April 2016
What brought you to Crestone?
Wayne Clark
We’d been coming up here for several years and literally just fell in love with the place. I have a friend who’s a Saguache County Police Officer, and our families would visit each other. About 4 or 5 years ago, Dan Warwick offered me a job. So, we just decided Crestone was the place where we wanted to live and raise our kids. We came up and I started work right away, became super active in the schools and everything, and I love it. When we first moved up here, of course, we had the usual struggles – we couldn’t find a place to live. The housing’s not that great here. The jobs aren’t that great– I was lucky that I had a job. But the people here are just so amazing – there were so many people trying to help us find a house. We were living, all 5 of us, in a 2-bedroom, single-wide where the doors wouldn’t shut, so it was a little rough at first! But we had so many people pullin’ for us that it was really cool. We’d been making a bunch more money in Albuquerque, but everybody we met here was really cool, like perfect strangers would give you the shirt off their back, and we wanted to be a part of that. And then we found out about the UFO’s and the vortexes and stuff, which is just an added bonus!
Kevin Matz
Well, originally it was to study with some meditation teachers and start a new life in the mountains. I didn’t know anything about Crestone. I hadn’t seen even one picture of it. I’d seen a newspaper ad online. When I got here, I was horrified. We were driving from Colorado Springs and then we came into the valley and I thought we were in hell. It’s just sand, and I thought, “Oh my God, what have I done? I left Hawaii, and here I am in the desert. What are we doing?” And then we started turning in towards the mountain, and I was like, “Ok, I see why we’re here – this’ll be alright.” And it was hard – it was super hard. I think everyone goes through those struggles here. And it was pretty instant for us – we didn’t go through the like “oh, this is great” first – it was like, right when we got here, it was super hard. It pretty quickly redefined my concept of reality, which I think is ultimately why I actually came. I was – well, I’m still young, but I was even younger then, and I had ideas of how life was, how things should be, and what I wanted, and that all got turned around and changed, I think, for the better. So I think the real reason I came to Crestone, looking at it now, was to completely re-write my concept of reality, start a new family, grow my family!
Benjamin Byer
The poor man’s Tetons! (laughing) Eco-building, eco-design, and Zen practice. I came here from San Francisco Zen Center. I met Richard Baker and Dan Welch in San Francisco and they told me about Crestone. And I had one other friend, Mark Swart, who was moving here, and lives here still, and has been here since I’ve been here. He hosted me and bought land and I built my own Cobb house. I got here in May 2001, and bought land here in November 2000, and then built the house and finished it 2006 and then traveled, and then came back, met Michelle, sold the land, and built a business. And then Elephant Cloud started 7 years ago or whatever – 6 or 7 years ago. And now we’re in town, so we’re actually real Crestone citizens, not Baca citizens. We are Baca citizens, too, members of the Baca - we have our old place there, but really we’re Crestone people.
I know that when I showed up here, I never wanted to leave. Like I knew that I didn’t wanna leave. So when I was driving outta here, I was really sad I had to go somewhere to come back and I worked really hard to get back here!
Lynette Tieder
Well, first I was living in Angelfire, Taos, and then over in Leadville, so on either side of the San Luis Valley. While in Leadville, a friend I had just met came to my door and said he’d had a dream that I was the 4th person in his vision for his land in Crestone, Colorado, which I had never heard of. He asked me to go visit with him the following weekend, so I did. When we arrived, it was a nice, mystic rainy day and it just looked so magical and I felt like I was home. I had a crying moment where I was like, “I found my home” – I was 19 and that’s what I was looking for and it really felt like, “This is it!” I ended up buying the next door lot from my friend where I got to give him $100 payments and could even miss some months, so it was very not scary. When I was 23 and got pregnant with my first child with my now-husband, Scott, I said “Well, we have to move to Crestone because that’s the only place to have my baby and raise a family – like, already found it, paying the land.” So we moved here, lived at Camper Village in a nice camper for a year, built our straw bale passive-solar home, off the grid, and now we’re here!
Alycia Chambers
I had been living in Carbondale, taking Natural House Building classes at Solar Energy, International, and somebody told me, “If you’re interested in straw bale, you’ve gotta move to Crestone – it’s the straw bale capital of the world!” So, I came here to visit my friend, Nick, who I’d known in Montana, and to stay with Robin Blankenship at Earth Knack. The first time I drove into Crestone, the full moon was rising over the Sangre De Cristos, and I remember feeling like it was the most magical place I’d ever visited.
While visiting, I got my first job in Crestone – plastering the dormitory at the Ashram. It was pretty exciting to come here and get my hands dirty doing something that I really loved. Shortly after that, Nick and I went to Ireland and found out while there that we were going to bring our son, Avery, into the world. He was born in our teepee in Montana, and when he was 6 weeks old, we came back to Crestone because we felt like this was such an incredible place to raise a child. And I really can’t imagine doing that anywhere else in the country!
Cristina Cabeza-Kinney
It was 2004, Raven was 6 weeks old. His father and I lived in Estes Park and wanted to move to a place that was more like-minded and progressive, so we took a road trip to find a place to relocate to. Crestone wasn’t even on our radar. We were actually going to Mancos, near Durango. We loaded up the truck, put a camper shell on there – kinda loose, but we kinda made it work – and left around midnight. Our friend, Lynn, joined us on the trip.
On the drive, while listening to some Native flute music, I totally tranced out, and then had an auditory vision that said, “Something’s gonna happen and you’re gonna have to forgive Lynn.” And I was like, “What the hell does that mean? I have to forgive him? Like something’s gonna happen?” So I said it out loud afterwards, and everyone was like, “What are you talking about?”
Around sunrise, with Raven, myself and Travis all sleeping in the camper shell, Lynn fell asleep at the wheel, went off an embankment, hit a rock, flipped the car, and the camper shell flew off. Travis and I flew in opposite directions and both landed in patches of grass. Raven didn’t have a scratch on him, even though he was covered with glass. I got a flight for life to Grand Junction with Raven on my breast, cuts all over my neck, and a fractured vertebra. Travis and Lynn both got a little banged up, but that was it.
Then we rented a car, and Lynn was driving. I had to forgive Lynn. The vision was I would have to forgive him for things to happen. So right away, I was like, “I forgive you,” and he felt awful, but I was like, “I forgive you, it’s all good.” I had vertigo really bad - I could barely stand up. My face was all swollen – I looked like a Navajo girl. And we had to decide if we were gonna go back, or try to find this place that we were supposed to move to. They said it was my call, and I said, “Well, we gotta find the place!”
We progressed to Mancos, and we were like, “this town sucks – let’s just go to Valley View to heal, recoup.” On the way up 17, I was looking through a map and saw Crestone. I had read an article about it in Nexus magazine about how it was kooky and weird and nobody really understood what was happening. And I said, “Oh, we should stop in this town! I mean, we’re trying to find a place to move to.” So we went to Shambala, and talked with Grandpa Greg, and little Quincy, when she was tiny. We met a few people. And after being there only 15 minutes and feeling totally welcomed in, we were like, “I think this is the place!” Like, it found us.
It was a weird find because we never even thought about going to this valley, at all. We had wanted to be near Raven’s grandma, who was in Durango. And I don’t think it would’ve happened that we found Crestone if it wasn’t for the vision that said I had to forgive Lynn. It was like a portal opened up to be able to come here. I had to forgive him, or else nothing would happen. So I forgave him, and then the path opened up to come. Three months later, we moved here, and we’ve been here ever since. That’s the story!