Location

Buildings & Facilities
Crestone Mountain Zen Center is located at 8400 feet in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado. Surrounded by 240 acres of Piñon Pine and Juniper forest, the campus is formed by the Main House with resident bedrooms, kitchen, community space, greenhouse and a vegetable garden, the Zendo (meditation hall), a Japanese style tea house, a Guest House, a workshop with a former pottery studio that was converted into a dormitory, a number of small cabins and the Lindisfarne Dome.

Please take a look at our photo gallery for a first impression of our practice and retreat center.

Natural Surroundings
At 8,400 feet, the Main House and its vegetable and flower gardens look out over the San Luis Valley, an ancient dry lake bed. From the monastery you can see 50 miles across to the San Juan Mountains in the west and about 80 miles each direction, north and south.

Ten miles below in the valley to the south you can see the Dunefield of the Great Sand Dunes National Park, the tallest sand dunes in North America. Beyond that lies Mount Blanca, 14,345 feet high, one of the sacred world mountains of the pre-historic Anasazi and present-day Native Americans in the Southwest.

Behind the campus the land rises steeply into the mountains bordering Rio Grande National Forest land. Along the north border of our campus you can walk up Spanish Creek into a verdant aspen and spruce covered canyon; to the east, a Chinese-scroll-looking rocky peak called Dragon’s Rock dominates the view.

Behind and above the whole property, lifting into another world of weather and spirit, are the impressive fourteen thousand foot mountains: Crestone Peak and Crestone Needle, Kit Carson, Challenger, and Columbia Point. Many hiking trails are available in the area.

Lindisfarne Dome
The Lindisfarne Dome was meant to serve as an interfaith chapel before the whole property was given to Dharma Sangha and became part of the Crestone Mountain Zen Monastery. It was conceived and designed by William Irwin Thompson and remains open to the public. It is an impressive interior space – calm, centering, powerful.

The stunning vaulting of the dome was designed by Keith Critchlow and engineered by Tony Hunt. It was constructed by bending in place and laminating 2x4s into 12” thick beams to span 2800 square feet – then another web of smaller beams were shaped and laminated behind the main beams. Finally, thin lengths of wood were laminated together and formed around the outside of the smaller beams to make the skin of the dome. The center skylight is about 24 feet high.

During the Guest Season the Lindisfarne Dome serves as a main practice and retreat space for meditation, yoga, and other retreats and workshops.