Crestone, Colorado

A prophet once foretold of a spiritual commune destined to flourish in the San Luis Valley; how much can one community keep itself protected from the outside world?

When the sun sets in the San Luis Valley and falls beyond the San Juan Mountains to the West, the entire canyon glows an eerie pinkish orange before it goes absolutely pitch black. Maybe it was the haze of that particular September evening that caught the setting sun in a way that made the ordinary occurrence feel supernatural. Otherworldly, even. 

I drove the van south on I-25 almost all the way to New Mexico before cutting west and looping back up north. It was fitting for such an odd destination to require a route that suit its peculiarity.  Once I’d circumvented the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, I arrived in the south-central basin of Colorado: a desert surrounded by rocky palisades. 

The San Luis Valley stretches 122 miles from the lush Gunnison National Forest in central Colorado south, almost all the way to Santa Fe. The headwaters of the Rio Grande deceptively gather density there, nestled high in the western mountain range before pouring into the valley and onward into Mexico. That magnificent water source nourishes the basin and provides a source of life in an otherwise arid landscape. It helps the valley feel cradled, protected, and above all, isolated. 

I’d just spent the day crossing another National Park off of my list. Driving through the desert was one form of amazement, but seeing the cascading dunes rise from the sandy basin felt disorientingly cartoonish, as if I’d somehow stumbled all the way onto Mars. The soft mounds of sand rolled on and on over each other like ocean waves in the wind as I walked closer to the base of the dunes. No part of the landscape looked real to me: it could just have easily been the opening scene from Aladdin. 

To reach the base of the dunes, I crossed a shallow river basin that, at certain times of the year, is deep enough to float down on an intertube. By the time I was there in late September, the creek was barely noticeable save for a few winding streams that bob and weave through the dimples in the sand. I crossed over the creek in my bare feet and let my toes sink lightly into the damp earth.  

A perfectly blue sky dotted with perfectly fluffy white clouds next to perfectly smooth mounds of sand that seem all too untouched: I stood in awe looking at the dunes as the valleys between each hill grew darker and darker with stark shadows, creating contrast between the sandy hills and their black shadow counterparts. 

The sky was crystal clear blue, only adding to the uncanny valley of it all. It made sense to me, at that moment, easily, how a particular type of folk could be attracted to the oddness of it all: the cartoonish landscape, the vortexes, the spaceship sightings, et cetera. The Valley pulled them there - the outlaw hippies, the space cowgirls, the flower child militiamen - by promising them a place as unique and bizarre as them. 

The groomed and tourist-accessible Great Sand Dunes National Park has been at odds with its rugged, isolationist surroundings for decades. In 2005, the Denver Post suggested that paradise might be in peril¹ as the Park’s planned expansion would encroach on nearby residents’ intentional obscurity. The small, rural community I was there to visit attracted the Venn diagram of folks wanting to live off of the grid and folks not wanting to be found – and fear of the outside world has marred the spiritual enclave since its inception. 

Leaving the park, I drove north on Highway 17 a few miles, past a UFO watchtower, and turned onto the only road that leads into or out of Crestone, Colorado. The drive is mostly through public lands managed by a handful of intergovernmental acronyms like FWS, NPS, BLM (no, not that one), USFS, and a few private land trusts. Thanks to the unique jurisdiction of the land, not much of it is privately owned, which seems to be the preference of the residents of the several small towns inhabiting the valley. 

There is only one official way in or out of Crestone, though I suppose one could enter the town by traversing the mountains to the east. You’d need to conquer a cluster of six rocky 14er² peaks to do it, but at least you’d be off the grid. 

I’d made my way to Crestone somewhat against my better judgment. I wanted to visit the small town knowing that it was a spiritual center for people looking to live a quiet, sustainable, communal life near the mountains. In much of the lore and draw of Crestone is that it’s an idyllic community for spiritually-motivated people seeking to live in simple solitude. But everything I knew about the town came from a true crime podcast. 

The town itself is only a three-by-three block of independently-owned shops, an organic grocery store, an off-brand hardware store, three restaurants, and a few small art galleries. Some aren’t even officially “stores” but rather trading posts, freecycling, and other non-traditional forms of exchange of goods. A town of 141³ people doesn’t need much more. 

I parked the van around the corner from the grocery store and took a sigh of relief to have made it down the gravel roadway. From my rearview mirror, I loosely monitored the three men on the other side of the parking lot rinsing themselves off using buckets of water from a spigot, looking as though they’d wandered in from the desert. After getting my bearings, I decided I’d spend the afternoon exploring the area, but would leave before the sun went down. Better to plan for it, just in case. 

