Review by Ed Quillen
Geography – January 1995 – Colorado Central Magazine
Field Guide to Mysterious Places of the West
by Salvatore M. Trento
Published in 1994 by Pruett
ISBN 0-87108-851-7
WHAT’S A MYSTERIOUS PLACE? According to the author, “Some places of the world evoke a kind, gentle feeling. The air is clearer, the sunlight is brighter, the people seem more pleasant. There are other places, however, where chaos and fear seem to loom. A gloomy, oppressive feeling hovers all inhabitants. Some locales are remarkably inspirational while, elsewhere, muddled thought is pervasive.”
So should you grab this book to find a cheerful locale when you’re down in the dumps and the proper planetary vibrations might elevate your psyche?
Probably not, because this Field Guide is mostly about archæological sites, not New Age geomantic convergence points.
Among the mysteries is this: The “Mysterious Sites in Colorado” map on page 32 indicates two spots west of Pueblo somewhere in Central Colorado.
But that’s the last we hear of them. Trento hops across Colorado from Pawnee Buttes north of Fort Morgan, to some odd rock shapes and piles along the Front Range, from petroglyphs along the Purgatory to Fulford Cave near Eagle and Anasazi ruins at the Four Corners.
None of these seems particularly mysterious or beyond the explanatory powers of traditional left-brain rational geology and archæology.
So Trento uses hype. Here’s a sample, describing a place I knew in my jejune days. “The Pawnee Buttes were the object of sacred worship among the Cheyenne and Arapaho… The stark isolation and difficulty of getting to the site — even today — make for a mystical place. The butte site evokes a strange feeling of wilderness that is literally millions of years old… a place where the spirits of millions of prehistoric creatures congregate.”
Hmmm. Since the Finger Cutters and Cloud People were nomadic and most concerned with good hunting, it’s unlikely they attached much sacredness to any specific site. I grew up on the Plains, so we visited Pawnee Buttes often in my youth. Access was not particularly difficult, even in the family’s ’52 Chevy sedan. The main feeling of “wilderness” came from swarms of rattlesnakes. If prehistoric creatures had spirits (James Michener seemed to think so when he was writing Centennial, about the same area as the Buttes), then any spot on earth with sedimentary rock should qualify as a congregation of millions of their spirits.
So it goes through Colorado, New Mexico (plenty about the Taos hum), Arizona, Nevada, California, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming.
Oddly, Utah holds no Mysterious Sites, and despite that map on page 32, neither does Central Colorado. Maybe our sites are so mysterious that they defy description in mere words and pictures, and so Trento left them out.
Aside from the speculation and hype, each site gets a full and detailed description, including access routes, warnings, and contact persons or agencies for the expedition planner.
Some guidebooks avoid being so explicit, on the grounds that publicity attracts vandals, experience-collectors, and other menaces, but not this one. “To keep the locations of these amazing places secret is to defeat the very thing most scholars yearn for: public awareness and respect of unusual and ancient places. The more people know about these sites, the more educated the public will become about such matters, and the more our shared past will be appreciated and protected.”
Sure. Perhaps we should be grateful that our two Mysterious Sites inexplicably vanished somewhere between the map and the detailed accounts. I wonder what they were. The gynecological rock formation along the river east of Cotopaxi? The Cave of [Fool’s] Gold at Garfield? The “Spanish Fort” in the Arkansas Hills? The Crestone Vortex, yet to be comprehended by mortal eyes?
Never mind. Given its pseudo-scientific approach and exuberant prose, and that fabrications like The Celestine Prophecy stay on the “non-fiction” best-seller lists for æons, Mysterious Places of the West is sure to be a monster. It’s entertaining, and you’ll probably need to read it, just to be in touch with the zeitgeist.
— Ed Quillen
