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Locals 2011: Mary Bowman

Dr. Mary Bowman, an obstetrician and gynecologist, provides a calming presence and expert care to more than 100 Yampa Valley women each year as they welcome their newborns into the world. Bowman is featured in this year's Locals special section. Find all of this year's Locals profiles in At Home in Steamboat Springs magazine, which is on newsstands now.

Steamboat Springs — Not many of us can say we’re part of 120 miracles every year.

Dr. Mary Bowman can.

The Steamboat Springs obstetrician and gynecologist provides a calming presence and expert care to more than 100 Yampa Valley women each year as they welcome their newborns into the world. And she’s been doing it since 1997, which means there’s a whole lot of area children — and now teens — whose first moments of life outside the womb were spent in Bowman’s hands.

Obstetrics is just half of her 60-hour-a-week job as one of three doctors at Yampa Valley OB/GYN. The workload associated with the thousands of patients at their practice is significant, but Bowman wouldn’t have it any other way.

“It’s what I’m supposed to be doing,” she says. “Not everyone finds that, so I’m really lucky.”

Dr. Leslie Ahlmeyer started the practice shortly after she and Bowman did their residencies together in Denver. The pair clicked, and Steamboat Springs was a perfect spot to settle for Mary and her husband, Jay.

As the practice has grown — it now includes Dr. Megan Palmer — so too has Bowman’s appreciation of what she does. She says she likes to help women feel empowered to take good care of themselves, and she enjoys caring for patients long term.

When not at the office, or delivering babies in the Family Birth Place at Yampa Valley Medical Center, Bowman is at home with Jay and their 14-year-old son, Nate. They fit Steamboat’s mountain lifestyle to a T — winters are spent on the ski slopes, and summers are spent running and mountain biking on trails from here to Utah.

Bowman, who spent her childhood between Colorado Springs and Santa Cruz, Calif., loves Steamboat because it’s a community that values its open space, its schools and its public institutions.

“People care about this place so much,” she says. “I don’t see us ever living anywhere else.”