Letter from Charlie Spielman
Crestone Pyramid – April 1994 – Colorado Central Magazine
I read with great interest and enjoyment your premiere issue. I was especially fascinated by the article on Crestone by Martha. When I was a boy growing up in the San Luis Valley in the l940s, our family would make the trek from Monte Vista to Crestone about once each summer for an idyllic family picnic and outing along the banks of Crestone Creek.
I fund it ironic, but not surprising, that both opponents and proponents of the pyramid project have overlooked the fact that just east of Crestone are dozens of “pyramlds in the raw.” We call ’em mountains.
Instead of building a pyramid from scratch, why not carve one out of a conveniently shaped granitic peak somewhere in the Sangre de Cristos? For that matter, another site in the many mountainous areas of the region could prove to be just as holy as one near Crestone, and would involve a lot less effort and fuss. I can think of a number of appropriate mountaintops from which a very impressive 400-foot pyramid could be carved. Think of the cost savings No need to import all that granite, just to mention one.
The Trinity Foundation could use unemployed miners, of which there are quite a few in the region, to do the pyramid shaping. This would be a real boon to several towns, and the miners would provide a very skilled and enthusiastic labor force for the work, including excavating the underground rooms, etc.
The miners wouldn’t require nearly as much in the way of costly housing and other facilities mentioned in Martha’s article, either. Miners are particularly adept at doing things like this without a lot of frills. The rock detritus created in the pyramid-carving process could be used for roads to the site and other beneficial purposes. And if the miners encountered a valuable mineral deposit in the process of pyramid carving, why heck, they could just mine and sell the minerals, and the profit would further reduce the cost of the pyramid.
Of course, if the EPA got wind that a bunch of miners were planning to start another project to satisfy the needs of some of the region’s population, benefit other inhabitants of our area, and make a profit in the process, they would probably put the kibosh on the whole idea.
Charlie Spielman
Horseshoe Gulch
Park County
