Located in La Garita in the northwestern San Luis Valley, Capilla de San Juan Bautista was built in 1924–26 as a Catholic mission church. It replaced an earlier church on the same site, which served as the area’s parish church from 1879 to 1895 but…

Perhaps no town in the western United States has taken a more unexpected turn than Crestone, Colorado – the onetime mining and ranching center has become an international hub for Buddhist, Hindu, New Age, and other spiritual practices. Located at the…

The First Baptist Church of Moffat is a two-story concrete-block building constructed in 1911 at the corner of Fourth and Lincoln Streets (401 Lincoln Avenue, Moffat, Colorado). In the 1920s, residents bought the church from the Baptist Association to…

The Great Sand Dunes sprawl along the eastern fringes of the vast San Luis Valley of south central Colorado, covering an area of nearly thirty square miles. They are the tallest aeolian (wind-produced) dunes in North America, heaping mounds of sand that…

Indian Grove consists of seventy-two ponderosa pines in Great Sand Dunes National Park that were peeled by Indigenous people in the 1800s to get bark for food, medicine, and other uses. First recorded in the 1970s by archaeologist Marilyn Martorano,…


 
 Peter Anderson’s most recent books include Heading Home: Field Notes (Conundrum Press, 2017), a collection of flash prose and prose poems exploring rural life and the modern day eccentricities of the American West; Going Down Grand: Poems…

The town of Saguache in the northern San Luis Valley began as an agricultural community after Ute Indians were removed from the area in the 1860s. Saguache boomed in the 1870s and 1880s, when it became an important starting-off point for miners headed to…

Known as the northern gateway to the San Luis Valley, Saguache County covers 3,168 miles between the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan Mountain ranges in southern Colorado. The word Saguache, pronounced “Sa-watch,” is derived from the Ute language and means …