I spent the day wandering through town and popping in and out of a few small shops. My first stop was an artists’ studio that sold a collection of textiles, wall art, and most notably to me, jewelry made from animal bones found in the Colorado mountains. I bought a pair of elk bone earrings and stayed to chat with the woman who rang me up. 

“This area is so beautiful! I’d been thinking about moving someplace like Cresone but it’s kind of remote, huh? How long have you lived here?” I asked.

The woman in her 70s didn’t miss a beat: “It’s been about eight years in Crestone, but it feels like I’ve lived here all my life! It’s lovely, but it gets quiet in the winter.”

“How so?”

She paused a minute to take stock of my interest in living in her community. “I don’t think many people who aren’t from the mountains understand that snow absorbs sound. There aren’t that many people here to begin with, so at night, in the dark of winter, some folks might get a little… spooked.” 

“Have you ever been spooked out here?” 

“Oh, well, not by silence, of course! I quite enjoy the peace. But a lot of people move out here alone and don’t expect it to feel quite as isolated as it does.”

“What about spooked by anything else? Just, you know, considering my options and everything.” 

“Occasionally, there are some men who hang around town that make folks a little uneasy. But that’s what the Peace Patrol is for.”

I raised an eyebrow, “the what?”

“If there are people in town causing trouble - doing drugs, messing with property, loitering - we can call the Peace Patrol to come and address the issue. They’ll talk to the guys, see what’s going on, and then maybe give them $30 for a sandwich and a bus ticket and ask them to leave before anything escalates.” 

In rural Saguache County, a small police station covers the seventh largest county in Colorado. Even if you wanted to call the cops - though from my gathering, folks there don’t particularly enjoy calling the cops - they wouldn’t arrive for over an hour for an emergency. This isolation adds to Crestone’s focus on sustaining a tight-knit community that looks out for one another; it also creates a draw for people who are intentionally laying low from law enforcement. 

She continued to describe what sounded like a hippie fever dream: a group of volunteers who dedicate themselves to being on-call for their neighbors in need. “It really started during the pandemic, when new people started coming in. The meth was always around, but it became a bigger problem. They started the Peace Patrol to always be around to take care of really scary situations.”

The Peace Patrol was formally incorporated⁴ as a nonprofit in November 2020, just as the pandemic entered into its first winter, and some of the summer “remote workers” didn’t leave. She explained that most of the volunteers were men, and most of those men had law enforcement backgrounds.

“Of course,” she added, “I never thought we needed anything that official. We’ve always taken care of our own here. Some of those guys just seem like they’re playing cowboy. Lot of them are ex-military.”

In 2016, a 29-year-old woman named Kristal Reisinger was reported missing in Crestone. She’d moved there the year prior from Denver seeking spiritual enlightenment, sobriety, and a fresh start. As the podcast Up and Vanished describes⁵, Kristal was last seen at a full moon drum circle before - allegedly - she was drugged and assaulted by one or several men in a group of friends before being killed. It took law enforcement weeks to show up in Crestone and actually begin investigating, unsurprisingly finding little hard evidence. Her body was never found, though the two most likely suspects are both dead now. And that’s why I know about Crestone. 

I asked her, “Have you ever been in a really scary situation out here?” 

As she finished ringing me up, she looked at me and smiled sweetly: “Nothing that I couldn’t handle.” 

I left the art studio and walked to a few shops clustered in the small town center. I wandered through thrift shops and jewelry stores and chatted with some of the women working about their time in town. Walking past the old Western saloon-style buildings of “downtown” gave me an uneasy pause: was it charming, or creepy? 

The nano-style brewery sat at the corner of the road to the grocery store and the road that led out of town. I sat alone at the far side of the bar and pulled out a book. I didn’t make it far into reading before getting into another discussion about Crestone, this time with the only other person at the bar: the bartender. 

“I’ve only been here about a year and a half,” she told me. “But it’s been just the most amazing time. It’s so freeing.” 

“How did you end up here?” I asked.

She told me about her divorce, her plan to travel around in her RV after her retirement, her visit to Crestone to see a friend, and how she instead met the love of her life and decided to stay.

“We live out in the Baca. Still in the RV for now, but we’ve been putting together the house bit by bit. Doing it all ourselves. It really is magical to feel that connected to the earth out there.” 

