Roy Young
Jan. 29, 1948 – March 19, 2026
Roy’s love for immersion in nature began with his Maine childhood, and right from the beginning included his gift for catalyzing love and fierce devotion to the natural world in others. His actions on behalf of the earth, and empowering people to defend and heal it, continue to ripple out, proving that one person can make the world a better place.
Love for wild nature came easily. Roy was the surprise second child in his family, with a brother 16 years his senior (Tod, still with us). All accounts indicate a childhood spent running wild in the woods, guided by voracious curiosity.
As a high school student, Roy read an article in “Reader’s Digest” about Euell Gibbons, the wild plant forager. Fascinated, he wrote Gibbons a letter. That summer, Gibbons drove to Roy’s home in Maine and convinced his parents to let Roy join him to help build the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School.
From West Falmouth, Maine, Roy went on to Duke University, studying geology on a Navy ROTC scholarship. When he registered as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War in 1968, the scholarship was withdrawn. His parents, Raymond Orrin Young and Doris Elva Dickey, remortgaged their home to finance the remainder of his education.
One graduate school trip found Roy digging fossils in the Green River Formation in Wyoming, which was legal at the time on Bureau of Land Management land. When he ran out of gas money in Denver, he sold a few of the fossil fish he had gathered, beginning his career as a retail geologist. Soon he was traveling to natural museum gift shops with a van full of rocks. In the early 1980s, he began selling at geology conventions, and those sales allowed him to open his first storefront business in 1986: Nature’s Own in Nederland, Colorado.
Just as important, likely more so to Roy at the time, were two other threads in his life: environmental activism and a deep devotion to river running.
In 1976, Roy moved to Boulder, Colorado, and co-founded Boulder EcoCycle with Pete Grogan, one of the first curbside recycling programs in the United States, using a fleet of repurposed school buses.
In 1978, Roy took part in what had been planned as a one-day civil disobedience action at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant between Boulder and Golden. It became a weeks-long occupation of railroad tracks, blocking the transport of materials into and out of the facility. Roy was chosen as a spokesperson early on and later as one of 10 defendants representing more than 200 arrestees at trial. Though his science-based testimony was compelling, the Rocky Flats Truth Force lost the case. He remained active in opposition to the plant, which ultimately closed in 1989, and also participated in civil disobedience at the Nevada Underground Nuclear Weapons Test Site in 1986.
River rafting became a natural extension of Roy’s geological passions. Beginning in the mid-1980s, he outfitted annual Grand Canyon trips, where he delighted in explaining geology as the Colorado River revealed layers of deep time. A frequent topic was the Great Unconformity, a phrase that often became his nickname for the remainder of the trip.
Friends described him as fearless. “Any time he was near water, his eyes sparkled.”
As Nature’s Own grew, additional stores opened in Fort Collins, Breckenridge and Boulder. Roy envisioned the stores as places where people could better understand earth science, geologic time and extinction through direct engagement with minerals and fossils. He also saw the business as a vehicle to fund environmental work around the world, especially small, locally driven efforts, “Why we do what we do,” as he put it.
Roy was instrumental in establishing several of the organizations Nature’s Own supported, often extending creative forms of support over many years. One example was transferring ownership of the flagship Fort Collins store’s historic building to Idea Wild, then paying the organization rent for its use. As executive director Wally Van Sickle said, “The rent alone has funded over 2,000 of our projects…”
Nature’s Own’s current two locations, in Fort Collins and Nederland, will continue under the leadership of Roy’s wife, Rosa Venezia, and his longtime business partner, Kate Readio.
Profits will continue to support environmental work, extending Roy’s impact well beyond his lifetime.
Donations may be made in Roy’s honor to: