SAN LUIS VALLEY

Crestone: Southern Colorado’s Little Boulder?

By Tonya Poole, 2-05-06

Maybe, but don’t let the locals hear you say it. It’s true, and you know it as soon as you arrive, that there are a great many things about Crestone, Colorado – a tiny town with an abundance of raw spirit - that fly in the face of even Boulder. The comparisons begin and end, perhaps, with Crestone’s astounding concentration of spiritual seekers, Buddhists, alternative healers, silver-haired hippies and barefoot, dread-locked mothers with baby backpacks. The small, progressive community of less than 100 people rests against the slopes of the Sangre de Cristos in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, with dramatic and much-photographed Crestone Peak presiding, and unofficially consists of the town of Crestone and the adjacent rural Baca Grande land grant development. Outside its boundaries, ranch land, jagged mountains and one-horse Colorado towns insulate it from the urbanization, and what many have considered bastardization, that has changed Boulder dramatically over the years.

It’s greatest charm may, in truth, be its daring authenticity. For better or worse, a drive into Crestone reveals no collection of quaint, old-but-miraculously-well-kept shops lining a charming main street, no puzzling array of dining options and not a single chain store, brand name hotel or any other familiar amenity ready to accommodate pocket-padded tourists. Instead, visitors find a retail void that’s as alarming as it is refreshing. No matter, the views of Crestone Peak and the surrounding Sangres are a distraction from the moment one turns east from Highway 17 onto County Road T, the only way into and out of Crestone unless on foot.

And yet Crestone’s notoriety well beyond the Rocky Mountains would have it a bustling, burgeoning community of arts and culture and the same getaway spirit that drives people in droves to places like Aspen, Santa Fe and Tucson. Its reputation as a spiritual vortex has likened the community to other archaic and metaphysical hot spots like Sedona and Mount Shasta, and while it’s true that the vibes in Crestone have drawn many a truth-and-beauty seeker into its fold, the town has remained largely uncompromised by its own charm. Three or four times a year residents from across the valley gather in Crestone’s downtown, parks or open spaces to take part in one of its many festivals, including a summer SolarFest for alternatives energy, a widely-known multi-cultural music festival, and the popular WinterFest held each November to celebrate local artisans and craftspeople. But when the tents are torn down and the party-goers head for home, the town quickly returns to an almost ghost town-esque ambiance, with a lamp or two flickering on to light the way down its small handful of streets, the single gas station in town closed up – for the day, or perhaps for the winter.

The development of Baca Grande has opened up the area, to some degree, to outsiders seeking the idyllic mountain life it affords – and with that has come a fairly modest increase in people and services over the years. But even here the streets are quiet, dotted here and there with hikers, deer, bikers, rabbits, cars and coyotes sharing space in relative equanimity. The rate of growth in the Baca has been slow and steady, and in being so will likely give the growth of Crestone as a town the chance to keep good pace with itself and to retain its gritty, quirky, bohemian feel without having to manufacture remnants of that environment to attract tourists long after it’s lost – a fate suffered by many a city dependent largely on tourism. But some believe that the biggest threat to Crestone’s way of life today lies just to its south, in the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve.

In September of 2004, the dunes became the nation’s 58th National Park, thereby setting it asail to double, perhaps triple its number of annual visitors – and if the Park Service moves on a growing interest in building a road from the Baca Grande into the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve– unofficially designating Crestone as a gateway, and forever changing its self-sustained solitude. Not a popular ideal among peace-and-quiet-loving Crestonians, though some admit they’d welcome a small increase in tourism dollars: enough to infuse the community with a few more of the amenities many of the residents have sacrificed in exchange for their lifestyles here.

For now it seems Crestone and the Baca Grande sit firmly on the cusp of a future that rests somewhere between best-kept-secret and national sensation. The area’s extraordinary natural surroundings and the earth rhythms that many say come together at optimum levels here remain its biggest and best attraction, and if nothing else, Crestone can rest easy in the knowledge that it has no Denver, no state university and – as of this writing, at least – no trendy oxygen bars to taint its authenticities. The town continues to hang on, even if precariously, by its impressive and naked ideal that cities like Boulder, Santa Fe and others were fleetingly prized for and, in their own upbringing and desire for progress, inevitably lost.

All images © Tonya Poole

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