There are a few small clusters of cottage-style homes throughout downtown, but most people who live in Crestone live in the Baca. People create earth ships, yurts, adobe homes, and other makeshift structures throughout the open desert mass of land. The Baca Grande has its own complicated life story⁶ from Spanish conquest to a minor gold boom town to nearly deserted by midcentury. But in 1979, the Baca was visited by a man named Maurice Strong and his wife, Hanne, who fell in love with “its spirit and felt the sacred mountain.”⁷ They were soon visited by a prophet named - I shit you not - Glen, who foretold of their arrival and their destiny to build the land into a spiritual retreat center for world religions. It would be a place where visitors and community members alike could reach a higher level of consciousness through spiritual connection and off-grid living. 

Through the rocky hillsides of the Baca, white temples and gold statues are perched along the foothills. Beautiful spiritual centers dot the mountainside as if plucked directly from their Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan ancestral homes. Something about the area mesmerized the spiritually-seeking; or, perhaps, the spiritually-starved. 

“I prefer the Baca,” she told me. “Even though it’s quieter, and that can get a little scary, the people who hang around town at night get weird sometimes.” 

About 1,200 residents live in the Baca at least part-time, though it can be hard to account for “residents” in such a fluid living community. As the area has attracted a new wave of spiritual seekers, the tension between old-guard hippies and the recent retirees has grown to a crucial inquiry: should the town incorporate?⁸ It has become a contentious battle over whether or not this former free-spirited cluster of homes needs bureaucracy to function.⁹ An importantly cited reason why: some residents now want formal law enforcement.  

“Who hangs around here?” I asked her. 

She lowered her glasses on her nose and looked up at me, “Can’t you already tell? The men who just hang around.” 

I asked her if she’d heard of the podcast and caught her wince. I softened the blow by adding the caveat: “I don’t actually like true crime podcasts, it’s just something I got into driving so much. I guess I came here because I wanted to see this place for myself.”

The bartender leaned in a bit. “She lived here, you know. In this building.” 

I felt my lower back get hot and my eyes widen. “What do you mean?” 

“Upstairs are the apartments. They just turned the downstairs into a brewery this last year. Her landlady that called it in, told them she hadn’t come home in a while? She’s still here.” 

I slumped on my barstool and looked out at the parking lot, at the men hanging around. “The town in and of itself is beautiful, it's just there's a lot of trust fund kids… trust fund kids, and so there's an abundance of meth and an abundance of people that have no jobs and nothing to do.”¹⁰ After being so engrossed by her story, I had to wonder: what could have saved Kristal? How does a community of 141 people lose an entire person? 

County police don’t venture into Crestone daily, so the community started to police itself. This came at odds with the growing population of both new-age Covid-era hippies and golden meth spoon burnouts, so the community formalized an alternate solution to policing in the form of a Peace Patrol. And then, as the adjacent residential community grew to a size too big to function, the residents reached a common existential crisis: how do you keep your people safe? Do you take up the burden of self-organizing, or rely on the State for comfort? 

“Why did you want to come here, anyway?” she asked, tentatively curious after learning of my interest in the podcast. 

“Oh,” I laughed. “I guess I’m just curious about what I’ll find?” 

“Sometimes I think we can’t find what we’re not already looking for.” Her eye twinkled slightly. “Anyway,” she continued, “if you’re around next weekend, you should come to my wedding! It’ll be out there in the Baca, of course.” 

I thanked her for her openness but had to decline her offer. “I would absolutely love to, but I have to be back in Denver in a few days.” 

“You should come back here one day,” she confidently suggested. “We do look out for each other here. Once you’re in, you’re in.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

I left Crestone before the sun set and headed towards a primitive campsite for the evening. I could have parked out in the middle of nowhere alone on public land for free, as I often did to truly live off the land; but I couldn’t fight the appeal of paying a small fee to ensure a safe campsite among other travelers for the night. The lower the sun sank, the more clearly segregated the gradient of the sky became. And once it fell completely, I opened the van door to complete darkness, stepped outside onto the sand, and looked up at the sky for UFOs.

1. https://www.denverpost.com/2005/06/08/paradise-in-peril/

2. A 14er is a mountain peak with an elevation of at least 14,000 ft

3.  "Decennial Census P.L. 94-171 Redistricting Data". United States Census Bureau, United States Department of Commerce. August 12, 2021. Retrieved September 4, 2021.

4.  https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_co/20201985826

5. https://season2.upandvanished.com/story/

6.  https://bacapoa.org/history/

7. https://www.manitou.org/foundation/history/

8. https://www.rmpbs.org/blogs/news/baca-grande-property-management-association/

9. https://crestoneeagle.org/opinion-baca-grande-should-become-a-town

10. https://season2.upandvanished.com/episode/episode-7/