the foundation, Anschutz-Rodgers' business interests range from owning the Grand Hyatt Hotel in downtown Denver (she played a hands-on role in its recent restoration) to the Pour House ("Sort of a good old boy restaurant," she said), in downtown Carbondale.

Her ranch, which has more than 1,700 cattle, is her refuge, a place where she spends about six months out of the year and where her 10 grandchildren love to be driven around in Nana Sue's pickup.

"Once (ranching) is in your blood, it's there and it never leaves," she said.

Her father bought the Crystal River in 1966. She acquired it in 1987 and is very much a working rancher. "I shadowed our manager (who was born and raised on the ranch) day in and day out to the point where I'm sure he wanted to say, 'Would you please not get out of the house?' Even though I spent summers on ranches, I didn't know the day-to-day operations. You have to learn every day."

Anschutz-Rodgers was one of the earliest members of the Colorado Cattleman's Agricultural Land Trust and has placed part of the Crystal River, which sits on a mesa, in a conservation easement to protect it from development. "I'm hoping it will always stay as a ranch," she said.

"One of my water engineers found a 100-year-old photo of the ranch. I found the exact spot it was taken and there's absolutely no difference," she said.

Ranching, she said, is at the heart of the character of the West.

"It goes back to that pioneer spirit. I really admire people who made that trip out to the middle of nowhere, not knowing where they were going, not having seen a homestead. A lot of it has to do with ranching. Our whole country was based on agriculture from the beginning. That heritage has just always been there, that true grit personality and staying power," she said.

Being chosen as Citizen of the West, she said, "says who I am, where I came from and where I always will be. It embodies the whole Western spirit and I could not think of a title that would mean more to me."

Citizen of the West award dinner

• When: Wednesday

• Where: Adam's Mark Hotel

• Tickets: The event, which benefits the National Western Scholarship Trust, is sold out.

• Information: 303-297-1166

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