Crestone, Colorado

Willow Spring Bed & Breakfast

Crestone, Colorado is nestled in the pines at the base of Kit Carson Mountain, on the east edge of the San Luis Valley. Between Crestone and the Baca Grande Chalets and Grants, there might be 900-1,000 people living here. It's a beautiful setting, 40 miles north of Alamosa on Colorado Highway 17 and then about 10 miles east on paved road.

Back in the late 1800's, there was a lot of gold and silver prospecting in the Sangre de Cristo's but not much mineral was ever found. Crestone was founded in one of the few areas where there was a producing ore body, albeit a small one. Originally, there was a stamp mill built here but the ore didn't last too long. There were some other finds to the south of Crestone but there was a problem with the folks who owned the Baca Grande continually chasing the "squatters" out. Eventually, the miners stopped trying to cross the Baca with their supply wagons and simply came in from the south, across the sand dunes. That didn't last long either. There was a stamp mill operating in Blanca to deal with ore coming down from the Commodore mine on Mt. Blanca but when that supply ran dry, gold mining in this area was just about over.

Today, the Crestone area has many spiritual centers espousing many different doctrines and disciplines. There's a few gas stations, a convenience store, a couple of hotel/lodges, restaurants, hardware store, lumberyard, coffee shop, and the Baca Grande Golf Course (sort of).

The Baca Grande is a Land Grant given to Luis Maria Baca by the King of Spain in the 1600's. It encompasses approximately 100,000 acres, including the summits of Kit Carson Peak and Challenger Point. A portion of the Land Grant immediately south of the town of Crestone has been developed as the Chalets and the Grants. It looks as though quite a bit of the development is listed for sale.

The Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service have bought that major part of the Land Grant that isn't developed, and the water rights that go with it and transferred nearly all of that into the control of the Great Sand Dunes National Park, the Rio Grande National Forest and the Baca National Wildlife Refuge.