ALAMOSA — The sprawling San Luis Valley’s isolation has bred resilience for more than a century and a half, going back to before Denver, Colorado Springs and the populous Front Range corridor even existed.
But if that remoteness has fostered strong community ties, it’s also behind an understandable strain of resentment. To some, it’s as though the high alpine valley, surrounded by some of the state’s highest peaks, is a forgotten land — except, that is, when Colorado’s power centers to refresh their fast-growing populations.
Change is in the air, however. New faces are showing up in its small towns and in its commercial capital, Alamosa, drawn by cheap living and the valley’s easy access to mountain trails, the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, and river rafting on the Rio Grande.
“I live 30 miles south in Antonito,” Jose Vasquez said during a morning smoke break outside the Walmart in Alamosa, where he is a hair stylist at a salon inside the store. “Even down there, there’s a bunch of different people that are just moving in from Pennsylvania, California, all different parts.
“That’s why I think it’s kind of funny that they know this place exists — and yet, up north (in Denver), they don’t.”
Three Denver Post reporters and a photographer spent 24 hours in Alamosa and nearby towns this month, asking residents what the rest of the state should know about life in the San Luis Valley. It was the fourth stop on The Post’s summer listening tour, a seven-stop undertaking to connect with Coloradans during the break between elections and legislative sessions.
Rural concerns and values
In many ways, the concerns of the valley are typical for rural Colorado. Public officials and farmers who grow potatoes, mushrooms, barley and, increasingly, hemp are fiercely protective of the valley’s water resources. Some worry about climate change.
“Our challenge is always in agriculture and always in water and all these things we have to have — and we need — to continue our life down here in the San Luis Valley,” Alamosa County Commissioner Darius Allen said during a discussion involving more than a dozen San Luis Valley residents and officials who gathered at a recreation center.
Town leaders struggle to keep small businesses open on their main streets, to get help for people addicted to opioids and to address some of the state’s highest poverty rates. They’re trying to foster more tourism and other new industries to fill the economic gap left by the closure of sawmills and other large employers.
But for some residents, the progress isn’t coming quickly enough.
“We’re trying to keep our small town from becoming a ghost town,” summed up Alamosa Mayor Ty Coleman, a bank manager by day, who says reviving Main Street is among his foremost objectives.
But then there are the ways that the San Luis Valley is unique in Colorado, and that goes beyond the cluster of spiritual centers in Crestone and the quirky near Hooper.
The Mexican border had reached up into the valley until the cession of 1848 handed over most of the American southwest to the United States; the first non-Native American settlements followed soon after. Families with Spanish and Mexican heritage planted their roots here generations ago, including the Salazars, who produced Colorado political figures Ken and John. In more recent decades, Guatemalan immigrants arrived on the area’s farms.
The region covers 8,000 square miles of mountains and valley, an area almost as large as Massachusetts, and nearly half of today’s nearly 50,000 residents are Latino. The region also is home to Amish and Mormon enclaves, among others.
Diversity influences politics
That diversity has influenced the area’s varied politics, and some of the nation’s most divisive issues — especially immigration — play differently here.
“We have a community here that wants immigrants,” Sheryl Strohm, who manages the Narrow Gauge Book Cooperative, said while looking out on Alamosa’s Main Street.
The shop raised money for an immigrant resources center, a disabled veterans group and, this month, the San Luis Valley Pride organization, which is holding its first PrideFest this weekend. Strohm said the bookstore owes its existence to residents who raised $40,000 in a month last year to reopen a longtime newsstand that had recently closed in the space.
During The Post’s roundtable discussion, community members and leaders talked about challenges they face regarding education, access to health care and transportation.
Time and again, the conversation returned to the downsides of the valley’s isolation from the rest of Colorado.
Crestone Mayor Kairina Danforth referred to Colorado 17, a key north-south byway through the valley, as “the road that God and CDOT forgot,” lacking shoulders and sufficient maintenance.
“If there are issues or problems here, we have to roll up our sleeves and get it done,” said Alamosa City Councilman Jan Vigil, who grew up in El Paso and came to the valley to attend Adams State University. “Denver’s not going to help us. The federal government’s not going to help us. We have to help each other.”
Seeking community connectedness
Crops are bountiful in the valley, but Strohm and others are hungry for something that can’t be harvested: a stronger connectedness with each other and the communities beyond their southern Colorado home.
Transplants from outside Colorado, pricier mountain towns and the Front Range have sought solitude in the San Luis Valley in recent years. In the summer, the valley swells with Texans who have second homes here.
Bonnie Munro and her husband moved from the south Denver suburbs to settle in South Fork, about an hour northwest of Alamosa.
“We’re outdoors people, and we love to fish and hike,” she said, “so that drew us to the valley. … We weren’t right next to another house. We have some acreage, and we couldn’t have afforded that in Denver.”
They also feel stronger ties to their neighbors, she said.
Denver Post journalists attended a second community meeting — an organic get-together of about 20 Alamosa residents called by small business owner Wendi Seger. She owns a farm-to-table restaurant, called Locavores, and with her husband is a longtime potato farmer.
The Adams State alumna became emotional sharing her journey to success, which she said she owed to the university. Seger wanted to rally the faculty, staff, students and community members who gathered in her restaurant to start packing the stadium for games, talking up ASU to local youths, and decorating stores and businesses with banners and school colors.
“A community on fire has the ability to transform organizations,” Seger said.
Aaron Miltenberger, executive director at the Boys & Girls Clubs of the San Luis Valley, was part of the circle. He voiced a hope that more valley kids would see value in their hometown university instead of scrambling off to the Front Range.
“I want to work to make this not just a town that has a college, but a college town,” Miltenberger said. “We’re not taking rich young people and making them richer. We’re taking students that have little resources and moving the needle for them and their futures in big ways.”
Angela Lee and Wesley O’Rourke, both 29, agreed that fostering community would be key to the future success of the San Luis Valley. The couple run the sustainable agricultural haven Sol Mountain Farm in South Fork.
“When I first came to the San Luis Valley, all I saw was stagnancy,” Lee said. “I knew that if I was going to try to make this place my home, I needed to help build community and connection to nature.”
Lee and O’Rourke host a “motley crew” of workers who help tend to the vegetable and hemp crops and care for the pasture-raised pigs on their property. They’re also active in the local farmer’s market scene, reach out to youth groups and give tours of their land, while serving as evangelists for the outdoors.
“The future is bright,” Lee said. “We want to be the beacon of hope for the youth in the valley and show that you can stay here — and that it’s possible to be happy in the valley.”
The Denver Postap Nic Garcia and Kelsey Brunner contributed to this report.
Updated Aug. 18, 2019, at 8:36 p.m.Due to a reporter’s error, this story initially misidentified a member of a well-known family in the San Luis Valley and misstated the size of the valley. Ken and John Salazar are state political figures whose family ties to the area go back several generations. The valley covers 8,000 square miles.