Strange Days for Crestone
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7/21/2018
I've been coming to Crestone my entire life as my grandparents had a home here in the 1960s. I have great memories from those days...the town was friendly and clean and filled with charismatic and eccentric old-timers.
We now visit Crestone every year or two and the mountains are still beautiful, but many of the people are really weird....if not fully disturbed and scary. We occasionally walk around the town and visit the handful of small businesses and people are mostly not friendly at all. I think everyone here is very poor and so perhaps they resent affluent or employed out of town people. You'd think they would want business, but the locals hardly even seem motivated to exchange greetings. There is a palpable sulleness. Recently we went into the two little artisanal galleries in and the women working there looked annoyed at having their solitude interupted--not that there was anything worth purchasing in any event.
Once we were in town and there was a little Sunday street market. A woman was reading tarot cards and my young daughter (about 7 at the time) wanted to have her fortune read. To my utter astonishment, the woman told my daughter that the cards revealed that she was going to have a sad and miserable life. My daughter was traumatized.... What kind of person does something like that?? We have had other creepy interactions as well. All around Crestone are these "camps" where impoverished people live under plastic tarps and all their junk is stashed around--it is a real defilement of some of the most beautiful land in the world. These people pretend to be New Age and enlightened, but most a really living in a manner which is highly disrespectful to the area.
I try to just focus on how it used to be, and I look up to the three 14,000 peaks which overlook Crestone. Those mountains have seen a lot over the milennia, and with enough time they will see these slothful, ugly types move on. The sooner the better in my opinion.
Keith | Rancho Cucamonga, CA