Crestone

Ragpicker Magic

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MAGIC? AT A USED BOOKSTORE? You’d expect to find it at the tarot reader’s place, the Buddhist  temples, or among the breathtaking 14,000-foot peaks towering over the small community of Crestone. But at the used bookstore? That’s right, if you intend to explore the esoteric wonders of the little town nestled among the Sangre de …

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Crestone Charter School

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IMAGINE PACKING A BACKPACK and checking a gear list that includes sunscreen, extra socks, water bottles, hat, hiking boots and various layers of clothing. Then envision loading up into a travel van with eight classmates and driving the westbound prairie route out of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains and across Colorado to the Four Corners …

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Postcards to Blanca Peak

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By Peter Anderson 1. Dear Blanca, On this postcard we see you from the north. The clouds have saddled up on your high ridges, where for a while, they will stay, until they realize you’re not going anywhere. Then they’ll get restless. One of them will say something like, “Hey, I’m gonna get me a …

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The Road to Chimera: Chapter 1

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By Peter Anderson What follows is the opening chapter of a mystery-in-progress set in a fictional San Luis Valley town that may bear some resemblance to the town where I live. Ray followed the road through some cottonwoods and crossed the bridge over the Gonaway River. It had been almost twenty years since he and …

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Dispatch From The Edge

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By Peter Anderson

It is hard enough to explain the game to someone who does not know it. It is even harder for them to understand why you love baseball enough to watch it. It is soooo slowwww, they say, and they are right, but for me anyway, that is part of the game’s appeal. What a waste of time, others say, and who am I to argue? For them, it may well be. But here at the end of the road, watching baseball on a slow summer evening is like drifting down the meanders of a familiar stretch of river – it’s lazy and it’s dreamy and it keeps calling me back.

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The Last Word: A Retrieval of Souls

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By Hal Walter Although the towns of Westcliffe and Crestone are separated by only a few miles of rugged mountains, they are culturally and philosophically worlds apart. My friend Peter May who lives in Crestone has been helping me explore some alternative supports for Harrison’s autism these past few years. He had suggested a soul …

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Dispatch From the Edge

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A Wilderness Alphabet By Peter Anderson   Let their names remind us of our shared inheritance 100 million acres, roadless and wild. From Absaroka to Apache Creek … From Ansel Adams to Allegheny, hallow Black Bear and Great Bear, be a witness for Bald Knob and Big Gum Swamp, in Copper Salmon, swim like one, …

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson All winter long, this lingering dissonance: I say “beautiful day,” and the blue sky mildness is real and pleasant enough, but so is the uneasy notion that our good fortune now will cost us come summer. The weather “pleasantries” we exchange carry only half of the truth. The other half, too unsettling …

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Keeping Online – Colorado Central Telecom

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By Mike Rosso

It was over a decade into the 21st century and the town of Crestone was struggling to keep up with the modern era. At a time when most of the urban United States, as well as many rural communities were becoming more and more dependent on the internet for work, news, commerce, and entertainment, the small community at the base of the Sangre De Cristo mountains in the San Luis Valley was not getting the needed bandwidth for basic internet service from its sole provider.

Ralph Abrams, then mayor of Crestone, was concerned the lack of workable bandwidth was discouraging newcomers and causing some residents to leave.

“We were getting half a meg at best,” Abrams said.

That’s when local citizens decided to take matters into their own hands. Their biggest challenge was finding the startup capital to take on a project of this magnitude. A grassroots effort was started to raise community funding, as well as help from a Small Business Administration loan arranged through the Collegiate Peaks Bank. Several grants were also helpful in the company’s expansion, including one from the State Broadband Deployment Fund and from Freeport-McMoRan Inc., the owners of the Climax Mine in Leadville.

“We started with 58 local investors, including contributions from our CEO and other staff members. We have since repaid our original investors, though a handful opted to hold onto their stake in the company,” Abrams explained.

