I’m sad to report that my beloved backyard, the Elk Mountains of Colorado, an intricate and infinitely faceted place that I’ve dedicated much of my adulthood to physically, intellectually and emotionally exploring, has of late become less beautiful, less mysterious, less awesome.

Seven of the state’s iconic 14,000-foot peaks still soar into the sky’s thin cold air, promising exhaustion and elation and adventures galore. And the famous Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, the range’s untamed core, remains inviolate, thank goodness. Messing around on Google Earth won’t reveal the change—the subtle yet profound loss—that has got me feeling blue. Underneath the satellites and glowing screens, though, down on the actual living ground of the Capitol Creek Valley, a dozen or so miles northwest of Aspen’s ski slopes and mega-mansions and Gucci handbags (and Prada handbags, and Dior handbags and Louis Vuitton handbags), the situation is palpable: A rare species has blinked out, disappeared and thereby degraded the ecological integrity of the region, its ineffable wholeness.

I am not talking about a bird or bat or frog or fish. Rather, I am talking about a small group of elderly white-haired gentlemen who for decades rose before dawn, slipped into their habits and greeted each new morning at the edge of the backcountry, below the forested basins and alpine ridges, with earnest prayer and rigorous meditation, centered minds and open hearts. Monks, in a word. Catholic brothers. Or as the author Pico Iyer describes them in Aflame: Learning from Silence, his book celebrating the ancient and ongoing call to withdraw from a frenzied, clamorous, frequently toxic everyday world in search of a richer, deeper way of being—“the true counterculture.”

The story of this particular countercultural experiment and its physical hub, known as St. Benedict’s Monastery, began in 1956. That is when a contingent of Cistercians—Trappists, to be exact—left their motherhouse in Massachusetts to establish a branch abbey in the high country of the Colorado Rockies. They settled on 3,000-plus acres of absolutely gorgeous ranch land—picture a Coors commercial wrapped in a Ford commercial wrapped in a Levi’s commercial, then add a statue of the Madonna to the corral—and cultivated an awareness of the divine through liturgy and manual labor (irrigating hayfields, feeding chickens, maintaining the 624-panel solar photovoltaic system) while simultaneously stewarding what many of their secular neighbors in Aspen, Snowmass, Basalt and Carbondale refer to as “the sacred valley.”

According to the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict, the code of conduct that structured and inspired the monks’ collective existence, fidelity to monastic life in a specific place—conversatio morum—is of paramount importance. The scholar Douglas Christie, an expert on the history of Christian contemplative practices, explained it to me in an interview thus: “In a religious context, we usually think of conversion as what happens when you turn toward God and are reborn, but conversatio morum meant that a person entering a monastic community was entering this community, this place, situated along this river, under the shadow of this mountain.” The nickname for monks in some parts of the Benedictine tradition is, in fact, “lovers of the place.”

How’s that classic rock song go again? Love hurts? Cue the blue feeling.

The number of Catholic religious in the United States continues to decline, an unfortunate trend given that as a society we badly need the monkish virtues of slowness and attentiveness and compassion and humility, and a troubling trend for church administrators. In 2022, the Trappists determined that St. Benedict’s Monastery could not be sustained without an influx of fresh novices and ought to be put on the market. (Wait, the monks of the sacred valley—our monks—are getting the boot?) Then the news broke this past December, in the run-up to Christmas, that Alex Karp, co-founder and chief executive officer of the data analysis firm Palantir, a defense contractor, had purchased the chapel, the cloisters, the cemetery, the corral with the Madonna, everything, for $120 million, which for him is pocket change.

Quite the reversal. Instead of men who have taken vows of poverty, an individual worth $16 billion. Instead of an institute committed to spiritual inquiry, a garish personal residence purchased with profits from enabling war. Instead of a caring and careful 70-year relationship with the landscape—well, let’s hope Karp quickly grasps that the hallmark of genuine mountainfolk is that we are possessed by the seasons and weather, the flora and fauna, despite the legal frameworks and paper-and-ink deeds that imply the opposite.

But here is the real bummer: Because I am, in my own fashion, a lover of the place—a lover of hiking and camping and birdwatching and stargazing, a lover of the diversity and complexity and untold interdependencies that constitute the Elk Mountains—I ultimately interpret the shuttering of St. Benedict’s Monastery as a blow to (I’m repeating myself) the region’s ecological integrity, its ineffable wholeness.

What does a small group of hushed old Cistercians pursuing an archaic simplicity contribute? Answer: Something delicate, something tender, something unique to the endemic species they evolved into over decades of disciplined and grateful inhabitation—something difficult to define. Basically, I always felt encouraged and enlivened by the knowledge that nearby, a mere couple of drainages away, strangers I would not recognize on the street (or trail) were modeling a radical alternative to mainstream, 21st-century American craziness. Amid noise, there was calm. Amid impulsiveness, there was deliberation. Amid turbulence, there was stability. Amidst doubt, there was faith. Amid confusion, there was clarity. And above all else, amid the relentless urge to extract and profit, to take and take and take and take, there was attunement to the holiness of the local earth, the gifts it freely provides, the grace of sun and rain and growth and decay, the stunning immediacy of Creation.

Monachus cisterciensis—an odd and wonderful critter indeed!

Aldo Leopold, the passionate biologist and visionary environmental ethicist, once quipped that the first tenet of intelligent tinkering is to never discard the parts. Catholic monks are no less a part, and no more a part, than yellow-bellied marmots and golden eagles, lodgepole pines and sticky geraniums, soil scientists and oil painters, bumblebees and granite pebbles, waterfalls and avalanches, stoked ski bums and grouchy plow drivers, king boletes and mud puddles. Heck, even billionaires are a part, a distinct piece of the puzzle—it is just that Aspen and surrounding Pitkin County already has plenty of them (80 at last count), whereas cenobites are in short supply.

On January 11, 2026, St. Benedict’s Monastery offered a final public Mass, followed by a reception in the refectory. Though I am positive it was not the case, I have enjoyed imagining hunched, arthritic monks wiping a few goodbye tears from their bleary eyes, blessing the congregation for its unwavering support and sympathy, then buckling on snowshoes, shouldering backpacks heavy with gear and food for an extended expedition and trudging uphill, upstream, toward the headwaters of the sacred valley, the perennial source that some call wilderness and some call God and some do not dare try to name.

Douglas Christie writes in The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology, his excellent book highlighting the shared sensitivities of naturalists and mystics, the overlapping yearnings of trekkers and monks that the “desire to be immersed within an immensity—to become endlessly, hopelessly lost in it, tumbling down, out, into a vast space, borne along, carried ever deeper by love—is itself endless.”

Amen to that.

Leath Tonino is the author of two essay collections, most recently The West Will Swallow You. A full-time freelance writer, his work appears regularly in Orion, The Sun, Outside, Tricycle, New England Review and other magazines.