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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 Pinon Pine and Juniper
forest land the campus is formed by the main house with resident bedrooms,
kitchen, community space, greenhouse and a vegetable garden, the Zendo, a Japanese
style tea house, a guest house, a workshop, several cabins and the Lindisfarne
Chapel.
Natural Surroundings
The main house and garden 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 is 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. To the north and northeast along Spanish Creek, you
can walk up a verdant pine, aspen, and spruce covered canyon, and 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.
Lindisfarne
Chapel
The Lindisfarne Chapel is a domed sanctuary that is open to the community.
Conceived and designed by William Irwin Thompson,
it was meant to serve as an interfaith chapel before the whole property was
given
to Dharma
Sangha
and became part of the Crestone Zen Mountain Monastery. 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 2830 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 Chapel
is open to the public and serves as a retreat-practice space for yoga, dance,
and other
workshops.
Driving Instructions
from Aspen
from Boulder
from Colorado Springs
from Denver
from Santa Fe
from Taos
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