Crestone, Colorado

By Peter Anderson

It is a cold morning in the dead of winter in Crestone, Colorado. Contractors and lumber trucks are headed for various construction sites in the reinvented 1970s mountain development south of town called the Baca Grande. Parents are driving their kids to a small charter school on the windswept flats west of town. A Tibetan monk in a saffron robe drives a Toyota to the post office to pick up mail (no home delivery here), and a lone horseman followed by a wily cow dog rides along the shoulder of the road, headed for a cup of joe at Black Bear Video and Coffee.

In front of Shambala, the other coffee joint in town, some of the regulars are smoking hand-rolled American Spirits, and wondering why an Alamosa contractor got the job to build another Buddhist retreat nearby when local builders could have gotten it done just as nicely. Their smoke drifts off toward the local peaks — Challenger and Kit Carson, The Crestone Needles, Crestone Peak — all of which are around or above fourteen thousand feet high. For those who appreciate a heavy-duty gradient, who like their topo lines nice and tight, these mountains can seduce you in a radically vertical way.

I made what I expected to be a temporary move here in 2000, with Grace, my wife, and Rosalea, our infant daughter. We were temporarily seeking a quieter and more contemplative life than we had been able to manage in southwestern Colorado. My first rambles east out on the inevitably steep Sangre de Cristo trails meant hauling a one-year old in a backpack. Her stamina for napping and riding, and mine for getting us both up the trail, limited us to a couple of hours round trip and only a thousand feet or so in elevation gain.

Still, the high peaks were working their mojo. One night I remember watching a full moon rise up the high ridges behind a banner of blowing snow. Crestone moments like these began to seduce me. Still, it took some new friends, some good reports on local schools, a buyer’s real estate market and new teaching and editing jobs to convince us we should stay.

Crestone isn’t an easy place to live. For many locals, keeping groceries on the table involves working somewhere else periodically or saddling up on that old Internet Trail. Other challenges include bitter cold winters (no banana belt hereabouts) with full-on doses of isolation, dust-bowl winds carrying the grit from valley potato farms in the spring, clouds of mosquitoes and other assorted insect pests in June and July.

But for a town at the end of an obscure country road in one Colorado’s poorest and least-populated counties, there is a lot going on. Bulletin -board flyers around town promote, among other things, an open mic, a house concert, a meeting of community activists fighting a proposal to drill for natural gas nearby and a Buddhist retreat.

For a small and isolated mountain town, Crestone is also unbelievably diverse. Here you’ll find monks and bikers; Buddhists and Baptists; retirees and renegades; hippies and Republicans. You’ll hear numerous different languages spoken — Tibetan, Japanese, and Spanish among others. How did this once-sleepy ranch town, long past its gold-mining prime in the 1880s, attract such a diverse international population?

First off, people are drawn to the space and silence here. There are no stop lights, no traffic jams; just a post office, liquor store, two groceries (one with hardware), a liquor store, a great bar, several good restaurants and little more than that, all of it surrounded by thousands of acres of public land.

Then there’s the community itself. Greater Crestone includes the Baca Grande, a failed 1970s mountain development that has since been reinvented as a haven for artists, contemplatives and counter-culture refugees of all sorts. It has also become a center for alternative architectures — straw bale, earthships, domes and any number of home-made solar hybrids.

By way of her nonprofit, the Manitou Foundation, Hanna Strong has played a big part in shaping the community of Greater Crestone. Some years ago, she embarked on a project to gather representatives from the world’s great religions in one place. From its holdings in the Baca, her foundation awarded land grants to communities representing the world’s great contemplative traditions including a Carmelite Monastery (Christian), the Haidakhandi Universal Ashram (Hindu), the Shumei International Institute (Japanese natural philosophy) and several Tibetan and Zen Buddhist centers. Manitou has also lent its support to environmentally oriented projects such as a proposed eco-village of low-income homes.

As attractive to curious seekers as Crestone may be, not everyone finds a way to stay here (or even wants to after the initial shine wears off). Still a steady stream of misfits, mystics, and mountain-dwellers keep rolling into this eclectic edge of a town to give it a try.

 

The Silver Crest

Bellying up to the bar in Crestone, you may just find a ranch hand on one shoulder and a monk of some persuasion on the other. In addition to good conversation, you’ll find lots of beers on tap, great margaritas and some fine Tex-Mex food, including some of the best green or red chile to be found anywhere in the San Luis Valley.

 

Crestone Overview

Pop.: approximately 1,200

Elevation: 7,923 feet (town of Crestone)

Number of Sunny Days per year: 333

Annual Snowfall: 69.5 inches

Nearest towns with populations more than 5,000:
Alamosa (47 miles); Salida (54 miles)

Nearest institution of higher education:
Adams State College (Alamosa, CO)

Nearest Ski areas:
Monarch (1hr. 20min.) and Wolf Creek (1hr. 40 min.)

Cost of Living: 10.52 % lower than US average

Student-to-Teacher Ratio at Crestone Area Schools:
8 students per teacher

Number of spiritual centers per capita:
off the charts