North America is vast and contains multitudes. There’s no doubt about it. How else to account for Crestone, Colorado?

Spiritual Travels tells the tale: At 7,500 feet in elevation and ringed on three sides by mountains, Crestone is both beautiful and isolated, subject to extremes of weather, wind, and temperature. It includes an amazing array of spiritual sites: more than two dozen ashrams, monasteries, temples, retreat centers, stupas, labyrinths, and other sacred landmarks. There’s even a ziggurat, a structure modeled on the temples of ancient Babylon.

Beautiful yes, but not so isolated these days: we drove in via two-lane, high-quality paved roads, Including, on the highway Colorado 17, past the UFO Watchtower, regrettably closed at that moment. I’d pay five bucks a head to take a look at that.

Crestone began as a mining town, as so many others did in Colorado. After the mines played out by the early 20th century, the area around the town was given over to ranching. That seems reasonable, considering its location in the sprawling San Luis Valley, though the town itself is hard up against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Spiritual Travels continues: Maurice Strong, a Canadian businessman and United Nations diplomat, and his wife, Hanne Marstrand Strong, purchased a large tract of land in the Crestone area [in the 1970s]. It had been subdivided for use as a retirement community, but the Strongs changed their plans for it after a wandering mystic told them that the land had unique spiritual qualities (a message echoed later by Native American elders).

So the Strongs decided to give free land to religious groups that agreed to establish centers there.

A wandering mystic told them? That’s an incident that could use a little more elaboration. Visiting Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses and even a weirdly masked devotee of Dahn Yoga have all come to my door, but I’ve yet to have any wandering mystics show up, at least along the lines of a sadhu or a strannik or a sufi. That I know of. Maybe one of those home repair outfits who are “doing work in your neighborhood” are really mystics, offering soul remodels.

We arrived in Crestone on September 14 after our visit to Great Sand Dunes NP. Mystical insight is one thing, but we were looking for a late lunch. The town itself isn’t large, with a permanent population of 140 or so, but I’m sure it expands and contracts. Such as during events like the Crestone Energy Fair. We added ourselves temporarily to the population during the tail end of that event on that Sunday afternoon.

We bought a few things at the town’s grocery store, Elephant Cloud Market – small and aiming at what Whole Foods might have been in its earliest days – and I asked the checkout clerk about the Energy Fair. As in renewable energy?

He looked a little puzzled for a moment. “Sure. But it’s more about psychic energy.”

So, wind turbines of the soul, geothermal from the heart. But I’d guess mindful yet small modular reactors wouldn’t be part of the discussion. I didn’t say that any of that, of course. I just said, “Oh.”

Next to the grocery store was a small eatery, the Cloud Station. We’d arrived just in time to order before closing: a couple of most delicious panini. While waiting for the order, I had time to study the rules.

Afterward, we spent time looking around the few streets of Crestone.

You never know what you’ll see. Enough reason to come.

Something not mentioned in the tourist literature: the Crestone Free Box. Leave stuff, pick up stuff, no medium of exchange involved.

I’d argue that in the widest interpretation of spirituality, and Crestone is pretty wide in that regard, the Crestone Free Box counts as a spiritual site. It is, after all, about freely giving of yourself to the wider world. Squint hard enough, and that fits.

As for the other spiritual sites, except for a handful of mainline Christian churches, most of them are not in the town of Crestone proper. Rather, the land grants inspired by that wandering mystic sprawl to the south of the town’s small street grid, along a warren-like network of roads up and down the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Range – mostly gravel roads, if our limited experience is any guide.

I had the idea that exurban Crestone was dotted with temples and shrines and other such places. But as we drove along, and especially as I studied the map, I came the realize that most of the establishments are retreats, such as Blazing Mountain Retreat Center, Chamma Ling, Crestone Mountain Zen Center, Crestone Retreat Center, Dharma Sangha, Dharma Ocean, Haidakhandi Universal Ashram, Shumei International Institute, Sri Aurobindo Learning Center, Vajra Vidya Retreat Center and Yeshe Khorlo USA. The sort of place that might briefly tolerate, but not really appreciate, casual visitors. More importantly for me, not the kind of religious – I mean, spiritual – sites that I tend to seek out.

I will say this for the area, facing as it does the Sangre de Cristo: wow. The Strongs picked a striking setting.

The Stupa of Enlightenment had the advantage of being not that far from town, besides not involving admission to a retreat.

Always good to visit a Tibetan stupa.

I wanted to see the Crestone Ziggurat, deep in the warren. I like a good ziggurat as much as the next guy, and they’re hard to come by in North America. But as we drove along, and up and down the twists, the road crunching and pinging our undercarriage with little stones and kicking up dust, I lost my enthusiasm to find it.

Visible for miles, the Crestone Ziggurat rises from a rocky hill on the southeast edge of the Baca Grande, notes Atlas Obscura. After purchasing the land in 1978, American businessman and father of Queen Noor of Jordan, Najeeb Halaby, commissioned the ziggurat as a private place for prayer and meditation.

Today, the ziggurat is open to the public. Visitors can climb the spiral ramp to the top, which offers stunning views of the surrounding area, making it a perfect spot for reflection and quiet contemplation. Visitors are encouraged to arrange rocks in a personal design at its base as a form of meditation and intention setting.

Note also that the twisty roads also serve a residential population, living in homes suitable (I hope) for a semiarid climate, with many properties xeriscaped to emphasize the point.

The religious – I mean, spiritual – sites of Crestone would take a full day at least to examine, considering the ground you need to cover. Who knows, I might be back. For now, I stand in admiration of the place. It’s easy to make fun of some of the New Age pretentions of the town, and sometimes I give in to that urge (and occasionally, of course, out-and-out cultists show up nearby). But no: Crestone represents fine threads added to the tapestry that is North America and an inspired bit of placemaking.