He used this capital to start Crestone Telecom, employing a tower to send broadband signals to homes and businesses as a wireless internet service provider in Crestone. Its first customer came online in April 2012.

“Our first tower was located just outside the town limits of Crestone, due east of the Baca [subdivision]. We call it the ‘Aspen’ tower,” said Abrams.

The initial success led the company to expand its coverage area to the northern San Luis Valley and eventually into the Upper Arkansas River Valley with the encouragement of the Chaffee County Economic Development Corporation (CCEDC) whose board considered broadband its number one priority, according to its director, Wendell Pryor. “The CCEDC was helpful in facilitating and connecting the dots for the young business,” he said.

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Dispatch From the Edge

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By Peter Anderson As you head into the good cheer of the holidays, you run into an old friend on the corner downtown between the bank and the post office who happens to be hauling a hydraulic wood splitter. And you have several piñons, decimated by an influx of beetles, which have been downed and …

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About the Cover Artist: Beatris Burgoin

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Beatris Burgoin was born and raised in southern Baja California, Mexico, as a member of an artistic family. She started painting when she was 19 and recuperating from a car accident. She’s been developing her style for over 17 years and has evolved into a modernistic oil painter utilizing only three primary colors and white. Residing in Crestone, Colorado, she has become a very prolific artist and finds that with Crestone’s big spaces, natural beauty and loud silence, she has room to grow and go deep into her artistic path. In Crestone she has explored different forms of art while continuing to develop technics in oil painting. Her artwork has been acquired by collectors around the globe, including Europe, Latin America, the Western Pacific and North America.

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Dispatch From The Edge

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By Peter Anderson

I tell her I need to replace the glass top of an electric range. I tell her how the bear broke into our house, stood on top of the stove hoping to find some goodies in a nearby cabinet, and fell through the glass instead. “I understand,” says the woman on the customer hotline in Tennessee. “We live in the mountains, too.”

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Music Review: Jah Kings

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By Brian Rill Psalm 68:4 King James Version Sing unto God, sing praises to his name: extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name Jah, and rejoice before him.  Jah Kings are an authentic reggae band from Crestone, Colorado. The music’s magic manifests from the start with an indigenous anthem called South Africa. It’s followed …

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Places: Willow Lake

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By Ericka Kastner

The Rocky Mountains are scattered with high mountain lakes, and Central Colorado is no exception. One of the best lakes I’ve seen yet lies at about 11,800 feet in elevation just east of Crestone. While the Willow Lake Trail is wildly popular with visitors on weekends, it still makes for a spectacular overnight adventure or a long day hike. Travel the trail on a weekday, and you’ll nearly have the place to yourself.
I first learned of this gem after admiring a painting by Salida artist Joshua Been. He’d just returned from an annual backpacking trip to the area and had captured Willow Lake in an oil painting. I was struck by the lake’s beauty as portrayed in his work and vowed to make the journey later that summer to see it for myself.
In reality, it wasn’t until the next summer, in late August under a blue moon, that I managed to get in a trip up to Willow Lake. My then 8-month-old pup and I thoroughly enjoyed the steep yet magnificent 4.5-mile backpack trip up to the high mountain basin.

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Dispatch From the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

We are in a library in a small mountain town. Another late spring storm has just arrived, bringing with it rain, hail and several inches of new snow. A traveler who has pitched his tent at the campground outside of town sits in this library looking at the weather through big windows facing the storm. He is grateful to be here in a warm place, reading about a National Geographic expedition to the Arctic. Sometimes armchair travel is so fine, maybe even better than the real deal.

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Places: The Crestone Stupas

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By Ericka Kastner

Passing through the San Luis Valley, travelers looking east toward the Sangre De Cristo Range may find it impossible to discern the two great stupas hidden among the trees, yet towering above the landscape in the mountain foothills just outside Crestone. The stupas are woven into the rich spiritual history of Crestone, a community with more than 20 diverse spiritual centers reflecting nearly all the world’s major religions.

