After five years of surgical and medical adventures in rural Alaska, Julie Conyers, M.D., is treating patients at Uchealth Pikes Peak Regional Hospital in Woodland Park.

“Rural communities are different,” she said. “Even though Colorado Springs is close, people may not want to go down there.”

Conyers is a member of the American Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy and a fellow of the American College of Surgeons. She has decades of experience in minimally invasive surgeries in addition to traditional approaches for the treatment of both cancer and benign conditions.

“We’re looking at how to develop more of these services up here,” she said. “We can’t offer everything but what we do offer we do well.”

For Conyers, treating patients in Alaska prepared her for just about anything.

“We would do damage-control surgery where we would stabilize the patients for transport,” she said.

Gunshot wounds, too, were common but dicey when the victim was on another island in the Ketchikan archipelago.

“We’d load them on the mail train from the fishing village and get them on the back roads,” she said. “It was a stressor.”

While vastly different areas, Conyers sees certain similarities due to challenges of distance from major hospitals.

“You’re going to have a limited blood bank to treat an internal hemorrhage, for instance,” she said. “It’s about logistics; you’re not going to get the cooler, for a rapid transfusion as you would at Memorial Hospital North.”

Ute Pass, too, is a geographical obstacle. “There will be times when you are not going to be able to get someone down the pass, so, to stop the bleeding we can put in those balloon tamponades,” Conyers said. “We have to do that up here in the emergency room until we can get them down the pass.”

For Conyers, the challenges draw her to practicing medicine in places other than big cities. “I still wanted to work in rural surgery, written about the challenges of developing rural surgery, the economic and transfer challenges,” she said. “There’s a nice culture at Uchealth, a culture of quality and good patient care.”

Conyers is a Colorado native whose father was part of the 10th Mountain Division in Leadville. “I remember coming up here as a child, but it was a little two-lane road,” she said. “I remember going to the North Pole.”

Conyers graduated in 1988 from the University of Colorado School of Medicine, served a sixyear residency. Continuing her education, she earned a master’s degree in business administration in healthcare from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

“You learn about being a doctor, but you don’t learn about business or about running a hospital,” she said. “There’s a science to business.”

With the increasing number of cases due to the Delta variant of COVID-19, Conyers encourages her patients to be vaccinated. “We’re seeing a surge of cases mainly among the non-vaccinated,” she said. “Vaccinations are protecting people.”

Some people are hesitant about the vaccine, she said. “I always respect people’s privacy, their right to not want to be vaccinated; they may not want the vaccine now,” she said. “But I tell them, ‘We’re here for you.’ ’’

Conyers spends her leisure time hiking, skiing and cycling. She and her husband Buddy recently took up riding e-bikes. “Woodland Park is gorgeous,” she said. “I’ve been a mountain girl pretty much all my life.”

Conyers splits her time between Pikes Peak Regional Hospital and Memorial North with alternating weeks.