Liz McMichael Co-Founded Carbondale’s Landscape Workshop

“Liz played a key role in helping establish the family business, Landscape Workshop, Inc.”

It’s a sentence that sounds like it belongs in a corporate annual report, dry and distant, but if you look closely at the history of Carbondale, you realize it’s actually a story about grit, landscape, and the kind of determination that doesn’t announce itself with fanfare. Elizabeth “Liz” Allyson Ross McMichael passed away on June 13, 2026, in Peoria, Arizona, after a brief battle with cancer, leaving behind a legacy that is deeply woven into the fabric of this valley.

She was born on May 4, 1946, in Florence, South Carolina, a place far removed from the high-altitude air of the Roaring Fork Valley, yet her life’s trajectory eventually brought her to Aurora, where she raised four sons. During those early years, before the business took root in Colorado, she worked as many as three jobs at a time to provide for her family, demonstrating remarkable strength and determination. You can feel it in the way the obituary describes her — not as a passive observer of hardship, but as someone who actively shouldered it.

Then came Jim Pitts. She met him, they shared 50 years of marriage, and together they built a life centered on family and hard work. But it was the business that anchored them to this specific patch of earth. In 1990, Liz and Jim relocated Landscape Workshop, Inc. to Carbondale, where it flourished. That year, the valley was changing, shifting from a quiet agricultural outpost to a bustling hub of tourism and development, and a landscaping company didn’t just survive there; it thrived. It became part of the town’s infrastructure, quite literally, shaping the grounds of homes and businesses alike.

Liz will be remembered as funny, intelligent, and full of life. She was a devoted wife, a generous and loving mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother to a large and close-knit family. The numbers are staggering when you stop to think about them: fourteen grandchildren, eleven great-grandchildren. That’s a lot of birthdays, a lot of holiday gatherings, a vast network of laughter echoing through houses in Carbondale and Peoria. She is survived by her husband, her four sons and daughters-in-law — Tim and Melanie, Scott and Shelly, Greg and Renee, and Steve and Leslie, as well as her brothers, Herb and Mark, and her sister, Sharon. She was preceded in death by her father, Lt. Col. Herbert Ross; her mother, Alice Ross; and her brother, Frank Ross.

There’s a warmth to the way her story is told, a sense that the business was never just about money or market share, but about the people who worked there and the community they served. Landscape Workshop, Inc. didn’t just cut grass and plant trees; it helped define the aesthetic of a town that prides itself on its natural beauty. And Liz was there, helping establish it, moving from South Carolina to Aurora to Carbondale, always working, always providing.

In later years, she and Jim enjoyed dividing their time between Colorado and Arizona, a comfortable rhythm that allowed them to enjoy the crisp mountain air of the valley and the warm sun of the desert. It’s a common retirement pattern for locals, a balancing act between two worlds. For Liz, it was more than a vacation schedule; it was proof of a life well-lived, one that required constant motion and constant effort.

The last thing you might notice, if you drive past a well-tended garden in Carbondale this summer, is the quiet order of it all. The neat rows, the vibrant blooms, the way the light catches the dew on a leaf. That’s Liz’s legacy, not in stone or marble, but in the living, breathing landscape she helped shape, growing quietly under the Colorado sun.