Stupas, traditionally monumental piles of earth formed to honor the spiritual teachers buried inside of them, eventually came to be erected in a more skyward fashion. They symbolize the Buddha’s body and mind, pointing the way to enlightenment and the path to realization. It is believed that stupas bring blessings to the builder, the landscape upon which they are built and to all who visit them. 

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News from the San Luis Valley

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Wetlands Work to Begin On Aug. 20, Colorado Parks and Wildlife approved $400,000 for wetlands and riparian habitat projects in the San Luis Valley. Three national wildlife refuges operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management will see the installation of 10 water-control structures which will benefit sandhill …

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More on the Pyramid

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By Martha Quillen

In honor of Colorado Central’s 20th birthday, Mike asked me to revisit the cover story I wrote for the first issue. Times change; that’s as apparent and expected as the sunrise. But upon rereading the March 1994 issue, I realized that the changes we anticipate are not necessarily the changes headed our way.
In 1994, Ed and I sounded absolutely sure that growth and prosperity were just around the corner. And so did the people of Crestone.

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

The vultures are leaving their roost over by the creek. They follow the Rio Grande south until the climate suits them. The sandhill cranes are flying in from the north, sometimes barely visible in the high skies as they circle, gather themselves and get their bearings; sometimes their weird cackling call precedes them as they emerge from low-slung autumn clouds. Elk are bugling for mates, bears are scavenging for extra calories before the big sleep, and coyotes are on the prowl for unsuspecting house pets. Here at the end of the road, summer drifters who came to town with little more than a sleeping bag are dreaming of sunshine and saguaros or maybe some seaside town in southern California, hoping to set aside some cash for the road. This is a restless time.

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

How do you know when a place has become a part of you and you a part of that place?

Thirty-five years ago, I lived in a small cabin under a very big sky. Like Crestone, it was at the end of the road. Well, not exactly at the end. You could drive a jeep over the Divide in the summer months, and many people came up there to do just that. But come winter, this all-but-abandoned mining town was the last stop for the county snowplow. For a few years, I was the only full-time resident there during the winter months.

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

The Free box outgrew itself. Now it’s a shed on the edge of town, roof rimmed with windworn Tibetan prayer flags, old mattress leaning up against front wall spray painted with the words “No dumping.” The cardboard box from our garage contains some lightly used fairy wings – still the rage in preschool fashion – and bench seat covers from Autozone, which won’t add to the clutter for long. But I worry about the mini John Deere tractor/sprinkler taking up shelf space, since it’s November and a big winter front will soon bury the few lawns in town.

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Dispatch from the Edge

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By Peter Anderson

I live on the outskirts of Edgetown (aka Crestone), barely into the old Baca Land grant (now Baca subdivision), at the end of suburban and the beginning of wild, just east of a creekside riparian zone, on the high end of the piñon juniper and the low end of ponderosa, on the eastern edge of the San Luis Valley and the western flanks of the Sangre de Cristo. In between our place (8,300 feet) and town (8,000 feet), rain turns into snow. This place is a threshold where roads end and trails begin and where the horizontal meets the vertical. Edges like ecotones, those zones where ecosystems meet, are diverse, full of life, and worthy of exploration. I look forward to checking out the edges, both cultural and ecological, and dropping you a line from time to time. – Peter Anderson

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Maurice Strong makes the cover

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Brief by Central Staff

Crestone – November 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine

A Strong cover story

The Sept. 1 edition of National Review, a conservative journal, featured Canadian oilman Maurice Strong on its cover, and devoted six pages inside to an article about him.

Central Colorado got brief mention: “…he ended up owning the 200,000-acre Baca Ranch in Colorado, now a `New Age’ center run by his wife, Hanne. (Among the seekers at Baca are Zen and Tibetan Buddhist monks, a breakaway order of Carmelite nuns, and followers of a Hindu guru called Ba ba ji.)”

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